Makes Sense - with Dr. JC Doornick - Making Sense of Empathy? The hardest yet most valuable language to learn - Episode 59

Episode Date: November 4, 2024

Empathy? Its one thing to understand and aknowledge what it means but an entirely different things ot apply and practice it in relationships. Just back from an extraordinary immersive couples retreat where we uncovered the secret to true love via learning the world's most difficult language to learn. Empathy. Lets Make Sense of Empathy together and equip ourselves with this life changing language and skillset. This podcast is available on both Apple and Spotify Welcome to MAKES SENSE MONDAYS with Dr. JC Doornick "Dragon" where we makes sense of the things that make you go Hmmm? Start your week off the right way by reclaiming control of your Great Morning.   LIVE STREAMED on Facebook, Linkedin, and Youtube     MAKES SENSE PODCAST SUBSCRIBE/RATE/REVIEW & SHARE our new podcast. FOLLOW the NEW Podcast - You will find a "Follow" button top right. This will enable the podcast software to alert you when a new episode launches each https://podcasts.apple.com/.../makes-sense.../id1730954168     Podcast Affiliates: Kwik Learning: Many people ask me where i get all these topics for almost 15 years? I have learned to read at almost 4 times faster with 10X retention from Kwik Learning. Learn how to learn and earn with Jim Kwik. Get his program at a special discount here: https://thelimitlesslearner.com/reading-promo62327921?via=m835j      OUR SPONSORS: - Makes Sense Academy: Enjoy the show and consider joining our psychological safe haven and environment where you can begin to thrive. The Makes Sense Academy. https://www.skool.com/makes-sense-academy/about - The Sati Experience: A retreat designed for the married couple that truly loves one another yet wants to take their love to that higher magical level where. Come relax, reestablish and renew your love at the Sati Experience. https://www.satiexperience.com Contact Dr. JC https://zez.am/makessense   HIGHLIGHTS: 0:00 - INTRO 2:23 - Empathy, the hardest most valuable language to learn 3:27 - Sati Experience - Relationship/Couples Retreats 6:19 - What is Empathy? What would life look like if you were not empathetic? 10:55 - Whats challenging about practicing empathy? 11:55 - Empathy in Business and Finances? 13:38 - The primary skillset for empathy is awareness. 15:53 - Learning the IRS (Interface Response System) 18:10 - Limitless potential for Love   Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to the Make Sense with Dr. J.C. Dornick podcast. This podcast covers topics that expand human consciousness and performance. On the Make Sense podcast, we acknowledge that it's who you are that determines how well what you do works, and that perception is a subjective and acquired taste. What we know is that when you change the way you look at things, the things that you look at begin to change. Welcome to the uprising of the sleepwalking masses. Welcome to the Make Sense with Dr. J.C. Dornick podcast.

Make sense. Great morning, world. Great morning, friends. This is your boy, Dr. J.C. Dornick. Welcome to another edition of the Make Sense with Dr. J.C. podcast. I'm frequently allowing myself to kind of like make a self-assessment of some big questions that I know a lot of people have. Some of the biggest questions are what's the meaning of life and what's, what's my purpose than an even bigger one of constantly allowing myself in these conversations that I've

been doing for years and years and years as kind of exposure therapy. Just allowing myself to always evaluate my intentions and my goals and things like that. What I very, very much enjoy and embrace and feel extremely fortunate and blessed about is just potential. The opportunity to take something like I'm about to do and share it with other. people. So I just wanted to drop that with you today because I think a lot of human beings have creative genius in them that they keep to themselves. Maybe they're worried about what other people will think. Who knows what other people are going to think? But just imagine what would happen if you

lived out loud a little bit more and shared some of your stuff and not have to call it content, not have to call it good or bad, but just shared it, just putting it out into the ether just to see what would happen. Just imagine how fulfilling that would be as I receive every now and then to find out that what you said was exactly what somebody needed to hear, or perhaps that it helped them enjoy a better day or get through a tough day. So that's just my open invitation to stop thinking about things and start talking about those things. Today on the Make Sense podcast, Make Sense Mondays, we're going to be making sense of empathy. One of my my favorite, favorite topics. Why? Because it's one of the things that I've always struggled with the most

