In colloquial language, to be empathetic is ‘to put ourselves in the place of others’. This habit is not only desirable in everyday life but also in skiing since it allows skiers and snowboarders to share and enjoy the slopes in a coordinated way, interacting empathetically in a mountain area. Empathic practice is essential for successful relationships.
Empathy is considered a facilitating factor for prosocial behaviors, being applicable to skiing since it is an activity in which social behavior is exhibited by sharing the public space offered by the slopes of a mountain.
In addition to sharing the emotional state of others, the practice of empathy also allows us to evaluate the reasons for the situation in which the other person is in, whether skier or snowboarder, accessing the connection with others and the coordination of actions together, which is something fundamental when moving around a ski resort.
Practicing empathy on the slopes through solidarity actions increases both our well-being and allows us to achieve altruism, which promotes a healthy mental life.
Considered a personality trait, empathy directly influences social relationships and, if it were more widespread and practiced, the world would be a better place.
Empathy is the ability to notice and understand the needs and feelings of others. This applies as much to feelings of worry and discouragement as it does to feelings of joy and elation. In other words, it is sharing the joy of a success or the pain of a failure from the other’s perspective or point of view.
Associated with compassion, this capacity involves being aware of our emotional experience of others. When we demonstrate empathy in the face of emotional suffering or stress that others are experiencing, there is a calming and soothing effect on the distressed persons and, feeling that they are listened to, they begin to trust the other.
The two components of empathy are:
- Cognitive empathy refers to our ability to put ourselves in another’s shoes -or skis-, that is, to adopt their same perspective or point of view regarding a given situation with the goal of understanding what they are thinking along with the context in which it is happening.
- Emotional empathy represents our ability to grasp the feelings of another, i.e., their discomfort or well-being because we tend to feel similarly to the one being observed.
From these two aspects, prosocial behavior then follows, i.e., we first interpret the other cognitively and sentimentally and then emerges what we can do by offering our help.
The neural substrate of empathy
It is now known that some of the same neural networks that are activated when we feel emotional pain are also activated when we observe the suffering of others. This empathic ability is believed to be due to mirror neurons. The activation of these neurons is the neural substrate of the understanding of the actions of others, which play an essential role in empathy.
Although mirror neurons are considered to be the basis of empathy, brain simulation also plays an important role even if it represents only a part of the other’s experience. For example, when watching someone fall while skiing, we do not feel pain but experience a reduced version of what happened. This type of neurons allows us to ‘feel’ what others experience and understand them without reasoning.
Emotional contagion is considered the basic level of empathy. It consists of an emotional process in which we ‘grasp’ the emotions experienced by a particular skier. This mechanism is not only limited to emotions; it also happens with facial reactions (laughter, yawning) and with body expressions and postures due to mirror behavior, this being an unconscious and automatic behavior.
Empathy as a basic attitude in professional performance
Compassion and empathy should be part of the topics covered in the training of snow professionals because people are first human beings and then clients or athletes.
While it is important to practice compassion with others, it is also important to practice compassion with ourselves (self-compassion) by treating ourselves with benevolence, without a sense of guilt or anger for not being able to rise to the occasion.
Instructors and coaches, as teaching authorities, have a social and moral obligation to foster empathy among learners and athletes by modeling empathetic behaviors themselves.
In addition to teaching methods or technical training, they learn to perceive what learners and athletes feel through two key aspects: sympathy and empathy. Sympathy refers to the feeling of attachment we feel when observing another’s situation, and empathy refers to understanding the feelings of others in a given situation. The ski pro who shows empathy inspires learners and athletes to try harder, increasing self-confidence and self-worth.
Strategies for acting with empathetic behavior
We mentioned that empathy is perceiving the experience of others through compassion and understanding but the difficult part is implementing actions that actually help others. One of the causes of lack of empathy is the egoic personality, in which excessive Ego makes it difficult to put this virtue into practice.
Some practical strategies are:
- Perceiving situations that impact others.
- Learn to listen attentively.
- Softening our tone of voice when speaking.
- Increase self-awareness of the effects of our own behavior in order to understand the behavior of others.
