Download Otter for your meeting notes

2025-02-11 - Jodie Edwin | Otter.ai

2025-02-11 - Jodie Edwin

Edwin Rutsch45min

Edwin Rutsch

00:00

And also the AI, because I've been what's that you saw, just capturing what we've been doing and putting it into the doc, into those documents. So you're centrist. The literature is more, you know, academics are more on the left, yeah, so I feel like it's politicized,

Jodie Jenson

00:23

and I think that it's something like four to one. So for every one conservative academic, there are four liberal academics. And so it's definitely a very biased group of people who are doing the research on politics and empathy, and so it paints a picture of conservatives that is very, very negative, like aversive to they're very closed to anything outside of their in group, only Looking for the what's good for their group. There's a term that's threat bias. You know, you're motivated by fear. Let's see. What are some of the other things that came up very low empathy and when exposed to conflict related violent media. The this was an interesting study, the liberals, their empathy went up for the people who are in out groups, whereas it went down for people on the conservative side. And so something that's are, do you want to turn this into an empathy circle and like, reflect back? Or how do you want to run

Edwin Rutsch

01:41

either way, I have no preference. Okay, do you find it helpful to have a

Jodie Jenson

01:48

I do find it helpful. I also just wonder I actually have a meeting at noon, so I don't know that I said, Oh yeah, that's we have 40 minutes. Oh, okay, that's that's not

Edwin Rutsch

02:00

a lot of time. So, yeah, if we just discuss then, because it'll take, if we have more time, another time we can do the empathy. Yeah,

Jodie Jenson

02:08

there's a lot of value in that. But what concerns me is that I do think that there are good things on both sides of the political spectrum, I do believe that there is value in having convictions to values. So there's a book that I read last summer that's called in praise of intransigence, and it was kind of chronicling people throughout history who have stood up to like fascism, or like people during World War Two, who stood up to Hitler and who, you know, everybody was just too afraid to stand up, and so they would just kind of go with the flow of it and like, well, this is what's happening. And we're, we're now becoming notified, or whatever you know, and and it just became this, this, this flow of the culture was just shifting, and everybody was afraid to stand up. And so basically, what they're saying is, sometimes it's important to to be to have strong convictions to values, whereas in the academic literature, looking at conservatives and liberals, it's everything, every single thing that I've read. And this was quite shocking to me, and I hope that I'm just getting a biased sample, and I need to look at, look for different keywords or something, but it paints sticking to values as a very negative thing. And so I just want to get your thoughts on that, because as we're opening ourselves up fully, empathically to other people, I can see a lot of good that can come from it. You know, we we understand other people better. We come into communion and we feel like we are, you know, we're we have a shared perspective now. But on the other hand, if there are things that you want to stay devoted to, like a religious perspective, I don't think it's a bad thing for people to have convictions to their religious values, but I want to get your perspective on