is, is being empathetic. It's one thing to understand what empathy is and acknowledge its importance, but it's another to actually execute and practice it. So I love this. So I call this episode, this empathy, the hardest yet most valuable language to learn. I love that conversation that we have. I have a 14-year-old daughter now. We're French, so my kids pretty much all take French. But we very often ask a question at the dinner table, what's the hardest language to learn? So I don't know what you would say, but very often people say Mandarin or some sort of dialect from a completely different realm of the world. And what's interesting as an American is very often you hear people from other parts of the world say American is the hardest language. I'm not talking about those kind of languages, but I'm talking about a language that works in the same.

And that is, I guess you could call it the language of love, language of compassion, but that would be the language. of empathy. It's a topic that I love talking about, but it has become extremely relevant as a result of my wife and I embarking on this new adventure where we're hosting these relationship retreats, these couples retreats. We call it the Sati Experience, S-A-T-I-E-E-E-E-Eference.com. We've recently had one, and I want to share with you some takeaways just so you can have access. I don't know what you'll do with it to something magical that we saw to take place. So that's my intention today is to take something magical that I saw take place that I know is going to change my life and the lives of so many others and share it with you. The intention of Make Sense Mondays, it's a format that we use

every day in our private community called the Make Sense Academy, which is basically this passion project of mine and potentially my swan song where I'm going to take everything that I've learned in my 53 years that's helped me become a successful entrepreneur, a human being that's out of his way and enjoying life with my priorities in order and all of those things that everybody's trying to do, but also execute with business and leverage your time and create passive income. So we're creating this environment where everything that I have ever learned is being put into discussion and course format. And I'm also bringing in all of these experts from various fields that have impacted my life, like my friend Jim Quick, he's going to be in our environment, doing

speed reading and memory retention and things like that. So it's like this amazing incubator for personal growth, self-development, but also follow-through and execution and actually creating results, whatever that might be that you're looking for, all under one roof at a very, very low cost. So this is my new passion project where I'm no longer unattainable. A lot of people ask questions of what would it cost to work with you one-on-one and all of that stuff. And our price keeps going up when you're someone like that because you become more valuable and it becomes less accessible to people. Go call Tony Robbins right now and ask them what one-on-one coaching would be.

So what we've decided to do is take that same experience and put it all under one roof. And at this current moment, through the end of the year, it's $48 a month. And then at the end of the year, it'll go up to 96 or 97. And what's interesting about that is you'll never pay more. So a lot of people are joining the Make Sense Academy and locking in this price to come along the ride as this thing keeps growing and growing and growing and value, and they'll never have to pay more. That's my intention of, yes, I want to be successful.

But at the same time, what's more important is that I become successful on the tail of you becoming successful. Come check it out. Just say, make sense. And I'll send you an invite to it. So let's talk about empathy. the hardest yet most valuable language to learn. So what exactly is empathy?

We all have our own opinion about that. But to begin with, let's look at what life would look like if you were not empathetic. That's a fun place to start with empathy. The way I look at it is it would be confusing, problematic, and eventually, probably very lonely. I don't know if anybody woke up this morning

and said, my goal is to be lonely. You might want to detach from life, but I don't think you want to be lonely. So the idea of interfacing with humanity in general, more so those in our immediate context fear without empathy, well, it seems to me that would be a one-way ticket to what I guess I would assume is a difficult life. Why is that? Why would it be a difficult life if you didn't know how to practice empathy? Well, as somebody that's a recovering asshole, forget about lonely, but it's just not fun.

