Embracing Empathy with Kristen Donnelly

Empower yourself to understand and appreciate diversity and inclusivity with Abbey Research’s help, and learn to human better.

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“We are smarter than our brains, I promise. We can be. And so that’s what empathy is. Kind of rewriting your brain to be curious about yourself, about the reactions you have, about the way you see the world. Be curious about other people and ask more questions and make less assumptions.” – Kristen Donnelly

Kristen Donnelly is an award-winning four-time TEDx speaker, international empathy educator and researcher with two decades of experience in helping people understand the beauty in difference and the power in inclusivity. She is also the COO of Abbey Research, co-founder of the Community Research Institute, and a regular contributor to Forbes, Medium and Thrive Global. She now works to help others understand how to human better and create a more inclusive world.

On this episode of the Live. Love. Engage. podcast:

• How we can learn to be more empathetic and practice empathy as a muscle
• What Kristen means by the phrase “to human better”
• What we can learn from art to better understand and relate to other people
• How we can foster diversity and inclusivity in our organizations and societies
• How Kristen became interested in empathy and its importance in fostering better relations
• Kristen shares specific professional and personal examples of how to practice empathy
• What human beings have in common with cucumbers

Connect with Kristen
Website: ARGoodDoctors.com

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In this episode, I talk about the need for empathy in the wake of the brutal George Floyd murder.

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TRANSCRIPT

Gloria Grace Rand
Namaste and welcome back to another edition out of Live Love Engage. I am delighted to be with you as always and to have a guest with us on the show today. And her name is Kristen Donnelly and she is an award winning, four time TEDx speaker, international empathy educator and researcher with two decades of experience in helping people understand the beauty in difference and the power in inclusivity. And she is one of the good doctors of Abbey Research, COO of their parent company, co-founder of the Community Research Institute, and an unapologetic nerd for stories of change. And she’s also a regular contributor to Forbes, Medium and Thrive Global. So welcome to live love engage. Kristen

Kristen Donnelly
well, thank you so much for having me. It’s a delight.

Gloria Grace Rand
I am looking forward to learning more about you and especially about this topic of empathy, which is one that it needs talking about because it seems to be in short supply in our world today, at least in certain circles, let’s put it that way. So I’d love to start off with asking our guests about their journey and about how they got to where they are today. So I thought I’d ask you what got you interested in being an international empathy educator?

Kristen Donnelly
It’s a great question because the answer, in all honesty, is my entire life. So, briefly to explain how we speak about empathy at Abbey Research, empathy is the consistent, intentional decision to choose understanding over assumptions of yourself and other people. It has nothing to do with feeling other people’s feelings or kind of reading other people’s emotions. That’s a separate skill set. And instead, empathy is a muscle we can all develop, a worldview we can all live by. And in that way I’ve been raised into an empathetic worldview in a lot of ways. My family has. We’ve owned a business since I was seven and the mission statement of that business is to impact lives and create wealth. And the idea is holistic wealth. How do we meet people where they are and provide them with resources, training, employment opportunities, whatever they need to live their best version of themselves? And in that pursuit, I have been constantly reminded that different people are different, that what I would want for somebody is not necessarily what they want for themselves. That the way I define family, is not the way they do that, all those kind of things. And that has always led me.

My father is a business person and Abbey Research that I run now is a division of our family company that my brother and I have now taken over for our dad. But for my entire life my dad preached that really all you need to have to run a successful business is to know how to balance a spreadsheet and to have insatiable curiosity. And if you can do those two things, you can pretty much run a business. As long as those kinds of things keep happening. You’re curious about the people you employ. You’re curious about your numbers. You’re curious about your product. You just keep asking questions. And we’ve kind of taken that.

I took that and then added my social science degrees. I have a PhD. I have a social work. I have an MSW. And I have a degree in cross cultural religious anthropology. And when I kind of combine all of those things, what I really learned is that humans are so similar and so wildly different. And one of the things that makes all of us work is the fact that we want to be seen, heard and understood. But innately, we’re terrified to see, hear, and understand other people because of our survival instincts that are hardwired in us. But we are smarter than our brains, I promise. We can be. And so that’s what empathy is, is kind of rewriting your brain to be curious about yourself, about the reactions you have, about the way you see the world. Be curious about other people and ask more questions and make less assumptions.