Edwin Rutsch

04:28

that. Did you see that video of the Trump phobia video? So you saw that's sort of the essence of what I see. That was all done with basically the empathy circle. So the empathy circle, that's why I just see that as an it's an important framework, because it's sort of like the minimal viable structure, you know that I think that kind of holds up. That's it's very functional. So it's to bring all the stakeholders together into a. Dialog, where everyone has free speech and can be, you know, it's like, whatever your values are, you can hold on to it and but you have to be willing to listen to the other side and be able to reflect back your understanding of what they say. And it's my you know, my experience is that when you do that over time, people get deeper and deeper in terms of their understandings. We've, you know, done had empathy circles with, you know, pro life and pro choice folks too, you know, and you know, maybe they don't come to an agreement, but they really start seeing the deeper issues that are involved. You know, in a two hour empathy circle, you know, it's just the start. And the same way with the the with the political left and right, where in the empathy tent, I kind of mediated the left and the right, and had them, you know, listening to each other. And so it creates that space. The Empathy is just that space in between where we have, we just have to listen to each other and hear what those values are, at least instead of, you know, immediately putting up walls and all the stereotyping and so forth. And from that, my sense is that you can negotiate some kind of under you get an understanding. You can negotiate some kind of a step forward. You know, you come up where everyone's, you know, needs, feelings and needs are sort of considered and, and you've tried to find a solution that addresses everyone's needs. So it's not like you're, you're giving up your values. You're, you're kind of going deep enough to find out where we have those common values and and then we have a starting point, you know, to negotiate some kind of agreement, you know, going forward. So I see, I just see the empathy is like a third way, not left, not right. It's a third way of the space between the sides that you have to value that space, and then through that you can, you know, come up with, you know, approaches going forward and and at the empathy itself is, and in terms of the, you know, I see the books out there, you know, the there's, you know, for kind of more from the political right is, you know, suicidal empathy. There's a book out, and then there's toxic empathy. And the criticisms they have, I actually agree with but it's like, I kind of see those criticisms. It's not the fault of the problem with empathy. It's the, it's actually an empathy deficit. So it's, you know, it's the empathy circle is bringing all the stakeholders to the table who have and you know, the conservatives in that point are saying, hey, you know, we're not being listened to. Or the, you know, if you know, on some of these issues, if it's crime, you know, the liberals are supporting the criminals you know, empathizing with them, but they're not empathizing with the victims. So the empathy circle is you're bringing everyone the criminal, the you know, the victim, or to the table for an empathic dialog. So everyone who needs to be there is is included. So,

Jodie Jenson

08:21

yeah, I like how Paul Bloom frames it as a spotlight, where empathy tends to shine the spotlight on one person but not another person, right where you it's hard to empathize with multiple people at the same time, and I think that that's probably what's happening when we have political polarization, is it just depends on who we're empathizing with, with whom we're empathizing, I guess. Yeah, say that. And you know, so if we're concerned about immigration, you know, and people, you know, driving down minimum wage or whatever, drive taking away jobs from people in the US. So it could be we're having a an argument about that because of the group with whom we're empathizing. So the Conservatives may be looking at the people who are losing their jobs, and the Liberals may be looking at the people who are coming to the United States, so we are both having empathy on both sides, but we need to bring that together and empathize with the other side as well. Yeah,

Edwin Rutsch

09:34

bringing all the stakeholders again for and that's why the the holistic empathy, I think is important, because if you're just seeing it from one person's point of view, it looks different than if you think of the mutual empathy between all all the stakeholders, which and then the other thing is, is you know, are liberals really empathizing with you know, one side, or is it sympathy? Are they just feeling sorry, and if you start getting into the victim, you know perpetrator mindset, I don't think that there's a concept in mediation called the Drama Triangle. You're familiar with that. So you're stuck, right? There's a there's a victim, there's a perpetrator, and then you're the risk. There's a rescuer coming in to rescue the victim, and by trying to rescue the victim, the perpetrator sees them as a perpetrator, and then they feel like they're the victim. And it just goes around like that in an item. And the empathy circle is you bring all the stakeholders together, and you have them empathize so with with the other stakeholders, with each other. So you create a space. They still have the free speech, but the value the space is the empathic space of listening to all the other parties. So yeah, so that's that, I think that that's, it's a different it's, it's the way out of the Drama Triangle. Yeah, I like your empathy is, is the exit. So instead of, you know, saying you're a perpetrator, you're the victim, or victimizing people saying, Well, I'm here to listen to what you have to say. I'm willing to listen to what you have to say, and you start surfacing the deeper issues, and you can sort of address the deeper issues. And I and when we did the mediation, you know, it's not like the Liberals are all that I kind of see the left and right kind of mirror images of each other, pretty much like when we had these demonstrations. You know, the political right would come to Berkeley, the left would counter demonstrate, and it was actually the right that was actually more open to dialog than the political left in those situations, I found that's