It's not fun when you know that you really don't care about others. you only care about yourself, attached to words like selfish and things like that. I mean, there's a time for everything. But the main reason that this would be difficult is this includes you and I is people want to be heard and understood. We all do. We all want to be heard and understood. And why do we want to be heard and understood? It's because we universally, I think, just want to matter. Think about that for a second. Do you want to matter? I mean, everything that you're doing in life from worshipping a religion or trying to be a good husband, a wife, or a father, a sister, a friend, business, all of that stuff. Heck, I'm doing it right now. I'm trying to make an impact

with the ultimate goal of me wanting to matter. That would make it very important for me to want to be understood. Because if you don't understand of my intentions, which can easily be misunderstood, well, then I don't feel like I matter. So that's why it's very difficult to be a non-emphotetic person is because people pick up very quickly that you don't care. In relationships, this plays big. So during our maiden voyage of this concept that I spoke about for healthy couples and healthy relationships that want to take things to the next level, we call it the Sati experience, we had this beautiful event. So we had intentions to create this beautiful event. And we planned it. It was in Paradise in Costa Rica, where we created a program for six special couples that varied

in age and scenarios that wanted to take their relationships to the next level. That was what these people came. That was their intention. They saw the advertisement and they said, hey, we want to come do the work. You know, they genuinely loved each other. We weren't creating a space for people that were having dysfunction and had complaints about one another. This is a unique experience for people that might be ships passing in the night, but they truly love each other and they're willing to do the work to not only honor one another, but also honor one another to the ultimate extent by saying, I want to put work into becoming a better husband for you or a better boyfriend or a better partner in general. So we knew going into this,

it was a very big part of our strategy that empathy played a big role in relationships, right? Understanding one another. The idea of acknowledging, that's a big part of it, acknowledging, understanding, and sharing the feelings of one another. Think about what that means. It's one thing to know how to say something in response to somebody else, but it's another to know how to say it in a way that the other person understands that you understand. That's the challenge with empathy, is not just knowing it, but it's executing it. That's what we notice that people had a lot of room for success with. Attempting to learn what it is like to walk in one another's shoes. And I say attempting because you'll never walk in somebody else's shoes. You'll just get a better

sense of it over time and every now and then your partner will evaluate your response as one that understands them. We were set. We were, you know, this is what we were, we were creating this event based on this, but we didn't know how deep it was going to go. So we also knew the importance of understanding one another's uniquenesses and bringing to the surface those differences was a very, very big part of this process. Again, acknowledging in relationship. that men, women, the different roles that we play in relationships, the whole men are from Mars, women are from Venus, which by the way can happen in a same-sex relationship or partnership as well.

We don't get to decide that stuff. The perceiver, the person involved in their life gets to decide that stuff. We just understand how challenging it can be because you've got two people that come from different worlds, different experiences, different programming from their mother, father, teacher, preacher, trying to understand one another. The easiest thing for you to do, which is difficult in itself, would be to be empathetic for yourself. Don't we struggle with that sometimes? So let alone try to be empathetic for someone else.

That's a different sex, perhaps, or from a different perspective, a different walk of life, a different knee-jerk reaction, different stress response, different experiences. Very, very challenging. I wrote this down. I said, the perfect scenario would be if Mars dated Venus and completed each other by creating one universal planet called love. We intended to guide our attendees through a series of exercises to take and to help them fully, fully embrace one another for who they were and find gratitude for one another's authentic selves. Think about what that means in the realm of empathy. By the way, for those of you that are business and finance focused right now, it works there too. Think about this. If you're in a

business sense right now and you're looking to drive income and things like that, it's all. It's going to be based on your, even sales. It's going to be based on you matching your product and service with the wants and needs of somebody. Some of you learn how to manipulate that. I'm not really talking about that. I'm saying if you really acknowledge and understand to the point where the person you're talking to knows this, we talk about this in our private community in the Make Sense Business Academy. There's a whole course called Communication Breakdown. If I know that you understand me and my needs, then when you make a suggestion of what it is that you could do to help me, there's a way bigger chance that I would be interested in it.

