Part 6 of the 10 part series: Leader-friendly gardening practices to end bullying.
 
Use empathy – Being responsible for your own thoughts and feelings and giving up “being right” for the moment opens the door for really listening to others and is your bridge from survival to thriving leadership.
 
Desired outcome: Compassion

In Part 1, I discussed the need for social change to help end bullying and it begins with adults. In Part 2, I made an appeal for adults to step up to end bullying, and in Part 3, I discussed how adults can empower children to take the lead on this. 
 
The leader-friendly gardening practices began in Part 4 - Being nonjudgmental and Part 5 – Do not enable.
 
Today my focus is on leader-friendly gardening - Practice Three: Use Empathy.
 
Empathy is the most powerful of all the six practices because it is the emotional ability to imagine and feel the thoughts and feelings of another without experiencing their specific circumstance. Empathy binds your mind and heart to another.
 
A key focus of the Leadership Garden Legacy framework is to make a mental, emotional, and behavioral shift from survival to thriving leadership.
 
Survival Instinct
 
All humans are born with a survival instinct, just like other animals on the planet. Except the human brain has the ability to engage in a higher order of thinking and emoting. Cognitively, we know we are born, we live, and we die. Ultimately we can’t survive life, yet humans have a sort of amnesia to this fact - until faced with a tragic illness or circumstance that can end life. Then we remember what life is about - love, relationships, and personal leadership.
 
There is no need to wait for tragedy to stirke to start living life this way. It does take a conscious choice and effort to thrive, however.
 
So the battle for human survival is much more than just the basics (food, water, and shelter).
 
Our primal instinct kicks in to fight, flee, or freeze when confronted with any real or perceived danger. Often the perceived danger, relates to our belief about who we are that threatens our ego. Real physical danger is clear; perceived danger is not.
 
What do humans protect most?
 
Humans will fight to the bitter end to “be right” about a belief system that has little to do with basic survival. There is no logical reason why two people who share very different faiths can’t live side-by-side in harmony. For some, a difference in ideology causes the same perception of danger as someone coming after them with a knife.
 
Knowing this about our nature helps counteract being right as an automatic way to protect and defend our ego, and aides us in being nonjudgmental and not enabling harmful behavior. We can listen to another’s point of view or understand their circumstance at the heart and mind levels, if we choose; even when the circumstance is something we have not experienced.
 
Empathy versus sympathy
 
Also, empathy and sympathy have subtle distinctions, yet are similar in the feeling of emotion. For example, when my mother died by suicide, I didn’t want sympathy or pity. I did want empathy. It was the 1976 and you didn’t talk about things like this. And even today, it is an unthinkable act to most. Therefore, so many people couldn’t relate to my experience or understand, and attempts to console me were well-intentioned, even though misguided.
 
The things that stuck in my mind, from those times, were when someone would express sympathy (I’m so sorry) and then followed with a comment such as what a "selfish act" on her part (judgment) . That certainly did soothe my pain. At the time, it made me feel my mother was judged, and I should question my love for her, less I be judged too. I will share more about that during the healing practice to eradicate victimization and what I have learned since.
 
The simplest shifts are the most profound.
 
A shining example of practicing empathetic leadership, in lieu of a tragedy, is best told by a recent story of children in Atlanta, Georgia.
 
I had an email exchange with a new Cultivation Grant recipient, Ms. Lesli Burton at the Campbell Academy in Atlanta, GA. She was sharing with me some of the ways she and her colleague combined the two units they were teaching, Positive Platforms and Leadership Legacies.
 
Ms. Burton told me one of the 11 year-old girls in the Positive Platform unit was studying bullying and had obtained permission to interview a girl considered a bully. As a result, the two girls were now connecting in a meaningful way and through video and self-reflection the students in Ms. Burton's unit were able to compassionately identify some weeds and seeds this girl had growing in her Leadership Garden.
 
The Atlanta students had been learning about growing their Leadership Garden, and now this student who had been using bullying as a form of self-expression had a group of other children around her who could help empower her highest good and leadership.
 
With this simple demonstration of how their 4th and 5th grade students were responding to the lessons, they combined their efforts into a school-wide "Transforming My Leadership Potential Compassion Project" with a focus on using empathy. 
 
It doesn’t take a lot of money or effort to make a difference; especially when focused on compassion that is rooted in the practice of empathy. And if you want to see how the children were responding to the Leadership Legacies unit, you check out their class blog.
 
Next, I’ll address leader-friendly gardening Practice Four: prune gossip.
 
Gossip was one of the insidious weed in the student’s gardens in the Wheatley study commissioned by CNN AC360 for a segment on bullying.
 
In the meantime, think of a time when you used empathy, and share how that made you and the other person feel.