Jodie Jenson

11:57

interesting, that your lived experience is so different than what the literature is saying about it. Because, I mean, I I'll even send this to you, it paints a pretty bleak picture. So, like I said, I was just like, dispassionately putting, like, compiling, and I'm just going to read to you. I wrote this with my own hands, and I then I looked back at it. I was like, wow, that is a terrible thing. Paragraph that I just wrote, but this is what I wrote. Several studies suggest that the personality profile of conservatives differs from those of liberal liberals. The extent literature paints a picture of conservatives who are not open to experience and tend to view the world as threatening and dangerous, conservatives have been shown to value members of their in group more than outsiders, with more blatantly racist individuals identifying as conservative. Neural scans of conservative brains have shown activation in regions that are sensitive to negativity, bias, threat, disgust and avoidance as such, many conservatives seek order social dominance and powerful authority figures, and so that's, I don't want to associate with a group that looks like that, right at all. I don't want to have anything to do with that. But that's not in line with my lived experience with because I was raised around I mean, I think where I am, it's like 95% right, leaning Republicanism is going very strong where I live, even though I don't personally align with it, I don't see them as bad people. And so then this is what I wrote about the literature on liberals. In contrast, a personality profile of liberal voters has emerged that looks quite the opposite. Research suggests that liberals are more open minded, creative and curious and see the world as a safe and cooperative place. Furthermore, they tend to value fairness and harm avoidance. Multiple studies have suggested that liberals are, in general, more empathetic than their conservative counterparts. And then I listed several of the studies there. In one study, when exposed to violent media, liberals, empathy toward out groups increased, whereas it decreased for conservatives. And so I see that I'm like, well, it looks like I am a flaming liberal, but, but then I need to come back to this duality of I do think that that what's his name, Chesterton. I can't remember his first name, but he's a he's a an ethicist from in the the early 20th century, and he said that we need to view it rather than the Aristotelian Golden Mean, where you find a balance between the two. He says, You have to find a way to hold furious opposites simultaneously. And what he means by that is find the good on the one side and find the good on the other side and not think that you. Have to let go of those good things, and that's the way I see American politics, is it? There's so much pressure to go one way or the other? Yeah, and I don't think that it is like a clear dichotomy where you have to choose one or the other. So I'm very grateful to hear that your experience has been different from what I'm reading in the literature, it's

Edwin Rutsch

15:22

very, it's not a very, it's very polarized in this position is, is not, yeah, very common even, yeah, so. And, you know, there's also there, there's maybe a different, I mean, there's in the empathy circle. What I want to do is, you know, go through, you know, with the definitions, with, you know, defining within the empathy circle. So we can model that, like bringing the stakeholders together, right? So take a topic, bring all the stakeholders into an empathy circle, and you can model a holistic empathy, because everyone's there, if you have the illegal immigrant, you know, the liberal, the conservative people impacted, and they're all in a dialog, listening, you know, to eat empathically, listening to each other. And, yeah, so that's sort of the Yeah. The essence of it's sort of like the, what I was hoping is, with conservatives, if there's tradition that empathy becomes a tradition, right? It's like, oh, and it is sort of a tradition too. That it is sort of the core of democracy is saying that we can listen to each other, we can work out our issues. And I think it's an empathic space that that happens in. And the, you know, the empathy circle is just sort of like training wheels, or like crutch to help agree that happened so and it's a minimal, viable, sort of a crutch, you know, it's the minimal working crutch that you can kind of build on. It gives a, like a starting place. And I've just seen it happen, if you saw those videos, you know, I had the political left and right, like six pairs that we mediated in Los Angeles. And of those five pairs hugged each other at the end, you know, I kind of helped. I hugged each person, and they hugged each other. Oh, that's great, but I attend the video too, you know. And on the other side, they're screaming and yelling each other, and the police are keeping them other side of the street. The police are keeping them them apart. So, I know it works, you know, it can work, but it's, yeah, it's and then you even have, there's other issues too, like there's all this, you know, racism and anti racism, and sort of, my approach is, you want to empathize with racism. So I have an interview with Daryl Davis normally, if you know him, but it's called empathizing with racism. And let me bring that up. Davis, so all the so instead of being against something, you're kind of empathizing with it. So which is another concept you don't hear a lot. He really got it. Darryl Davis, he's, you know, if you read about him, he's, he was, he, he has, like, a podcast, you know, millions of views and has been written up in the New York Times, just that he sort of listened, sat down with the KKK, you know, sort of befriended KKK members. And then through his friendship and his listening, they said, Hey, I was totally wrong about, you know, black people, you know, and they, yeah, yeah, I just put the link in. I put, actually, I put it into the wrong area, okay, yeah, because I was waiting for a Lincoln, yeah, I put it into the AI chat so you see that