Make sense? So back to relationships. We were there to guide them through these exercises to embrace one another for who they were. But like I said, find gratitude for each other's authentic selves. Find a way to appreciate the differences. That's a big, big part of it. We didn't really know going into this. It was our maiden voyage to what extent this was important.

important and how powerful it was. Empathy organically became the emphasis. We were very open and curious people, my wife and I, meaning we didn't go there with this intention of telling people what to do. We allowed ourselves to remain open and curious to see what else might transpire, to make it better. Our next trip is going to be in February around Valentine's Day and we're going to take another six couples. God, these people are in for a treat. But then the people are, after them are in for a treat as well. We came to the conclusion that the primary tool to level up one another's empathy was the practice of present time awareness. Now, we talk about this in our Make Sense Academy all the time. One of the most challenging things for a human being to do is

practice being present and aware of what is actually happening now, which if you think about is the only thing that's happening. If you're living in the past and the future, you're living in a fantasy world that has already passed and is no longer relevant. or has not, may not ever happen. If your present moment awareness of one another and yourself is functional, you have a way better chance of practicing empathy. If you're living in the future or the past, your practice of empathy is going to be affected by where your head is at.

But if you're living right in the present moment, you have an opportunity to do something extraordinary, noticing what is actually happening around you both now, not predicting it, not basing it on the illusion, so that you can make healthy decisions that are in support of one another with the mutual goal of strengthening and elevating your love. That's what these people came on this trip to do, to strengthen and elevate their love.

Anybody into that? Now, if you're listening to this and you're in a place where you say, I don't want to strengthen and elevate the love with the person I'm with, well, that's another discussion. You might need to speak to somebody else. about an exit plan or some sort of reparation. You know, I mean, my wife is a very successful therapist. She's a sex therapist, but also a mental health therapist.

She's very often having people that are in dysfunction coming to, guiding them to the potential of repair, but that's not what our trip was for. We want to elevate the love to learn to not just respond, but have empathetic responses. I got to tell you, very often I think that I'm responding the right way to my wife or even to my clients, to my friends, my family. And for some reason, the feedback that I get from them is that I don't know what the hell I'm doing. I've got a lot of work to do with this too, but I'm just a little bit ahead of some. So a response that proves your understanding and acknowledgement for one another's unique wants, needs, and desires. But first, we have to learn how to practice awareness.

Now, what was cool about this is I kind of knew this, what we teach, and that's why it perfectly led into my work with the interface response system, the IRS, which by the way, is just a four-step process. Everybody that comes into the Make Sense Academy, that's their first step, is they take the interface response system, just to learn the language and learn this practice of being present time-aware and conscious.

And from that place, once you have those tools, to execute on changing the way you look at things, so the things you look at change, anything's possible from there, if you're willing to do the work. So it's a four-step process, this interface response system,

first to become aware of yourself. and the way your brain works and why it's working the way it works. So that's perceived. The second one is the validation of saying, hey, what I'm thinking might not be what I want to think. It might be what I'm taught to think. So I pause it. That's step two. And that's cognitive distancing. And we say, hmm, which means haven't made up my mind. And then from that space, unpersuaded, you can assess things from a conscious place and check things out from different vantage points, including your partners and then make a healthy response. That's in connection. and support with your goals and dreams.

But at the same time, you could also play in that playground within the illusion as well. But it perfectly lended a space to teach these couples the interface response system to arm and equip them with the tools to practice awareness. Once again, awareness like empathy is something that you could explain to me and show me you understand it, but very different to execute and apply it, especially in relation. relationships when there's emotions and thoughts and feelings associated with. So first, we taught people to acknowledge that their minds have been programmed for the most part. And I'm not saying that's good or bad, but your mother, father, teacher, preacher, and your

life experience have created your perspective. And your perspective has jaded and influenced the way you look at things, your perception, followed by learning that about your partner as well. Have you ever taken the time to really assess why you are the way you are? Not from a place of blame and then take the time to ask your partner as well. We started to realize that the possibilities

of where you could take your love, selfishly, we were also looking at our own relationship, my wife and I, Mika, chicken. And what we realized is that there's no ceiling, as my friend Jim Quick would say, it was limitless. There's no limit to how strong a couple's love could be. And we also started to acknowledge that there needs to be some sort of a governor, some sort of a controlling factor because you could also become over the top in love and do nothing. But love, which sounds great, but, you know, there's so many factors in this.

