Otter.ai Summary

Susan Christie, a seasoned professional listening trainer, shared her journey of integrating empathy into various fields, including psychology, customer service, and medical education. She emphasized the importance of empathy in improving relationships, reducing stress, and enhancing communication. Christie detailed her career progression, starting from a community college in 1973 to developing successful training programs for corporations like Pacific Bell and AT&T. She highlighted eight key strategies for building an empathy movement, including focusing on desired outcomes, customizing programs, and using experiential exercises. Christie also stressed the need for authentic empathy over mere repetition and offered to share her half-day empathy training program.

Action Items

• [ ] Create a concise one-hour empathy listening workshop curriculum that others can easily deliver, using a practical and actionable label such as "How to Work with Difficult People," based on the existing two-day and half-day empathy programs.

• [ ] Share the existing half-day empathy listening training manual and all related pages with the Empathy Center team in a format that is practical and sequential for them to adapt and apply.

Outline

Introduction and Background of Susan Christie

• Janna Weiss introduces Susan Christie, highlighting her extensive experience in professional listening training and programs.

• Susan Christie expresses concern about the audience's attention span and decides to proceed with her presentation.

• Susan shares her background, including her friendship with Darwin Bill Filler and her passion for empathy and empowerment.

• She recounts her experience as a psychology professor at a small community college in Connecticut, focusing on the needs of working-class students.

Empathy in Various Classes

• Susan discusses how empathy fits into the five classes she taught, including child development, psychology of family, and psychology of women and men.

• She emphasizes the practical application of empathy in improving relationships and reducing stress.

• Susan shares her experience teaching empathy in prisons, where inmates gained compassion for themselves and their upbringing.

• She highlights the importance of empathy in various fields and its impact on personal and professional relationships.

Career Development and Empathy Training

• Susan talks about her successful career as a trainer and consultant, starting with a two-day listening program developed in San Francisco.

• She mentions the acceptance of her program by major corporations like Pacific Bell, AT&T, and British Petroleum.

• Susan describes her one-hour program on dealing with difficult people, which she taught in various medical schools and corporations.

• She outlines her eight points for building an empathy movement, based on her personal experience and practical applications.

Challenges and Solutions in Empathy Training

• Susan expresses concerns about the effectiveness of empathy circles and the need for practical applications in everyday conversations.

• She shares her experience of offering a half-day program based on the Stanford training manual and its success in various organizations.

• Susan emphasizes the importance of focusing on desired outcomes in training and consulting, using examples from her work with clients.

• She discusses the need for customizing training programs to create deep rapport and practical solutions for organizations.

Practical Applications and Future Directions

• Susan highlights the importance of labeling training programs to make them appealing and practical for participants.

• She shares her experience of giving free talks on working with difficult people and how it led to opportunities in major organizations.

• Susan emphasizes the need for customizing training to create the deepest level of rapport and practical solutions.

• She discusses the challenges of creating a standalone empathy program and the importance of experiential exercises and demonstrations.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

• Susan offers to share her half-day program and other resources with the audience, emphasizing the practical and sequential nature of her curriculum.

• Janna Weiss thanks Susan for her wealth of experience and practical insights, highlighting the importance of compassion and understanding in growing the empathy movement.

• Janna shares a personal anecdote about the benefits of empathy circles and the need for continued work in spreading empathy.

• The meeting concludes with a sense of gratitude and a commitment to practical applications of empathy in various fields.

Otter.ai Transcript 

Janna Weiss  0:01  

So it's my joy now to introduce Susie, Susan Christie. Susan Christie has designed and facilitated professional listening training and programs for 1000s of people in corporations, universities, medical schools and hospitals all over the country, of course, teaching empathy is an important part of this work, and she will be speaking about my experience building an empathy listening movement. So thank you so much.

