Our next speaker is Kathleen Valentin, and professor, Dr Kathleen Valentin works at the Lutheran University of Applied Sciences in Nuremberg in Germany, and she'll be talking Kathleen will be talking about balancing with the empathy circle. So we look forward to hearing you as well, and we Catherine is our final speaker for today, and we will have a few minutes. So if you would also like to put any questions in the chat for any of the other speakers that we've heard and for Catherine, then we can spend a few minutes addressing those. If not, we'll just go straight into the empathy circle.
Thank you very much. Can you hear me? Yes, so I will share my slides too. I'm very, very happy to be here today. I'm so thankful for the empathy circle. I really, really fell in love with it, and I would like to share some experiences I had with it. Um, please forgive me my English. I'm not a native speaker, speaker and and sometimes I miss my word, but I know you're all here with your heart, so I feel quite comfortable right now, actually, I made a little brochure about the way I do this empathy circle. I firstly I did it for the German people, German speaking people, but then I translated it. So if you're interested in that, I will send you the link in the end. Now my there it goes. So I made many different empathy circles, uh, meanwhile, like, for two years, some something about that, and I was not really trained in that. I'm not very sure if I really do it in the way you do it as a real, trained facilitators, I will tell you what kinds of empathy circles I'm talking about right now. I'm, I'm a climate activist in a little regional group called families for future, and we had with citizens, a climate change empathy circles. And then we had at our university about the care crisis climate empathy circles. And that's the reason why I was later just had a empathy circles about the book on tyranny from Timothy Snyder. That also was not my idea. I think it was somebody of you here who had the idea and I was copying it. And we really, really have good time doing that. And then there was the situation that's a very practical one. And the last two talk about in our university, the devotion, the service, didn't really it's a Protestant university didn't work anymore. People wouldn't really come anymore. And I said, oh, there should be many different reasons why that is the way. And we had empathy circles about that. One. Empathy empathy circle about that. The last one I would like to mention is an empathy circle, also very practical one in a company and they just wanted to find a solution how to lay out the rooms. And had like kind of empathy circle with 13 people, which was very helpful for that process. So when I give you some hints about my experiences. It's not in a scientific way, but as I'm a researcher, I would like to make some definitions. What is empathy? For me, I really adore that there are different understandings of empathy. In my case, I take the effective experiencing of the presumed emotion of another living being based on the cognitive understanding of this emotion while maintaining the self other differentiation. I think one of the speaker before me told me that that going into the other person means empathy. You still keep being yourself and there's the other person. And balancing can be conceived as the relative weighing assigned to an orientation. So in my understanding, empathy itself is always balancing between the feelings I pursue, between situations myself and the other persons, or what's going to talk about. So.
So firstly, I would like to talk about that we had it was in the empathy circle about climate change, and it happened to be that there were climate activists and people who denied that climate change is mankind made or has to do anything with our industry. And of course, people were very eager to get in contact with persons like this, because normally, we are in our bubble. And the empathy circle was very with big was done with big feelings, and it happened that in this mirroring, they didn't come up with the same idea of how climate change is happening, but they found that they're not so far away from each other if it comes up to what to do. So you really could see that the levels of thematic and content based deliberation can shift over time in this empathy circle, and the question of what truly matters evolves through the encounter. In the beginning, some of the people were having the inner feeling of, okay, it's a good empathy circle if we come up with a fitting idea, and in the end, it was not necessary anymore. Second thought I want to, I want to tell you about, is balancing power relations. I don't I then think that I have to tell you that we all the time we have big power relations in when we start talking to each other, also in a empathy circle, of course, and concerning many issues. And I want to tell you about two examples. One example was with a layout of the room empathy circle. There were many people from this company talking together in this way, the for for the first time, and the two people who who were in charge of, in the end, to find a solution of how to design and lay out these rooms. They really get a very, very deep understanding of the wisdom of each person who is involved in this process, and to get a deeper understanding of how they can fulfill their jobs, taking into account the different people who would not be heard if they wouldn't have this empathy circle, or very similar, when we had the empathy circle about the service there was, there were people talking to each other who had a very high power, like professors and priests, and people like me, you can talk a lot, and I have fast opinion. And then there was one student, and in my experience, she brought the most helpful issues for the process. She had the same time to talk as the other did, as the others did, and this created a situation that the other guys had to stop talking and really get in this listening and mirroring or reflecting. And I really could see that the process was so valuable because she really got the space this perspective needed for the whole process. So the implicit power structures really became more fluid through this empathy circle. And the equal distribution of the time, gave the people a rhetorical power that they would not otherwise have. In this way, even if the people are nice in Lutheran, they wouldn't have let her spoken so much. The third issue, of course, balancing feelings and self relationship. I think you all know it yourself. I want to talk about my experiences in this case. So in one case, it was about the crisis of care, crisis empathy circle. There was this lady, she later told me that she really knew what to say, and she really had a good idea. Oh yes, this is a good contribution if I say this. And then she had to listen and reflect. She had to listen, and she had to listen, and she had to listen. And suddenly, when it was her term, she said something totally different. She planned to say, and she really experienced what it made with herself when she was listening so long, and was released from this effect just to have to say something so so fast. Or another example is we had this empathy circle about on tyranny, where it is about fascism and how to how to strengthen our democracy. And there was one contribution by one participant, and she was showing in what way she would hope to act when it really comes to face real, oh, I'm sorry I'm missing the word that she cannot be a Professor anymore if there would be an oppression, a repressive moment from their chiefs, and she would say, I would skip being a professor if I would come into that situation. I'm not sure. I cannot say, because I don't know what an such situation I will be, but that's hopefully what I will do. And then another participant, she was saying, Oh, I'm I'm feeling so tingled. I'm feeling tingling because it really touches me so deep, and I realize am I'm also already in this situation, because I have such tensions to get along with my position in my work and what my chiefs tell me to do or not to do, and this, this empathy circle moments really help this mirroring to to mirror each other helps you To make it possible to connect with your own feelings and to take the next step, and by listening for longer, a new relationship to one's own views and feelings can be created. So that was my contribution. Thank you very much for every one of you for listening. Here you have the link. I can send it in the chat and yeah, thank you. Applause.
