Empathizing With Yourself Is Actually Quite Hard

It’s easy to promise you’ll eat no chocolate tomorrow after eating chocolate.

We make such a promise because our current emotional state stamps all over our future selves.

It’s easy to condemn yourself for the way you behaved years ago during that thing with that person.

We make such judgements based on how we feel now, with the data we have now, not on how we felt or what we knew then.

These empathy gaps prospectively and retroactively make us terrible at empathizing with ourselves.

And it shows in our marketing messages in business, too.

Your prospects may be afraid to move forward with you today. Or angry when they pick up the phone to you. This is okay. We’re terrible empathizers, remember?

So try harder. Your message will improve because of it.