Speaker 1  0:35  

Good morning, folks. I have a little conflict right at this moment as an educator and a trainer, I'm concerned that many people might want a break about now, and yet I want this 15 minutes to be with you. I'm just bringing up this point. It's partly what I know about biology. Shall I just go on? I guess I will. I would like to introduce myself and my background, because I have been so passionate about empathy and empowering people to be more themselves. I am an old friend of Darwin Bill filler, we have kayaked for hours together. I've taken the empathy training. I've become a trainer. 

I was at Berkeley under the tent with Edwin and others, and I'd like to tell you how I have learned in 1973 I was a psychology professor in a small community college in Connecticut, and I had the great privilege of teaching working class people in a town where the rug mill had gone out of business and oh, I tuned into these students. You know what they wanted? They wanted to understand themselves and others better. They wanted to improve their relationships. They wanted to be less stressed. A lot of them had self talk where their critical interjected. Parents were driving them nuts.

 I am a very practical let's make this, whatever it is, work for us and everybody. And so I'd like to share my experience small college. I i ran the department I could teach whatever I want. Would you take a moment and picture how empathy would fit into the following five classes that I taught child development. We're talking about people being better parents were talking about people understanding their own childhood development. I taught child development in the prisons. Oh, my goodness, these men and women began to see themselves and their childhoods with tremendous more compassion for themselves, for their parents, for the culture in which they had grown up. It just fits. I also taught psychology of family, much the same I taught psychology of women. 

Psychology then became psychology of women and men. Oh, my goodness, did the men and women have one another. Stereotype, pigeon hole, oh, lack of respect. Content for goodness sakes, put them in an exercise where they play one another, and it gets nasty now, psycho personality and human sexuality in each of those classes, empathy comes in in a different form, in a different sequence, yeah. 

So what I'm bringing is this background of what. Working with real people and real lives. Quite proud of how I have parlayed this into quite a successful career as a trainer and consultant. And I'd like to just mention how I did that. And follow that is I have eight points that I put together about how to build an empathy movement based on my personal experience. So I came to San Francisco to finish a PhD and

Speaker 1  5:39  

on a sabbatical, and then I was recruited into a communications training program, and we developed a two day listening program. Oh, my goodness, we had a wonderful team of people. It was developed, it was accepted, brought in by places like Pacific Bell AT and T British Petroleum, and they paid the big bucks, you know, to fly people in, put them in a hotel. We had them for two days, changed their lives. 

They told their friends. People signed up so fast. Well, I started my own business after that, as a consultant, this company, oh, this listening program. So I taught customer service, same thing, and then, I developed a one hour program called how to work with difficult people every corporations. I did this in about 50 different medical schools, corporations, because people came with somebody in mind. How could they deal with this difficult person? So I want to segue into my eight ideas, okay, this is very mind developing my career. So at first, as I have attended and worked with empathy circles, I'm not sure how people take that experience into their everyday conversations. 

To me, it feels like there's some missing pieces about how they quiet their self talk about how they paraphrase and encourage people to continue about how to know when to empathize listen and when to assert themselves and take care of their own needs. So I would like to encourage that. How can this be expanded to more action? And some of you have some good experience, I'm here to learn from you. I'd like to tell you that when I was teaching in a community college, and I said, Well, I offer empathy. I don't think it would have flown. Empathy was not part of their language. They were not look but they could tell me. My teenagers would tell me, I don't listen. My boss never listens to me. Thinks he has all the good ideas so and secondly, to have a curriculum, well, I created

Speaker 1  8:59  

a half day program. This is the Stanford training manual, and I offered it to many, many different organizations, and I'm feeling great about the curriculum now I've had this two day program, this half day program I own. I would be so happy to share it with all of you. I am really pleased to have developed this over 50 years. Did you notice I said in 1973 that was 53 years ago? Oh no, I said I started 1973 that was 53 years ago. I've been around folks. I've been trying to serve people the best I can. And my point number three, I feel very strongly about this at. Really helped me. I like to focus in working with consulting clients, in working with participants for training, to focus on the desired outcomes. 

