The Three-Second Move That Boosts Confidence and Calms Any Conversation
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You spent your whole career being told to feel their pain. That device is wrong and it's quietly draining you dry. There's a three second move that works better and I'm handing it to you today. Welcome back to Speaking with Confidence, a podcast that helps you build the soft skills that lead to real results. Communication. storytelling, public speaking, and showing up with confidence in every conversation that counts. I'm Tim Newman, a recovering college professor turned communication coach. And I'm thrilled to guide you on your journey to becoming a powerful communicator. All right. Let's start with confession. For years I thought being a good communicator meant absorbing whatever emotion was in the room.
The client is furious about a sponsorship deal that fell apart if I match their energy. I nod, I frown, I let their stress climb straight into my own chest. By the time the call ends, I'm rung out. And I still have to go fix the actual problem. Same thing happened constantly in the classroom. Student walks in with a failing grade and his arms crossed. I absorb his fear, his embarrassment, the dread of explaining this to his parents. I carry that around for the rest of the day. Here's the part that nobody wants to admit.
None of that helped him. He was still failing. I was just tired. That's the dirty secret of emotional empathy.
It costs you your energy. It clouds your judgment and almost never calms the other person down. They don't feel better because you feel bad. They feel better when someone understands what's happening in their head without getting pulled under by it. Chris Voss draws a hard line here and changed how I coached this stuff completely. Ball spent twenty four years as an FBI hostage negotiator. He never once felt what the hostage hostage takers felt. Emotional empathy is feeling what someone else feels. Tactical empathy is understanding what they feel and using that understanding to move the conversation forward. One drained you? The other hand you control. Boss eventually ran the FBI's international kidnapping negotiation program.
He started out as a hard charging cop who tried yelling at hostage takers. Guess what? It didn't work. Pretending to agree with everything they said didn't work either.
Why does absorbing other people's emotions drain my energy?
But guess what? There was one specific move, did work. He calls it tactical empathy. And the word tactical is doing all the heavy lifting in that phrase. This isn't about being nice. It isn't about finding common ground so you can hold hands and sing together. Tactical empathy means you understand the other person's feelings and you say them out loud, but you never absorb them. Naming the emotion gives the other person a chance to stop being ruled by it. And you stay in control the whole time 'cause you're the one doing the naming. There's real brain size behind this and it's wild. Back in two thousand seven, UCLA researchers showed people photos of angry and fearful faces while scanning their brains. When people just looked at the faces silently, their amygdala lit up.
The amygdala is your panic center. It's your fight or flight switch. But when they were asked to say the emotion out loud Yeah, we'll make to look calm down. And the activity shifted straight into the thinking part of the brain.
They didn't meditate.
They didn't process anything? They just sent the word. Vols took that exact principle into hostage situations. Instead of muttering I understand your frustration Sounds like a customer service script. He'd say something like It sounds like you're worried about the FBI is about to storm the building. He named the specific fear. With precision. The hostage taker could actually think again instead of just reacting. That's tactical empathy in a sentence. You don't feel the pain. You identify it. You say it out loud with precision and you let the act of naming it do the heavy lifting. This technique has a name. Boss calls it labelling.
And it runs on three simple open. It seems like It sounds like Or it looks like.
You observe the emotion, you attach it to one of those phrases, and you drop it into the conversation.
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