But what we were excited to learn, and these people experienced it as well, a lot of people were saying they want to come back once a year because they realized that they just opened in a good way a Pandora's box. And that Pandora's box is releasing love. So we came up with some fun questions organically in one of the exercises, and I want to share some of them with you, to help one another better understand one another. So if you're in a relationship right now, this would be a fun thing for you to ask your partner. And it would be fully intended on you trying to get a better grasp on the way they look at things. And then they could ask you the questions as well and therefore get a better understanding of one another. creating the dance floor for empathy. So here they are. You could ask your partner,

tell me about a part of your day today when you felt sad or depressed. We don't ask that question. How about this one? Tell me about a part of your day today when you felt elated and excited. And naturally, once they share that, you could say, what about that made you depressed? What about that? And just get a better understanding. Not trying to look for commonalities, although there will be some. get a better understanding of their perspective so that you have a better understanding of what's going on. So tell me about a part of your day where you felt confident, where you felt loved, where you felt disrespected, where you felt respected. We had an exercise like that. And, you know, the feedback that we got from that was that these people that knew each other so well realized they didn't know a lot of

things about one another. And it was just enlightening. And there were so many aha moments by this practice of empathy where people said, holy cow, if I knew that, I wouldn't be doing this. I would choose a different path. I wouldn't talk so much. I would just listen because I realize you just like to be heard. That's a way that you feel loved and respected, right? That was a lot of fun to watch. A lot of hugging, probably a lot of other stuff going on at night, but we weren't privy to that. So this exercise that I just shared with you unveiled something very, very unique about the practice of empathy, and that is this. And this is a very important grasp as we close out. The definition of empathy was universal in definition.

However, its application, which I said is the tough part, was extremely unique to each individual. It was subjective for each individual. So what that means is if you feel like an empathetic person, it doesn't mean it'll come across that way to someone else if you don't understand them. That was the biggest breakthrough. And that's the evolution of the Sati experience. very, very cool what's going on there and what's to come. All you got to do is reach out and just say, you know, you want information on Sati. We have a website Sati experience. Probably in the

week or so we'll announce the next trip. If you want to just get in that realm and even get part of our blogs and stuff like that, just reach out and say, give me some Sati. This brought light to the importance of becoming aware of what life looks like through one another's lenses. They're different. They're different. You know, here I am. I don't wear any but that's what my wife knows about me. It's the way I look at life through my own, not somebody else's. So our next trip is set for February. We'll be opening registration soon.

We can't wait for this process to take place because it's already evolved. And we feel, and this is just what we feel. It doesn't have to be what anybody else feels. In fact, every time you listen to me talk, I welcome you to just forget about everything that I said and just go your own way. But if something I said was interesting or made you go, hmm, and made you enter a space of saying, maybe I don't know everything, maybe there is room for work, that's wonderful. That's what's called an open and curious mind and heart.

And you would love the Make Sense Academy. So reach out and check that out. What the world needs most we feel is love. There's more love. A lot of things that we think are important that if you think they're important, they're important. but in comparison to love and the power that it brings. And you have to be ready for that, right? We're in the top 1% of this podcast right now,

and we have a lot of diversity in it. For the most part, people are open and curious. But some people will pass this up and say, stupid. And that's just because they're not ready. They're focused, right? And they're driven in a certain direction. What they don't know is that they're on a line that they were put on by somebody else.

I always have to ask yourself what's at the end of that line. Make sense? So have an amazing day. I hope things go your way. And if you learn something today, give it away. A lot of rhyming right now because it's only when you learn something and give it away, meaning share it with others, share this podcast, share this video, share the Make Sense Academy. When you pay forward something that you are in love with that is serving you, it becomes yours.

So I want you to make an evaluation whenever you meet somebody like me that spends all of his time teaching other people his things. It's a completely selfish act on my part where it's helping me make it my own. So if you learn something today, give it away. That's how it's going to stay. And we'd love to have you, by the way, in our group, in our family, if you're ready. Love and appreciate you. Have an amazing day. And for those of you in the Make Sense Academy, we'll see you tomorrow morning. Thank you.