Jodie Jenson

19:02

interesting emphasizing

Edwin Rutsch

19:04

with racism, empathy is not agreement, disagreement, sympathy, judgment, racism or anti racism, empathy equals empathy, deep, listening, seeing our common humanity. So anyway, so he really got, he really got the, you know, that, because that's he, he lives it, you know. And he, he has something like 200 KKK robes of people that gave him KKK and gave him their robe. I have

Jodie Jenson

19:33

read about him, yes, okay. And he's made, like, some serious, amazing, lifelong connections with people. Yeah, okay, yes, I've read about

Edwin Rutsch

19:43

him and as to his listening and his befriending people who would naturally generally be seen as the enemy, and they're terrible people, we have to suppress them. So it's sort of the concept of the means are the end if you want empathic. Ends, you have to have empathic means. And that's a really good example. You know, his story, yeah? So it kind of just gives an example of how it can of how it does work.

Jodie Jenson

20:16

That's really, yeah, that's a very beautiful example of that. I'm curious if you could help me think through how we could do an empirical study looking at the empathy circle, looking at the effects of it on people's long term ability to empathize. Because you were saying that over time, you have found that for yourself and for other people, it just becomes the way that you interact with people is more empathic and you're more prone to engage in active listening. I'd love to study that, and I'd love to add some like some academic research to back up what you're doing. The thing that's I know I explained my idea for my experiment and thinking about having one of my groups be an empathy circle, but I'm concerned that it's too different from my other two groups that they we can't straight across, compare them. The reason being, I want it to be like a 20 minute thing, so all four of my conditions are just a 20 minute interaction, and with an empathy circle that doesn't give you enough time to do like the training. And also, you would have to have a facilitator there, whereas I want to see what happens with just the two people interacting with each other. So I'm I'm starting to wonder if it needs to be two separate studies where I do my experiment, but then I do more of a longitudinal study with the empathy circle, and it could maybe be with some of the people that you have worked with, and like, you hold an empathy circle, several empathy circles, and I would do maybe some measures before, like measure their level of empathy, and maybe a few other measures before, and then also directly after the empathy circle, and then also maybe, like, a month later, just to get some residual effects of it, to see if it's if it's if they're maintaining those higher levels of empathy. Do you think that would be something that would

Edwin Rutsch

22:30

work? Yeah, I'd have to see it, you know, kind of more articulated. I do know people have talked, you know, we have like when we do see if I can find it empathy. So the circle, you know, like, here benefits, if, if you go to that, and then you see there's a bunch of sub pages of people who just reported their experience in, in short, you know, sort of blurbs.

Jodie Jenson

23:03

Is it the these different benefits? Yeah,

Edwin Rutsch

23:05

but there's a me, just, I can show that on the screen, yeah? So, you know, if you got on the side here, say benefits, you go through, these are sort of testimonials, you know, that people just gave short comments that like, I really enjoyed the circle process because I listened to people in a way that is so much harder to do outside of this process. So there's a lot of sort of benefits that people have mentioned. It's a little bit of a, you know, giving the feedback. Yeah, I do know, you know, when people there's, I remember one woman, she mentioned that, you know, when she did the empathy circle, then she would talk to her father, who usually she has kind of issues with, she had more sort of resilience to just listen to him. So there's sort of that aspect to it, I guess those are the sort of the outcomes you're looking at.

