I Feel Your Pain

"I feel your pain" is one phrase I have a hard time warming up to because in 99% of the cases it's not accurate. The same is true of its second cousin, "I know how you feel." You don't know how someone else feels even if you have experienced the same event. People process it and label it differently. If you don't believe that, ask any police officer to read back eyewitness accounts of people who have seen the same accident.

There is a way you can get a lot closer to know how someone else is feeling. It's called "Modeling." If you take on a person's physiology (how they hold their body, muscle tension, their breathing rate, the look on their face, etc.), you will start to notice different feelings in your body. These feeling will approximate the feelings the other person is sensing in their body. Feelings are not emotions. Feelings are things you can actually measure and feel in your body (tightness in your chest, tension in the shoulders, a lump in your throat, pressure on your temples, a knot in your stomach, a gurgling in the bowels, etc.). An emotion is a conversation in your head about an experience that has happened to you in the past or a conversation in your head about an anticipated experience in the future.

How can you use this bit of knowledge? If you model somebody's physiology, two things will begin to happen:

1. You will gain instant rapport with them because you are communicating with them on an other-than-conscious level that you are just like them, and that feeling will register with them outside of their awareness. The sense they will get is this person is just like me, therefore I like them.

2. You can gain a finer appreciation of how another person is truly feeling before you dismiss their angst as something you're guessing at. Why guess when you can know? You can try this in non-threatening situations - on a bus, at an airport, a mall, a restaurant - anywhere where there are a lot of people to experiment on without them knowing. Once you get a handle on the modeling process, you can use it with people who are important to you.

If you want to get rapport with people, you only need to do what they are doing - like matching their body position. If they cross their legs, cross yours. If they speak to you rapidly, speak back rapidly. If their eyes go in patterned directions, do the same thing with your eyes. You will make a connection.

If you truly want to get as close as you can to knowing how someone is feeling, make yourself a clone of them in everyway possible and pay attention to the feelings in your body. You may have different labels for these feelings than they do but the actual feeling will be very close. For example your label for the feeling may be "minor annoyance" and their label may be "depressed." The words are what confuse the appreciation of another's feelings. Pay attention to the actual sensations you receive and then you can say, "I know how you feel."

There is something else you will notice after some practice with concentrated matching. Occasionally, you will tune in on another's pictures and thoughts. The first time I did this, I modeled a young woman from New York City. There were two people coaching me as to how to be more like her with my body position, facial expression, muscle tension, etc. The woman I modeled was instructed to mentally remember an experience she had and just be herself. After modeling her for 2 minutes, I was supposed to come up with a word that described her experience. I came up with "jostled." She said the word was "hassled." I figured I didn't do too good of a job with the exercise until I offered her the following. I said I was getting an image of a subway car with her holding on to an overhead strap and she was getting bumped. Her jaw dropped. She said, "I was thinking about riding on the subway and being bumped into and hassled." My jaw dropped. Please play with this. It's very powerful.