Empathy. There are probably as many definitions of empathy as there are people, because each individual has a way of identifying him or herself with the other person and his or her emotions.

This is often coupled with the ability to imagine what someone else might be feeling, or thinking about their feelings.

In empathy we could identify three types or faces that define the level of your empathy. You start with the cognitive way - you want to know what is the other person feeling.

The physical aspects of that, How do you feel and how contagious...

...these things are.

Then this has to lead into an emotional aspect of empathy in which you are feeling what the other person is feeling. You're actually physically...

...sensing that emotion in the other person, but then to become empathetic, you also require a third stage, meaning you have to be compassionate. You have to actually act on the feelings of the other person and not simply...

...know what that person is feeling. You have to in as many people term you have to become vulnerable in terms of their emotions.

Often people confuse sympathy with empathy and sympathy, it's important to define it because so many of us stop at just simply feeling what other people...

...are experiencing, but there must be that step beyond that in which you have to act and do something to make that person feel better about how she or he feels. So that's an important differentiation...

...of the two.

My name is Andrea. I'm from Spain. This video is going to be about exploring empathy or describing empathy to students.

In my experience as a teacher...

...some struggle to understand the real effects that their actions have on other people.

For students, especially those who have lived in the same place their whole lives and have not been exposed to different cultures...

...or different types of people, it is harder for them to understand the difficulties that others can face.

That is where empathy comes in, and the easiest way that I explain this to my students is that the very famous quote that is translatable to almost any language...

...which is put yourself in someone else's shoes, or putting yourself in someone else's shoes. There are many different activities that can help develop empathy in students...

...That can help give them an understanding of what is empathy. One of them that I use very often is writing the quote that I mentioned before on the...

...board and creating a safe space for them where we can discuss this quote and why it's important to be empathetic.

What it means to be empathetic and how we can do that in our day-to-day lives. I truly believe that the sooner students start learning about empathy, the better it is for everyone.

Why empathy is important?

Just think about this, as adults, we do not have any experience of being kids, children, teenagers in the year of 2022.

We do not have any experience of what it means to take that role now, the same as our kids and children and teenagers...

...do not have any experience of being adults and they do not know what that means.

So this is the same, we do not have any experience, none of us, of being a different gender, being of a different origin, a different race, just to name it.

This is why...

..One can't tell how one never needs to feel or needs to behave.

Then we ask questions and then we talk to each other. We always need to think about things, not from our perspective, not from, I and I know, but from him or her perspective, and to try to understand how...

...does she or he feel.

Just this can create the emotion, the relationship and safe environment for us to communicate.

And our role and our main mission is to understand not our feelings, but his or her feelings.

And this is how we can start to share our real emotions, our realities, as all of us, we are different and unique.

So I really invite you to create the safe environment and to understand how each of us feels.