Gloria Grace Rand
Wow, I love that definition, and I love your dad. Also in formulize, I suppose, for what makes a business successful too. I’ve never heard it explained with the curiosity factor in there. But it makes so much sense to think about because it really does. You have to be curious about what’s going on, what’s going on in the market, what’s going on with your customers, what do they need, what do your employees need? And I can see where then the empathy no empathy muscle I was trying to put those two words together will come in handy. And in fact, you actually say that empathy is mandatory. So why, why do you believe that?

Kristen Donnelly
Because I usually joke, like, I gesture wildly to the planet and be like, not having empathy has gotten us here. But I think it goes back to what I said kind of at the end there, that everybody craves to be understood because we crave to be known, and we crave to be safe, and we crave to be in all those kind of things. We are biologically meant to live in community, and the culture doesn’t really work in community. Rhythms these days. We’re hyper individualized and hyper siloed And so that has fed our fear of the unknown, that has kind of fed anything that looks different is wrong. Anybody who doesn’t agree with me is evil or dumb or stupid. And at the same time, our biological imperatives are like, but we need people. And so we’re kind of at this culture war within ourselves of anything that’s different than me is wrong. But I desperately need people. And the problem is, if we’re really honest, everybody is different.

And so we start creating these weird hierarchies of like, okay, well, I can tolerate that difference, but I can’t tolerate that difference. And that person voted different than me, which means they’re evil. And I can’t know them and that person’s a different religion, which means they’re going to hell. So I can’t know them. And we’ve done all of these weird things when truly the way that we function best is to understand our limited control over other people. I.e. we have none. And that’s so much of the result of empathy. So the more you practice empathy, the more you choose to understand rather than assume, the more you truly realize your place in the universe, that you are important, but you are not imperative, that you have a lot of power but very little control. And that we have to work together to make those kind of things happen.

And I use the example a lot of American politics to be completely honest because it’s the thing the question we get the most as empathy educators is especially you and I are speaking in the middle of October of 2022. If I see one more political ad on my television, I’m going to throw a shoe. It’s just so, so much. And I lived in the UK for years and television advertisements aren’t allowed there. And if state by magic wand change everything, I’d make the election season six weeks long with no television advertisements. That would be my answer. But anyway, a huge kind of part of this is that it’s very easy to assume a lot of things and it’s also very easy to get frustrated over things you cannot control. There are many politicians, elected officials of this nation that I would rather throat punch than have speak for me in a court of law. And yet my fellow citizens voted for them. I don’t live in their constituency. I have no power over that. I have absolutely no control over who they vote for.

And so if you really think about the republic that we live in, it’s a great lesson in what you can and cannot control. However, a lot of people make money on our fear and a lot of people make money on our anger. And so they try to tell you that you should spend all of your time thinking about how terrible the senator from the state that is not yours truly is. And life is about as we know it is about to unravel because of this person that you will never meet. Do I think that there’s problems and dangers? Absolutely. Can I do a thing about it?

What I can do is love the person in front of me. What I can do is figure out how to be kind to my employees. And I can treat door dash drivers with respect. And I can make sure that the kids in my neighborhood are safe to play. And I can help support youth sports. And I can make sure that I can volunteer my time to teach kids how to read. These are things I can do to make the world better. I can’t control who other people vote for and there’s a lot I can’t control. My friends marriages that I might not think are great, I can’t control how so and so parents I can’t. So the more questions I ask and the less assumptions I make, the lower my anxiety gets.

Gloria Grace Rand
And that’s something that is something we all need or all desire. We certainly want to be able to function with less anxiety, to be able to be happier and more even keeled shall we say. politics is something that well, they say politics is really where you might have a little bit more control over. At least it starts at the local level.

Kristen Donnelly
Correct.

