Two days before my father died, we visited him, and we were very stressed, angry, worried. He had had a stroke, the doctor told me to take care of my mother and I got the message. I remember sitting there, in the same room with him, and he seemed inert. However, a nurse came and spoke calmly to him, with warmth, she made jokes, and my father smiled, and quite a naughty smile it was. It amazed me and that image has stayed with me ever since. It was as if I was a little jealous that she managed to do that.
I kept thinking how that was possible. My mother, my brother, his wife, and I, we were tense, scared stiff, we felt useless, angry with ourselves and with fate. That lady came and did some things that, in another context, we would probably call applying empathic communication techniques; she did her job and manged to make a dying man smile.
I think it’s not every day that we find ourselves in such life and death situations, not every day that we reach such an extreme point in being scared. Or, on the other hand, that we are called upon to communicate with warmth, with care, to show that we care, so that we ‘soften’ a heart, a mind, a frozen soul. And yet, how much do we know it and want to do it? How much do we care for someone else?
For 15 years we have been talking about emotional intelligence. However, there are just a few who practice it. A colleague from the board of an association I am part of, talks a lot about compassion, kindness, the idea of caring for others. He is one of the few people who walk the talk, I have often seen this in our interactions over the last three years. I’m lucky to know him.
Do you have such people around?