Empathy is great, but what you really need is patience.

In this day and age, it’s hard to come across a job where you don’t have to interact with other people. In a services business, if you’re not interacting with people, you’re doing it wrong. And unfortunately people will likely be the hardest part of your job: they’re unpredictable, irrational and unreasonable to varying degrees on any given day, and you may not know why. Probably any person you come across who inflicts their bad mood on you is upset for reasons completely unrelated to you.

Empathy is often touted as the answer to coping with people: if you walk a mile in their shoes you’ll appreciate where they’re coming from and achieve an improved level of understanding. Empathy is hard though, as it requires you both to figure out what’s going on with that person (“oooh, so your husband embarrassed you in front of your former high school sweetheart and now you’re questioning your marriage”), and then to express the empathy in a way that makes them feel that you’re being empathetic. Empathy is something we should all work on and use, but it’s not the answer. It’s too hard and takes too long with variable results. You can’t simply walk a mile in someone’s shoes – you have to wrestle them off of them first, and give them back in good condition after.

What really works is patience. Patience means you can choose situations where you don’t think you’re going to be able to really understand what’s going on with a person, accept that you don’t understand, and treat the person with professionalism regardless of whatever crappy behaviour they’re exhibiting. You can be patient with yourself: that’s the part where you accept that you don’t understand what’s going on and don’t need to; and you can be patient with the other person: that’s where you play nice even if they’re being a jerk. In the end, you’ll get out the other side of the situation having gotten whatever job done (i.e. the reason you had to talk to the person in the first place) and without much drama.

Of course I want to reiterate that empathy is a wonderful skill to cultivate; so don’t let patience become your default mode of operation. Save it for those tricky situations where you just can’t crack what someone’s deal is, or the time it would take to understand is disproportionately more significant than the task you’re trying to accomplish warrants. Used correctly, patience can be a real time saver that helps you avoid hours of frustration wondering “what the f*** is wrong with that person?”