The Tribe of the Empathic

There’s a thought I often come back to.

If there were an empathy bingo card, and I counted how many times a day I hear someone describe themselves as “very empathic,” I would probably win quite often.

Empathy is one of those qualities people seem comfortable wearing. More comfortable, perhaps, than calling themselves intelligent. With empathy, we appear more generous with ourselves.

Over time, I’ve found myself pausing on this. Not out of judgment, but out of experience.
Because the more I work with people, the more I listen to their stories, the more empathy starts to look less obvious, less immediate, less simple than we often assume.

I don’t write this to define empathy. I write it to sit with it.

What I’ve learned is that empathy is rarely spontaneous. Our minds are built on shortcuts, categories, biases. They help us navigate the world. They are necessary. But they are also the very things that get in the way when we try to truly meet someone else.

Stepping into another person’s story requires intention. It asks us, at least for a moment, to loosen our grip on our own lenses. You can’t really enter someone else’s story while fully wearing your own.

Staying with another person’s emotional landscape is delicate work. It means resisting the pull to translate their experience into ours. It means noticing when familiar emotions get activated and choosing not to let them take over the space.

And this is where it often becomes tiring.

Almost without realizing it, we move toward advice, solutions, fixing. Those paths are reassuring. They give us something to do. Sometimes they soothe us more than they help the other person.

Being with someone else’s experience can hurt. It can touch unresolved places. It can make us feel powerless, or overly involved, or uncomfortable with not knowing what to do next. Remaining balanced inside another person’s story takes the presence of a tightrope walker.

Over time, I’ve come to see empathy less as resonance and more as hospitality.
Welcoming a story for what it is, without reshaping it. Even when it feels familiar. Even when parts of it echo our own. Another person’s story is not a mirror. It’s a window. And a window is something you approach with curiosity, not recognition.

This is perhaps why empathy feels so complex to me. And why I pause when I hear it claimed too easily.

We often confuse empathy with sensitivity, or with the sincere desire to understand others. A beautiful desire. But one that doesn’t always translate into being able to stay present.

Most of us know the feeling of not being truly listened to. Of being met with someone else’s story, or with advice we didn’t ask for. Many hands would go up. Expat life teaches this quickly.

In my work as a coach, I listen to many stories. Thousands of hours by now. And I’ve learned something simple and demanding at the same time: the moment I carry someone else’s story into my own, I make it harder to truly be there for them.

Empathy, at least as I experience it, asks for something paradoxical.
To forget my own story, rather than find it inside someone else’s.

Involvement is not empathy.
Presence, questions, and listening are.

Every story has its own gravity. It deserves care.
And perhaps the only real requirement is this: to leave our own shoes at the door.