Creating content can feel incredibly difficult right now. If you’re like me, you’ve spent the last few weeks oscillating between a can-do approach and hours of staring into space. Here’s how to tap into those very real emotions and channel them into more impactful content.
What empathy is and isn’t
We commonly confuse sympathy with empathy. Sympathy is understanding and perhaps feeling bad for the struggles that someone may be experiencing. Empathy means understanding the person’s feelings and thoughts from their point of view. Sympathy is when you feel compassion, sorrow, or pity for what the other person is going through. Empathy is about putting yourself in their shoes.
In this post, I focus on cognitive empathy, which is the ability to understand how another person may be thinking or feeling. Cognitive empathy helps communication by helping us convey information in a way that resonates with the other person.
Feelings, who needs ’em?
I’ve always struggled with how to deal with my emotions. For much of my life, I thought that I needed to keep how I felt under wraps, especially at work. I recall tough days when I Googled reasons to get out of bed, and when I reached my desk, I would try to leave my emotions at home and just focus on working. Sometimes, the office felt like an escape. But usually, pretending to be unfeeling was a difficult if not impossible task. When this strategy backfires, our feelings overrule us. I’ve come to embrace the fact that emotions are what make me whole and human.
There’s a lot going on, and we’re all grappling with it
Creating marketing content can be incredibly hard right now because there is just so much going on — not only in your mind but in your readers’ minds, too.