PP #36 | On the Difference between Support and Empowerment, EQ and Empathy, and Sleeping through Storms
Teach them to Fish, Practice feeling tough feelings, Don't be a Hero that creates problems in order to solve them
Support vs Empowerment
Next time you feel like supporting someone, try empowering them instead.
Support is helpful in a moment. It provides someone with a crutch to lean on or a hand to help them up.
Empowerment, however, leaves a mark long after you're gone. To empower someone is to help them source their own support, to find the energy and inspiration to pick themself up.
Help someone to do that once, and that door will forever be open to them. Once you see that you can help yourself, you can’t unsee it.
To support someone is to give them a fish. To empower them is to teach them how to.
Emotional Intelligence vs Empathy
Emotional intelligence is so much more than empathy.
To be empathetic is to perceive, value, and adapt to the emotions of others. It’s a necessary skill for a leader.
To be empathetic is to be interpersonally emotionally intelligent.
But there’s another, oft-overlooked component of emotional intelligence: intrapersonal emotional intelligence.
To have intrapersonal EQ is to be able to identify, understand, manage, and use your own feelings.
By increasing your capacity to work with emotions you find challenging in yourself, you unlock a deep well of internal wisdom, as well as your ability to hold space for those emotions in others.
Identify those emotions that are challenging for you. Practice noticing them, sitting with them. Notice where they live in your body and how they feel. Ask yourself: what is this emotion telling me? How do I want to move forward, keeping what is has to say in mind but not letting it rule me?
Sleeping Through Storms
Our culture rewards Herculean efforts. We love a hard worker, a fire fighter, a person willing to stay up until 3 am to solve the problem.
At the same time, our culture under-acknowledges the hard work of preventing problems in the first place.
Playing hero is conspicuous. We can point to the monumental effort output in reaction to a big problem.
Preventing problems leaves none of the same traces. It does not involve displays of Herculean effort, or late nights and long days. It is marked by absence—the absence of those big problems that pave the way for the hero.
It is exemplified by a calm composure, a knowing that things are prepared and in their proper place. This is the calm clarity of knowing the the important things have been tended to.
At the end of the day, can you sleep soundly through a storm?
Read: I Can Sleep Through a Storm - A story with a message
Question(s) of the Week
Who are you supporting right now that would benefit from empowerment?
Where is your line for supporting vs. empowering someone? When do you think someone needs support vs. empowerment? Where do you want it to be
What feelings do you struggle to feel? How does that affect your leadership, performance and relationships? How can you practice feeling it?
Can you sleep through the storms of your business and life? What rituals or reserves do you need to create to not only whether storms, but come out of them even better?