Gloria Grace Rand
Because that’s where you can have or at least if you start to find out who are your local representatives.

Kristen Donnelly
Absolutely.

Gloria Grace Rand
And you can have control by the vote that you have and or talking to them and making your voice known and let people know what you want.

Kristen Donnelly
Absolutely. But it gets it has a limit. I live in the state of Pennsylvania.

Gloria Grace Rand
Yeah.

Kristen Donnelly
And my representatives speak for me, and I’m happy with what they do in the state legislature. There’s other counties that I’m like that’s not I don’t live in Lehigh County. I can’t do anything about it. So I try very hard to take responsibility for what I can change and to release what I can’t. And that’s, to me, one of the core elements of the practice of empathy.

Gloria Grace Rand
Yeah. And is there anything else that you recommend that people do? Because you did mention a few things about sort of basic human nature or basic things that I suppose our parents should have taught us to be, like, nice to other people. But can you maybe give some actually give, like, maybe a specific example where having empathy will be very helpful and how you could practice it?

Kristen Donnelly
Sure. I can give both a professional and a personal example.

Gloria Grace Rand
Okay. Yeah.

Kristen Donnelly
So a professional example is one of the things we implement here at our company. And everybody in the 90s used to do disciplinary meetings where you kind of walk in and you’re like, you’re really wrong, and here’s why, and we’re writing you up, and that’s kind of it. And when my brother and I took over the company a couple of years ago, what we realized is that that wasn’t working and it was really just making people angry. And so we talked to some people about best practices and we got this, actually from our vice president who was kind of doing it, but we weren’t empowering him to do it all the time.

And so we then decided to empower and to change to how he ran disciplinary meetings. And instead, we simply sit down and say, can you tell me what happened? Can you tell me what happened? And then tell me from your perspective because sometimes they’re coming in and they’re really hot. And then I have to say, you get to speak and then you get to speak, and we kind of have to do. But if it’s just us and the person, and the person doesn’t necessarily know they did anything wrong, perhaps because that happens a lot. Hey, this specific situation, tell me your story, give me your perspective on this.

Because what we realized is that by coming in and punishing them immediately, we were assuming that they were nefarious. We were assuming they were out to do something evil or they were lazy or they were losing us money intentionally. And most of the time, our employees actually have either decent motivations or neutral motivations. And some of them are even excellent motivations. They don’t see the whole picture. And so I can say, hey, I love that instinct. Unfortunately, there’s a bunch of pieces you don’t know. And so that’s why we ask you to do it this very specific way and doing it this other way. While, again, thank you for trying to be creative. Can you run it by us the next time you want to be creative instead of just being creative? And it can become a dialogue, because then we’ve had people after several years of doing this, come back at us and be like, but that’s stupid, and here tell me why. And I’m like, okay, I don’t know. What don’t I know? What don’t I know about how this is working on the floor? What don’t I know? And it can become a conversation. And then at the end, you can still look at them and be like, but you’ve still violated our policy, and so please never do that again. And then the upside of that is when we do start a meeting and we’re angry and we’re kind of yelling, they know it’s a real big deal, and it’s not a conversation. It is one of those times that we need to get real serious, real fast.

In a personal example, my best friend Erin, who is the other good doctor at Abbey Research, she and I are very different people. We have the same tastes and things. We’re super similar in hobbies. But she is a rabid introvert who lives with her mother and has cats. And I am a rabid extrovert who lives with my husband and has no pets because I don’t like to have to keep things alive besides myself. So there’s a lot of times that Erin and I process information very quickly. I always have. I was the kid with my hand raised first because I understood the question first. I’m Hermione Granger, and Erin is much slower processor. And she’ll tell you this we’ve told this story several times, so when she takes a long time to respond to me when I say something, I think that my immediate reaction is, oh, my God, she hates it. She’s being diplomatic. She’s really mad at me, and she doesn’t know how to say it, so she’s parsing her words. What she’s actually doing is taking time to process everything I’ve said to make sure she can respond well.