What do we want them to be able to do based on their time with us, and what would that create as a success, in terms of their moving forward very effectively? So picture me with somebody bringing me in because their team isn't getting along, and of course, then the person who's bringing me in is a major piece of the problem. And I almost always ask now first I have to, course, listen, understand what is happening, tune in to their needs. And then I said, if we work together, and we are very successful in what we want, what would the results look like, feel like, smell like? And they pause. And, you know, it's surprising how many people can tell you what success would smell like, you know, but empathy smells like it. Listen, it lightens it just a little bit. And then I put desired outcomes in my proposal to work, and they know that if we do this, we're successful, and it focuses everything I do. What are the desired outcomes? My next four ideas have something to do with what we've already been talking about. How do we get into organizations? 

I'd like to tell you how I got into organizations, because here I was San Francisco, a new city I had worked with in this little Communications Corporation, yeah. Well, I thought, I don't know this listening program. So I decided to teach customer service. It's all the same, but people know they need customer service. You can just imagine how customer service you know all of these computer geeks, they think their job is to install or fix computers. And when they come to my program, they realize, Oh, my God, they need to create a relationship with the client. New idea, how do they manage their expectations?

 How do they introduce themselves? How do they create satisfaction in their customers? Empathy a major piece of that idea. Number five, I gave free talks, and so you have to label this something people want. How do you work with difficult people? I did free talks, starting with Lions Club and and I'm trying to think of the public organizations where people from companies go and meet and

Speaker 1  13:53  

like at UCSF Medical School and Bechtel, I gave my how to work with difficult people, and they just marched me into the head of training and development. Said, Bring her in. I believe that I could help create a one hour talk that all of you could give. We have to label it very carefully. We have to be filled with practical, actionable I would love to do that. It would be my privilege. Point Number six, I feel that it's very, very important to customize everything we do to create the deepest level of rapport. 

And that is about, I brought some extraordinary spiritual people into the corporations. And, you know, it seems like we shouldn't have to do this, but we needed to teach them to speak business language. We needed to teach them. How to Dress people need to feel like we are like them. Point number seven, I recently attended an empathy workshop here with a group of people who've met regularly, and I came up with a huge concern. I feel very strongly about this. In the empathy circle, some people were kind of memorizing what the person said and repeating it almost in their own words. 

No repeating it exactly the words the person said, my sense is they were memorizing in their heads. They didn't have their hearts open. Memorizing and repeating words is not the same as attunement, as being open hearted, as being curious and really feeling into the experience and needs of these other people. We do not want people repeating what the speaker said, and my eighth point is, I think it would be very, very difficult to Create a standalone, self managed program on empathy. We teaching empathy is about exercises, demonstrations that give people the deep experience.

 It brings compassion, it brings understanding on both sides. We need to bring many kinds. I've spent 50 years coming up with experiential exercises and demonstrations and so lastly, to segue into the curriculum I will be glad to help. I will share my half day program and all the pages, but I want to do this in a way that people are really making it practical and sequential for people. I love the ideas I've heard today. I see myself as selling customer service. I'm going to work with difficult people.

 My book is for academic people, staff, how to work with faculty, because they get treated like second class citizens. For the last 15 years, all my work has been building compassion for the faculty among the staff and teaching them how to be respected and productive. Thank you.

Janna Weiss  18:24  

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Susan, thank you for sharing your wealth of experience. Thank you for sharing the vastness of your experience, and thank you for offering it to the empathy center, and for offering to share it with us in a way that is practical and applicable. And I love that you mentioned compassion, understanding. I think that all the other words need to get together with empathy, love and all the others, and that's a way to grow the movement. So thank you. Some people might say I've been around.

Janna Weiss  19:01  

and then recently, I was stuck at the airport for 15 hours, and one of the one of the airline workers, was not so pleasant when I came and asked her a question and I invited her to the empathy circles. Do you think I need empathy? I'm like, I found it really beneficial. I told her, so, thank you. I think there's a lot of work to do. Thank you. Yeah.