135 – Noticing the cut versus feeling the pain
Filed in Anecdotes, Business storytelling, Corporate Storytelling, Podcast
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Empathy will help you help other people. Listen to hear how a woman stopped a child’s crying by showing that she could really understand how they were feeling.
This week on Anecdotally Speaking, Shawn is back! And a member of the Anecdote team you haven’t yet heard on the podcast joins him—Cynden Adams, our Head of Marketing.
Shawn shares a short but sweet story that he recently heard from a friend. It’s a great story for encouraging empathy and illustrating emotional intelligence.
Cynden mentions our upcoming public Storytelling for Leaders programs, which you can learn more about via our events webpage. She also invites listeners to tell the team what they’d like to see from Anecdote in 2022! If you have a request for Anecdotally Speaking, the Anecdote Blog, or anything else, you can contact Cynden at cynden.adams@anecdote.com.
If you intend to reach out to us, keep in mind that the Anecdote office will be closed from the 20th of December until the 10th of January.
For your storybank
Tags: emotion, empathy, helping, openness, problem solving
This story starts at 02:54
Cao She recently collected her twin boys from preschool and noticed a young girl crying. She was four or five years old and was waiting for her Mum to pick her up. Three adults tried to soothe her.
The first adult approached her, bent down to her height, and asked, “What’s the matter? Can I help you?”
The little girl had scratched her finger. She held it out and said, “It hurts!”
“It will be okay,” the woman responded, “We’ll get a bandaid for it.” She left to get a bandaid, but the child continued crying.
The second adult, a doctor, approached her. He spoke to her, mostly repeating what the woman before him had said. Still, the child continued crying.
The third adult, a mother, took a different approach. She walked up to the child, got down on her haunches, and said, “Oh, I see you’ve got a cut on your finger! Don’t they hurt? They really hurt! I’ve had one too, and even though it’s just a small thing, they seem to hurt so much!”
And as she spoke, the young girl stopped crying.
Anecdote International is a global training and consulting company, specialising in utilising storytelling to bring humanity back to the workforce. Anecdote is now unique in having a global network of over 60 partners in 28 countries, with their learning programs translated into 11 languages, and customers who incorporate these programs into their leadership and sales enablement activities.