Jodie Jenson

24:07

Yeah, that's definitely within psychology. There are different ways to operationalize and we can look at it qualitatively, which is like taking those open ended comments that people give. And then there's also specific scales that we use that are like validated, like that have been shown to really get at what is empathy. And I mean, I have thoughts on that as well, because I think that we're not actually getting at empathy. So I actually am looking at creating my own scale. But you know, that's pretty brash of me to assume that all of these researchers for the past 50 years have gotten it wrong. But there are a lot of things that it leaves it leaves you wanting to understand it more when you get into things like Paul blooms book, where he operational. It as this affective, emotion contagion experience that is, you know, all about the personal distress. I think that's problematic. And in a lot of the scales, it actually is operationalized that way, to include those kinds of things. And I don't think that that's what we're talking about here.

Edwin Rutsch

25:16

Yeah, it's so confusing. You don't know what tech people are doing. We've thought mentioned that, you don't know what they're talking about. Yeah. So

Jodie Jenson

25:24

ironically, as we're talking about empathy being the thing that should help us to understand each other better,

Edwin Rutsch

25:30

well, that's why I want, that's why I wanted to do the definitions to at least create the scope of this is how I'm defining empathy, you know, the process of sensing into the experience of other, the holistic empathy, a group sensing into each other. So there's a group quality to it. I love that. And then there's a sensing into your own experience as well. So it has, it's a larger sense of the quality of how we sense into life, almost, the are we sensing into life in judgmental way, in a detached way, in a Yeah? So there's, there's a whole Yeah, quality of being, almost way of being. It's a way of being. Yeah,

Jodie Jenson

26:20

yeah. I agree with you. I think, Oh, I did that reminded me that we had talked about maybe one of my academic friends coming and joining us from one of these meetings. And I talked with her on Friday, and she said that she can join us for a meeting on, I think it was the 25th Her name is Lee Wong, and what university is she at? Somewhere in the Midwest, I can't remember, and she she's excited to hear what you've been working on and provide her insights as well, based on kind of looking at it from this holistic perspective, like you're talking about, where it's more of a holistic feeling into your experience, in with others and with yourself. And that's really a lot of what she's getting at as well. She's using different words for it, but I think it's, it's very similar to what you're talking about.

Edwin Rutsch

27:20

Yeah, there's the other aspect. Well, the what I'd like to do is, you know, do have kind of explain the model, the basic model, and then it's, it's framed within the context of an empathy circle, so that when we're talking about the different aspects, like we're talking about Paul Bloom's definition of empathy, that we can in an empathy circle, we can role play it, you know, it would be like you, you know, coming into an empathy circle thing, I'm so angry, I'm so pissed off, you know, or you know it and then, and you're the speaker and I'm the listener. And in me, instead of saying, Oh, I hear you're upset, you're you're angry. You know, I'm here to hear more. It's like I get I am so pissed off, too. I'm like, angry, and I don't listen to you anymore. I just reflect back. I kind of take on for whatever, whether it's emotional contagion or just as a reaction. So we need to be able to be able to document the the the thing we're talking about within the context of the empathy circle, so anyone else can reproduce it. They can role play it, too. And then it makes it much more tangible Within this broad open you know. Or we can role play. You know. What do they mean by toxic empathy? Or, you know, suicidal empathy, you know those books, well, let's, let's role play what they're talking about. And the one this suicidal empathy is the one I think that is like not empathizing with all participants. So it's showing you can role play well, bringing all the participants into an empathy circle. You bring the illegal immigrant or undocumented person, you bring the someone who's maybe lost their job or something. You're bringing them all in. They're empathizing with each other. So you can actually model it and role play and then specifically point within. And it also kind of helps build the empathy circle as a foundational practice, you know, and then there's all the blocks. There's a, you know, what they call the roadblocks to empathy, so you can go through, you know, judgment, or, you know, one upmanship, or, you know, just, there's a whole bunch. There's, I mean, it's already in the literature in terms of the blocks, the roadblocks to empathy, and I've got,

Jodie Jenson

29:50

yeah, wild literature on that, because I'd love to see that as well.