The first couple of years of our friendship, that got dicey. And so finally we just said, what do you need in this moment? Or I would say something, and she’s like, okay, I have to tumble dry that in my brain. I’ll come back to you tomorrow. I’m not mad or you’re not in trouble, or something like that. And I can say, hey, Erin, I need this answer on Thursday, so I’m going to give you all this information on Tuesday. And then on Thursday at 09:00 A.m., we got to make a decision. So we stopped assuming that how she processes information is the same way that I processed it, and we started asking a lot more questions. And it has only brought us closer. Our work moves faster. There’s a lot less negotiation. We can be very, very agile very, very quickly because we’ve asked all the questions to truly know each other.

Gloria Grace Rand
I love that. Excellent examples for that. And I think it’s so helpful because it is so easy for people to do make assumptions, and I know my mother drilled that into me. Don’t make assumptions, because when you assume we all got that and yet we still wind up doing it anyway, even. And I think sometimes it’s just habit, I suppose, and it’s just something that we need to learn to be able to think before we speak, which is always a really good thing to do.

Kristen Donnelly
Yeah. And so often right now, I think there’s so much noise in our lives that very rarely we don’t listen to listen. We listen to respond.

Gloria Grace Rand
Right.

Kristen Donnelly
It’s a discipline to learn to listen to listen. And I’m a trained social worker. It’s literally what I got graded on. And there’s still people in my life that I only listen to respond to because I’m always on the defensive with them, and I have to sit there and discipline myself and say, they’re not actually mad. Their tone is just terrible. Like, they’ve told you that they don’t know their own tone. Listen to what they’re saying, and don’t respond to the word. Respond to the idea. Like I’m 39, and I have been trained to listen to people since I was, I don’t know, 15, and this is still a discipline. So it’s one of the principles of empathy, too is it’s incredibly simple. It is so simple. You have to believe that the other person is a person that you don’t know very well. Practicing it is hard as hell. All of the good stuff in life is really simple. Where it gets complicated is the execution.

Gloria Grace Rand
Yeah, absolutely. I want to just ask you about something, because for those of you who are listening to this, you don’t have the benefit that I do of the video, because I’m looking in your office and I see all these lovely dolls that you have, a variety. So can you share with me a little bit about what’s the story behind those?

Kristen Donnelly
sure. They’re all Funko dolls, which your audience may know are the really big heads and the kind of smaller bodies. And the ones behind me are all from fandoms that I’m a part of. So there are several members of the Hamilton musical. There’s a lot of Marvel characters because I am an utterly massive Iron Man fan and have been for a long time. So I’ve got Captain America and the Winter Soldier and Iron Man and then Ladies of Marvel, as well as Minerva McGonagall from Harry Potter. So I’m a big pop culture person.

I believe that my academic research tells me that we learn how to human through stories and relationships. And at Abbey Research, we talk about art a lot, and what can we learn from art and how can we learn to human differently and better? Because you may not know somebody who is deaf or somebody who has had multiple miscarriages or somebody who is Asian American, but you might want to know more about their experience. And we can do that through art. We can do that through documentaries or novels or YouTube videos where people share their real life experience, and you can practice curiosity through art and learn about other people and make less assumptions and ask more questions through stories. And so I have for a lot of years.

Gloria Grace Rand
Very cool. Well, see, I was not expecting that answer, and so I’m glad, because it’s interesting because my husband has hero clicks of these little teeny tiny figures of Star Wars and Marvel and all that stuff. And here I thought there might have been tools to use in your research, but in a way, it sort of is. So talk to me a little bit about because you mentioned Abbey Research, and tell me a little bit more about what do you do with that organization?

Kristen Donnelly
We help people human better. So in terms of going into a company and organization, it’s a lot of employee engagement. So we’ll do trainings or implementation coaching on how to help people get along better. Recruitment, retention, all of the people fuzzy sides of business. We do a lot of work right now on helping people understand why their diversity initiatives aren’t working and kind of do an analysis of what have you already done? Okay, we can tell you why it’s not working. Here’s what you have to do instead. And that kind of conversation.

