A great article from the TED talks website on ways to build more Empathy into your life. Check out the extract below and the full article here

Empathy — or understanding the thoughts and feelings of the people around us — is one of the most important and most trying parts of being social creatures. But what exactly is empathy? And crucially, can we have more?

Stanford psychology professor Jamil Zaki PhD, director of the Social Neuroscience Laboratory there, studies these very questions. In a TEDxMarin talk, he says that human empathy is actually a skill that can be developed rather than a fixed trait. “Empathy is a simple word for a complex idea,” he explains. “Research psychologists understand empathy as an umbrella terms for multiple ways that we respond to other people’s emotions.”