Edwin Rutsch

29:57

Yeah, there's a. I just, I think I'd mentioned Thomas Gordon, if you let's see. Let me bring this up. This is a good book. This is like from Thomas Gordon. And was she? I see discussions others, Dropbox, and, anyway, I think this, if you are you able to open this, because it's, this is an audio of it, but it's parent effectiveness training from Thomas Gordon, yeah. And if he, he it, he that's the audio version. There's a book version, which can get him pretty cheap to have an older book, but he's kind of talking about the using active listening with, you know, parents and children. And he has a book out on leadership effectiveness training, and then teacher effectiveness training. So it's, it covers a lot of these concepts. And he has a whole list of blocks to to listen to, listening to, and there's other sources too, I could, I definitely want

Jodie Jenson

31:19

to listen to that. Is that? How long is this? I can't see,

Edwin Rutsch

31:23

oh, it's like, five hours.

Jodie Jenson

31:25

Okay, entire recording there for me. Yeah, awesome. Yeah. I'll listen to that, something

Edwin Rutsch

31:30

you can listen into in the car or something, you know, if you're driving or

Jodie Jenson

31:34

and I do, I commute about 35 minutes to and from campus, and so I'm always looking for something to listen to. And no, I'm not always looking. I have so many things to listen to because I have, I actually have aI read my textbooks to me, because with the added commute time, I don't have enough time to do all of my readings for my classes. So that's been very helpful. But my most recent book that I've been listening to is, oh, that looks interesting. Yeah,

Edwin Rutsch

32:05

that's the blocks to empathy, sort of a project. Oh, yeah, this is where I'm also posting, you know, our discussions. And so you can see, I create a whole list of these blocks because that's like, actually, one thing I like to do is create a course out of this definition, you know, so and then you would go through the blocks to empathy, so you can kind of role play the blocks and stuff like that. Oh,

Jodie Jenson

32:32

this is great. Yeah, I like what you have here. And so it's a, it seems like it's a work in progress where you're just going to be adding to it. Yeah, each one of these pages very cool. I like this a lot because that's something I've been thinking about a lot. Is what keeps us from empathizing? And I think that let's see, let me look at yours and see if you have it on here. Oh, these are so good.

Edwin Rutsch

33:03

If you look at there, there's a whole body of work from, you know, Rogerian, you know, from Thomas Gordon, I think, created a lot of these. The NBC community added so that, from the practitioner point of view, they developed these, these concepts,

Jodie Jenson

33:24

I'm gonna I'm gonna dive into that. I've been wondering if, from the perspective of perspective taking, if we're looking at it that way, where I have to wonder if people don't engage in it because they're afraid of it, changing

Edwin Rutsch

33:42

them. Yeah, that's one of the blocks. Is that one of them on here? I don't know if it's here, but I have seen that. I think Rogers even talked about it, that there's a fear that you're going to be changed, yeah, if you have really strong, you know, rigid beliefs that, hey, I don't want to. And I think I mentioned that too, that where we had the empathy tent at a political right wing rally in the State Capitol in Sacramento. And we went there with the empathy tent just to listen to the political right and it was five members of the identity Europa group came. They're the ones that had, like, the tiki torches, it, you know, Charlottesville, and they came and, you know, they're very Holocaust deniers and, and the topic came up about the Holocaust. And my, I don't know if I told you this story, but my friend, who is there, he's Jewish. Oh, that's right, you did tell me the story. So it was like they were very like they didn't want to take in that, you know, the his experience. It took like, five times for him, but he finally did. And my friend just talked about that. When he finally got it and finally took it in, he could feel sort of a sense of relief and a sense of connection, or. Something that the person really heard him instead of just probably putting up putting up that wall? Yeah, I

Jodie Jenson

35:06

think that's a really good example of being afraid that it might you might have to change the way you view the world if you are fully open to empathizing with another person, because maybe that means you're wrong, yeah.