We do a lot right now as well with multigenerational workspaces and helping people, helping the youths understand the olds and the olds understand the youths. And how do we all kind of get along and get together. So that’s for organizations, then, for individuals who are looking to human better, we run a YouTube channel and a podcast that explores everything from how do we have empathy around gun violence in the US. How do we talk about climate change empathetically to what can I learn about empathy from Hallmark Christmas movies? And how can I engage with art in that way? So everything we do is about helping people human better.

Gloria Grace Rand
I love that expression to human better. That is so cool because that’s what we are. But yeah, we don’t always do a good job of it. Where was I going to go? Because you were talking about, oh, diversity. That’s where I was going to go. See, I do make an effort to listen, but then it sometimes then bites me because then I forget because I’m trying to keep listening.

Kristen Donnelly
It happens.

Gloria Grace Rand
Because you said that sometimes you will go into a company and they’ll be like, yeah, this is why the diversity program isn’t working. So can you give an example of what isn’t working in some companies? What are they doing? And then what do you recommend that they do instead?

Kristen Donnelly
Oh, it’s so easy what’s not working. It’s when we just pretend that diversity is racial and we don’t actually have conversations about what diversity actually is. So anytime an organization comes to me or a human comes and says, we really want to increase our diversity, I was like, well, that’s actually impossible because every group you’re in is diverse. Even if they look homogeneous, they’re diverse. Every human is an individual constellation of their own attributes. So the very first mistake you’re making is assuming that just because you have a room full of white people, you don’t have diversity. So let’s kill that. And instead, let’s talk about inclusivity. And what you do need to do is grow inclusivity. And the first thing to do that is to get curious about who’s already there. So who’s there? How many people do you have that grew up on farms? How many people do you have that can speak a second language? How many people do you have that care for people at home, either parents or children? What do the humans in your office look like? How many people have hidden disabilities? Who has a really huge charity is on the board of a charity? Could you be supporting that charity?

Get to know your people outside of their functions. Then figure out ways to make sure that they can authentically show up on their own terms. Because what we hear from a lot of people who are classified in minority groups, whether that be racial, ethnic, physical ability, is that they are only ever invited to conversations because of that thing. So they’re the token disabled person in the room. They’re the token person with autism, whatever. So you create a culture where they just show up as a human, and we let that inform their contributions.

But, like, there’s a difference between you guys are redesigning the physical building, and you want to make sure you talk to everybody whose body is above a size twelve and say, hey, let’s have you test the desk chairs, because we want to make sure you’re physically comfortable. And then making the size 32 person, making it everything about their weight. Asking them to do menus for everything or never asking them to do anything else that doesn’t have to do with bodies. So I hope your listeners can understand that difference. There is a difference between making something entirely… the internet joke that goes around like your personality isn’t entirely the baseball team that you love. Apply that internet joke to your relationships. You don’t have a black friend. You have a friend who happens to be black. And you love, I’m hoping, to the high heaven. You love other things about that person besides that they’re black. And you’re not just like collecting humans like the Infinity Stones or something.

So that’s the first thing is you recognize that everything is diverse. Every human is diverse, everybody is diverse. And the process of understanding your own diversity we call emotional intelligence. Understanding kind of your own story, your own histories, your own everything, and then create an environment where everybody gets to show up on their own terms and then see where it goes. And that’s work. And that’s another thing, another example of something that’s super simple but really hard to implement. Understand that everybody in your building is a person. Treat them accordingly. The implementations of that a little bit more challenging.

But if we keep pretending that if you just shove disparate people into proximity, you will achieve something like how many workshops have we been to where black folks and white folks are just told to hug it out and Kumbaya? That can’t work. The thing about inclusivity, too, is in doing that work to allow them to come to the table or come to the meeting or come to the room on their own terms, you have to have honest conversations about what their lives actually look like. So you’ve got to say, oh, my gosh. A really great example is very recently, the Broadway show Hades Town had to apologize to a hard of hearing audience member who had a closed captioning device that one of the cast members took as a recording device and shamed her publicly twice from the stage.

