People are most likely to help people with whom they feel empathy or rapport. When someone we like needs our help, we are usually motivated to do whatever we can. That motivation is lacking if someone we dislike needs our help. People who need help and understand this human attribute can get all the help they need not by demanding it but by creating the desire in another person to give it.
Ten years ago, or so, I was dramatically I was dramatically reminded of this "rule": create empathy. I was in Tashkent, Uzbekistan where the local language is Uzbek but one can rely on Russian as a common language. I spoke Russian. I did not speak Uzbek, and I understood it poorly.
I was meeting with Dr. Yoldashev, Minister of Education, at the time. A man who had made quite a difference in Uzbek education already and who did know how to get what he wanted, Dr. Yoldashev had asked the organization I was working with for some help in establishing school programs that would permit children, who had lost their native language, to acquire Uzbek rapidly. He considered this to be the most effective means to turn Uzbek, an official language of the country (along with Russian), into a common language of use. Without good Uzbek language programs in the schools and the subsequent development of comfort in using Uzbek in everyday life, the language, and along with it the historical traditions and the Uzbek culture itself, he feared, would ultimately die out and be supplanted by a foreign language and culture -- Russian.
I understood enough Uzbek to know that the person introducing us told Minister Yoldashev that I spoke only Russian. To my surprise, however, Dr. Yoldashev continued speaking Uzbek. I followed his conversation but with great difficulty. Finally, he posed to me a question, which I understood but for which I did not have the words to answer.
"Do you really not speak Russian?" I asked him in Russian.
He grinned broadly. Then, in accent-free Russian, he said, "I speak better Russian than Uzbek. I got my Ph.D. at Leningrad State University. However, I wanted you to understand here [pointing to his heart], not here [pointing to his head], the importance of a good Uzbek program.
He got my attention, empathy, and help!
----
Excerpted and adapted from a collection of vignettes, copyright 2003.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
About Me
- Elizabeth Mahlou
- I am the mother of 4 birth children (plus 3 others who lived with us) and grandmother of 2, all of them exceptional children. Married for 42 years, I grew up in Maine, live in California, and work in many places in education, linguistics, and program management. In my spare time, I rescue and tame feral cats and have the scars to prove it. A long-time ignorantly blissful atheist converted by a theophanic experience to Catholicism, I am now a joyful catechist. Oh, I also authored a dozen books, two under my pen name of Mahlou (Blest Atheist and A Believer-in-Waiting's First Encounters with God).
Recommended Reading List
Because I am blog inept, I don't quite know how to get a reading list to stay at the end of the page and not disappear from sight. Therefore, I entered it as my first post. I suppose that is not all that bad because readers started commenting about the books, even suggesting additional readings. So, you can participate with others in my reading list by clicking here.I do post additional books as I read them and find them to be meaningful to me, and therefore, hopefully, meaningful to you. One advantage of all the plane traveling I do is that I acquire reading time that I might not otherwise take.
Truthfully...I could not have said it any better. This is what I live by and has gotten me along so well in life----->
ReplyDelete*People are most likely to help people with whom they feel empathy or rapport. When someone we like needs our help, we are usually motivated to do whatever we can. That motivation is lacking if someone we dislike needs our help. People who need help and understand this human attribute can get all the help they need not by demanding it but by creating the desire in another person to give it. *
Thanks, Val. It is so simple, isn't it? But many people don't seem to understand it.
ReplyDelete