Edwin Rutsch

35:21

And that's where having that value of of empathy to get from the get go, it leaves you open to constant growth. And yeah,

Jodie Jenson

35:31

yeah, I've been looking into a construct called intellectual humility, and I think that that's that plays into this as well, in the research, and I want to read more about it to understand, like, how they view that differently from empathy. Because if you're, if you have intellectual humility, it means that you're willing to learn from somebody else. And I so I think that that's an important part of this as well. Because if you're if you don't think that another person has anything to teach you, then why would you empathize with them? And so I see some interesting overlap there. Yeah, it's

Edwin Rutsch

36:13

an aspect. It's a facet. If there's the empathic listening and you're open to listening, there's describing some aspect of that process, right? It's like, there's a humility in I could see that, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jodie Jenson

36:30

And I want to dig into that some more and understand it, because I I'm intrigued by because at a conference somebody, I told somebody that I was studying empathy, and she said, Oh, there's so much overlap with humility, because she was studying humility, and I just I hadn't, for some reason, it had not dawned on me that there was so much of an overlap. But it's true. The more I think about it, the more I realize that, that if I'm not humble enough to see that there's any value in empathizing with another person, then I won't engage in it. So, yeah, I think there's, there's definitely something there.

Edwin Rutsch

37:08

Yeah, for me, it's like, I just know that, just from experience, if you just listen to people long enough, you get to a deeper common humanity. So it's like, oh, and it's, everyone's sort of like that, you know, yeah, it's sort of just having the experience and the valuing of that.

Jodie Jenson

37:28

So looking at it from like a leadership perspective, because you are a leader of your nonprofit organization, how do you balance the time that you spend listening and, you know, active listening and and reflectively repeating back to other people. How do you balance that with Okay? And now we need to get this thing done, because I think you could get lost forever in just listening to other people. So how do you balance that as a leader?

Edwin Rutsch

38:00

Well, I'm sort of task oriented, so I just have that as you know, sort of a doing stuff. And, yeah, how do we? Well, a lot of our meetings are about getting stuff done, you know. So we just, just before this, had a board meeting. And so everybody's working on projects. You know, one person's working on the Santa Barbara group. So they're going to be going to a retirement home, and there's like five of them. They're going to do just active listening, empathic listening, with the people living there, bit like we do in the empathy tent. So they're working on that. So we're kind of, yeah, the goal is to create the vision behind it is to build a culture of empathy, to make empathy a primary social value. So when we're doing the empathy circle, we're sort of doing that. Sort of the means are the end. So we are sort of doing what we're what our mission is. But how do you do all the organizing? Right? So there's a lot of you know, Ingrid is working on the Phoenix training, which is on the 22nd just in two weeks. So he's organizing the training in Phoenix. And you know, there's a lot of organizing, sending out notices, promotion, room, accommodation, all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, so, yeah. So that's, there's no and there's, there's also, I think, in conflict mediation. There's there's a in the action we have called the restorative empathy circle. Based on the restorative circle process is you have a conflict between parties, and then you bring them into an empathy circle, where they dialog with each other until they find that understanding, mutual understanding of. Of the conflict. And then the question is, what do we do now? And then people say, well, let's do this. And they said that. And then so you create a list, sort of a To Do, list of how you're going to move forward. So that's sort of the taking it into action. Oh,

