“Empathy is the starting point for creating a community and taking action. It’s the impetus for creating change.” – Max Carver

We think Max Carver got it right and that if we truly care about community building and making positive changes in the world, we have to invest in learning about how to become even more empathic as empathy is at the heart of true understanding. We asked some deeply empathic leaders to share their perspectives below.

Morgan Hawkins

I like to think I began developing empathy at a very young age. My mother was diagnosed with lupus when I was born, so I grew up witnessing her live with chronic pain and exhaustion. Despite her illness, she managed to be an incredible homemaker, a devoted wife and parent, and a high-ranking military officer. As a child, I didn’t fully understand what she was going through, but as I got older, I began to truly see her strength and not just in how much she did, but in what it must have cost her. I started putting myself in her shoes, imagining what it felt like to lead, nurture, and endure all at once. That shift taught me to give grace in a way that only comes from lived experience.  Read More>> 

Tiffany Jones

Empathy, the ability to understand, feel, and share another person’s emotions or perspective. I have not always appreciated empahy. Partly because until recent years, having the ability to feel other’s feelings has been heavy, cumbersome, and at times exhausting. Before doing some deep reflective self-work and learning to practice observing other’s emotions, feelings, and perspectives, it was extremely difficult not absorb them. Read More>> 

Christian J Charette

The early conditions of my life promoted performance and atonement. Empathy wasn’t framed as a virtue—it was a survival tool. I learned to scan for shifts in mood, anticipate needs, and respond in ways that kept relationships stable.

Later in my professional life, through our work together and my own study, I’ve come to understand empathy as a skill—taking another person’s perspective, staying out of judgment, recognizing and validating their emotions, and feeding back their experience with authenticity and sincerity. Read More>> 

Randeep Nagi

I think empathy has just always been there in me. I don’t remember a time when it wasn’t. It wasn’t something I had to learn through a big event or change in perspective. Even as a kid, I was deeply affected by the pain or struggles I saw in people around me — friends, strangers, even characters in books or films. I could sense things that weren’t being said out loud. Read More>> 

Michaela Fuller

Empathy grew within me through life experiences that opened my heart in both painful and beautiful ways. One of the earliest experiences that shaped my emotional awareness was losing my dad when I was five. I didn’t fully understand the weight of that loss then, but it made me sensitive to the fact that people often carry emotions they don’t express out loud. Read More>>