not only was my family's life being really enhanced and bettered through this process, but other people's families were able to improve as well in their communication. So I found that perhaps this was a way that I could kind of bridge the gap between focusing on myself and my family and also focusing on the outside world. So fast forward again to today. I'm now studying psychology. I'm getting a PhD right now, and for the past nine or 10 months, I've been working with Edwin on the empathy definition project, and so I wanted to kind of get into a little bit of the definitions. And with this, I'm going to share the current model of the way that we're conceptualizing the definition of empathy. And if you saw my talk last last Summit, we can see that there are a lot of convoluted definitions out there in academia and also in people's current lay understanding of what their word means, but in terms of how it is conceptualized within the empathy circle and through Edwin's intense research that he's done over the past 15 years or so, and my own as well. This is, this is kind of the model that he's come up with, and I feel privileged to be able to share it with you with His permission again. And so I just want to kind of walk through this and then show you how it maps onto my experience in the empathy circle training that just finished last week, so I'm now officially an empathy circle facilitator, which is exciting, but then also my experience is sharing the empathy circle with my family, all right, so we start here with self empathy, So understanding yourself and so that really overlaps heavily with emotional intelligence, because the models of emotional intelligence are kind of your understanding of yourself, your regulation of yourself, but then also understanding other people and interacting effectively. So I like that this model is a very emotionally intelligent model of empathy that also includes that self empathy component. Basic empathy is the way that it can be understood, is the interpersonal bridge, so leaving your inner world and venturing into the world of somebody else. And so that would be the role of a listener in an empathy circle, imaginative empathy. And Edwin has said that this is often not something that is used in the empathy circle. There are specific cases where it's really effective to use this in an empathy circle, but I will share a little bit of my thoughts about imaginative empathy as well. Then there's mutual empathy, which is a shared understanding and connection. So that is the overall quality of the group. So if you have an empathy circle, you can start to think, how is our empathic, our mutual empathy within this group? And then based on this shared understanding that we have this mutual empathy, then we work together toward empathic action. And I like that he has here. This mutually agreed action. And so if we are wanting to make a decision about how to help someone like in my experience working in West Africa, if we were to more deeply understand the needs of the people we're helping and also the strengths of the people that we're helping, then we can get a better understanding of what would we be best for them, and I think that that's very applicable in our family relationships, in our work relationships, in all of our relationships, understanding first and then moving forward. Okay. I love this quote from Carl Jung. He says, Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate. So I just wanted to share a quick experience. I'm going so over time on this. So I'm going to keep this brief and try and get to the most important bits of this. So in the empathy circle training, there was a time when I was the Speaker and my active listener was the facility. Facilitator, and he was really focused on making sure he had the timer going and and so there was a moment when I was saying something that he actually kind of missed what I was saying. And so when he reflected back to me, it wasn't quite what I had intended. And so in that moment, I had to practice some self awareness. I had to have some self empathy and also some mutual empathy to understand, oh, the way that I'm communicating is not being well received. So I love that both of these actually all three of these. So self empathy, basic empathy and mutual empathy actually also empathic action were at play in that because I had to have self awareness to recognize that I was not being understood, and that was also an understanding of the level of empathy within the group, so I had to engage in some empathic action by changing the way that I was communicating in order to help my listener better understood what understand what I meant. This has also played out with my family. I have six year old twins, and they love the empathy circle. They think that it's a really wonderful experience where they can feel seen and they can feel heard, but there have been times where their ability to engage in basic empathy is very rudimentary because when I say it's your turn to reflect back, they just repeat word for word what the person has said. So if one of them says, I love my family, the other one will just repeat back, I love my family. So it's been an interesting opportunity for me to meet them where they are and help them by scaffolding on top of their understanding. And I'm going to show you this. This is in line with Lev the gods keys zone of proximal development. And so where they are, where they can do something very comfortably on their own, is right here. But perhaps for my children, especially my six year olds, stepping out into this new framework of active listening and reflective listening is something that they can do with help. And so I'm scaffolding. I can I can show you this right here. If you can see this, this is a beautiful building, right? So where they are is a beautiful place, and from there, we scaffold on the outside to help them to grow and to progress. This is just a fun little graphic that kind of shows. This is adapted from John gottman's book raising an emotionally intelligent child. So often when we see that our children are not understanding what we want them to understand, we just get frustrated. So this child is just living her best life, and her parents are over here frustrated. So what I would recommend in all of our interactions with people who have different understanding, understandings from us and specifically with our own children, is we need to walk down this path of empathy, join them where they are, affirm that where they are is legitimate, and then start coaching, because too often we jump to, oh, you're doing it wrong, and we start coaching, but we need to affirm that where they are is legitimate and it's okay. Okay, so I don't have time to talk about imaginative empathy, but I maybe at a future Summit, I'll talk about some of the thoughts that I have about that. Basically, my main takeaway with that is that children love imagination. They love putting themselves into different scenarios and acting things out. And so I'm excited to implement that into my empathy circles with my children. And so just to conclude, I have seen all areas of this framework play out in the empathy circle training and also with my family. And I feel deeply gratified to have been a part of this. And again, I'm very grateful for Edwin and all those who have provided empathy to me, because I have found that it has blessed my life, and I hope to be able to bless the lives of other people through this process as well. Thank you.