Jodie Jenson

40:16

okay, so that's kind of after the empathy circle portion of an

Edwin Rutsch

40:20

of a conflict? Yeah, of a conflict. So there's a and I have a friend, she's working in in something called it's a process where community members get together and they listen to each other about some issue, but then they also create a plan proposal that they give to the policy makers. And so it's, so there's, there's, and there's other processes, like called people's assemblies or citizens assemblies, where it's, it's sort of a community initiate, you know, community addressing community problems. So it can, you know, you can take the understanding that you've created in the circle and take it to the next step. So there is and then part of what we're doing is also trying to repeat what we're doing. So trying to spread the empathy circle as a practice, and then the other in terms of action. I know this is what Carl Rogers talked about, when do you do an empathy circle and you have a new insight, a new sense of identity, develop that change happens in you that is affecting all the actions you're taking going forward? You know, if you see, oh, if you see, if it's a racist thing, right? So that person who is, you know, that Darryl Davis listened to, he had a change, like, Hey, I was wrong about, you know, my judgment of black people, and he gave up his Kukla Klan robe to Daryl Davis. And going forward, his actions are totally different, right? He's no longer kind of judging, you know, so judgmental and being actively so that there's a, there's a there's action in that, you know, your personality is changed. So all your actions, sort of going forward, are incorporating that, that new sense of your identity and understanding of the world. So, yeah, so those are all action oriented. So it's not just, you know, how we're just, you know, self centered, just sitting here, you know, whittling our thumbs or something,

Jodie Jenson

42:37

yeah, because it has it, it is a balance, and I don't know that. And like I said earlier, with I don't think it should be one or the other, like in politics, I think it, it doesn't have to be you either sit and listen all day or you get stuff done like, I think that's how you get stuff done, right? It's how we, we work more effectively together as teams and leaders with subordinates. And you know, we it brings everybody to an equal playing field, yeah?

Edwin Rutsch

43:04

So that's another practicality of it, yeah. It's, I mean, you're saying you want to do something that's practical, that works. And, I mean, we talked about that before, so

Jodie Jenson

43:15

yeah, I've got to go, because I've got this other meeting, but I would love to put a bug in your ear to think about how I can benefit you and your mission. I would love to get involved with your board or with with getting trained, and, you know, maybe bringing the empathy circle to where I am. So just be thinking about that. Maybe this week I want to benefit you like you're benefiting me.

Edwin Rutsch

43:46

Oh, great, yeah, that would be, and one thing would be, is to give the I can go through the basic model of the empathy definition, because that's what I'd like to kind of refine, and keep refining that, and then when we have these discussions that we're able to point back to ground what we're talking about within the context of the empathy circle, so that can keep growing, because I think I see that as a practical, functional, you know, part so and then out of That kind of can grow some kind of studies or or other other actions. So, yeah, great, okay,

Jodie Jenson

44:27

and next week, when we meet, I want to share with you a model of of Pratt, like a very practical way of thinking about empathy that I developed, like two years ago. And actually, just last week I was, I thought back to it, and I was mapping it onto the empathy circle. Okay, great. And it was, it was really interesting how it, it aligned really beautifully with it. So, yeah, that'd

Edwin Rutsch

44:52

be really good. We can kind of show that model and then map all the stuff we're doing onto that. So that would be, that's exactly,

Jodie Jenson

44:58

yeah. And I mean, everybody. Has their own like analogy, or like specific way that they're talking about empathy. I really liked anita's Empathy circle. You know, we have everybody on different points on the circle, her analogy last week. And I just, I like that we all have different ways of of looking at it and conceptualizing it for ourselves. And I think that bringing those together and seeing how they map onto it is going to be that's

Edwin Rutsch

45:26

what I like to do, too, is be able to have that model and then map all the different definitions that you come across. Like, how does this fit into Yeah, so I think that just helps with clarity. And yeah, I agree. And like Dan Batson, he was saying it's like everybody's got these different definitions, you just have to share yours. Yeah,

Jodie Jenson

45:48

yeah, I like that. Okay, all right, so I'll see you next week. Then, all right. Sounds good. Yeah. Thanks. Bye.

00:0000:00