Gloria Grace Rand
Oh, no.

Kristen Donnelly
And the hard of hearing girl went on Instagram and said that was incredibly shaming and it was terrible, and I’m just trying to enjoy theater. And the production company went, holy hell, we screwed up Our bad. We’re so sorry. We’re going to have to look at all this is a constantly learning thing. We want to be accessible for everybody. We’re so grateful shannon brought this to or samantha brought this to our attention. But we got to do some work now to realize all the ways like we have to now fix this. And so they’re doing the work of inclusivity. There’s a structural bias in theater for able bodied people and wealthy people. There is for audience members. And so every time a production company, an individual production and English speakers every time they do something. Like, there’s Hamilton’s in German now, which I think is incredible. Every time somebody does something that widens the net of who can show up to a live theater, that’s the work of inclusivity.

Gloria Grace Rand
Right? I love that you’re able to be able to break this down, give some concrete examples, because I think it’s important for everyone to understand what this looks like. And yeah, it is about including people. And you’re right. I mean, everybody is different, even it doesn’t matter what race you are, you’re going to have different people that grow up in different circumstances. And so it’s so important. What is a commonly held belief that you disagree with?

Kristen Donnelly
There are a lot, Gloria. A commonly held belief that people are replaceable? I don’t believe that at all. I do not believe that we can never get better. I never believe that there’s no hope. And I don’t believe that the world is more terrible than it’s ever been because we all survived the bubonic plague. We have soap now. It’s inhaley not worse than it’s ever been. We just have fear machines in our pockets. It’s not worse than it’s ever been. The climate is worse than it’s ever been. Humans are not worse than they’ve ever been. So I think those are kind of my big three. Those are my big three.

Gloria Grace Rand
Okay, very good. And another thing I love to ask my guest is, what are you curious about right now?

Kristen Donnelly
I am curious about so much. That’s such a great question. I am doing a research project right now on the wellness industry and how we kind of have sold people on the idea that if you wrap your body in Saran Wrap, you’ll become a healthier person. Like, where does that all come from? And then also our next podcast series is on climate change. And so I’m doing a lot of research on what climate change actually is and research on sustainability and what individual responsibility is in the midst of governments and corporations not taking action. So those are kind of the two big topics. I’m always curious about how to love people better. I’m always curious about super curious right now about the next Taylor Swift album because that drops in two days. So really excited about that. And curious if the Phillies are going to go to the World Series. So those are some of my curiosities. But in all seriousness, I try every day to love people a little bit better than I did yesterday. A lot of days I fail, but that’s generally my daily goal.

Gloria Grace Rand
Is there one piece of advice that you could leave our listeners with today? What would it be?

Kristen Donnelly
You are basically a cucumber with complicated emotions. You need sunlight and water and rest.

Gloria Grace Rand
Okay, well, there you have it. Never heard humans described as cucumbers before but okay…

Kristen Donnelly
Yeah, none of us drink enough water. None of us rest enough and very few of us see the sun enough. So you need those three things. You’re a cucumber with complicated emotions.

Gloria Grace Rand
Cool. Very good. This has been wonderful. I really enjoyed having you here and enlightening all of us today, and me as well. If someone wants to learn more about you, maybe want to check out the podcast, how do people get in touch with you?

Kristen Donnelly
Our website is argooddoctors.com. All one word, argooddoctors.com. Everything’s there.

Gloria Grace Rand
All right, excellent. I’ll be sure and have that in the show notes for those of you who are listening somewhere and don’t have a pen handy. So be sure you go to livelovinggagepodcast.com and you’ll be able to get all that information. So thank you so much for being with us today, Kristen. I really appreciate it.

Kristen Donnelly
It was an honor and a privilege. Thank you so much.

Gloria Grace Rand
And I do want to thank all of you for listening and for watching on YouTube. I hope you will continue to do so and make sure that you are subscribed, if you’re not already, and tell a friend about it. The show as well, if you are enjoying it. And until next time, as always, I encourage you to go out and live fully, love deeply and engage authentically.