Can empathy and the other qualities which underpin workplace well-being and culture, be taught? The straightforward answer is ‘no.’ However, they can be developed using the foundational development tool for the brain, engagement with poetry. Engagement with poetry, whether memorisation of poems in education, or writing poems, and sharing and reflecting upon the process as a workplace wellbeing initiative, builds and connects the cognitive and emotional intelligence systems which create empathy, resilience, enhanced communication skills, perspective and connection, delivering the qualities required to boost wellbeing and heal workplace culture.
The elements of understanding which enable empathy, inclusive of perspective, communication, and interpersonal understanding, are all interconnected. They are also reliant on each other to such an extent that boosting one builds the others. Shared experience, risking vulnerability in a group, and experiencing a common journey build these qualities and bring teams together in a powerful and enduring bond.
Camena, an Edinburgh-based company using poetry to develop workplace well-being, do not aim to turn people into poets, but instead build enduring, sophisticated intelligence systems bringing the benefits required to address emotional issues undermining well-being, and thus strengthen the qualities needed to maintain well-being, resilience, perspective, connection, and communication. Developing empathy is particularly vital for Camena, wanting to make it a cornerstone of the workplace, recognising it as essential for genuine connection, understanding, and team resilience. Rather than teaching empathy as a fixed skill, their approach nurtures it through immersive, reflective experiences led by their teaching artists, who use poetry as a tool to unlock self-awareness and shared perspectives. This empathy can help to transform workplace culture by building stronger bonds between colleagues, enhancing communication, and creating an environment where people feel valued and supported.
As empathy becomes a part of team interaction, it can strengthen leadership and help to promote effective stress management. This ultimately fuels creativity. Camena’s work addresses the empathy gap left by educational systems, where poetry has been diminished as a focus. By filling this gap, Camena offers a unique pathway to build lasting, empathy-driven relationships that enhance cohesion, and wellbeing, and ultimately create a supportive culture that naturally reduces turnover and increases engagement.
In an experiment Camena asked ChatGPT what benefits does writing poetry have for developing empathy? These were the results:
ChatGPT said:
Writing poetry can be a powerful tool for fostering empathy, as it encourages self-reflection, emotional expression, and deeper connections with others. Here are some key benefits:
- Heightened self-awareness: Writing poetry requires introspection, helping the writer explore their own emotions, thoughts, and experiences. This increased self-awareness can make it easier to relate to and understand others’ emotions.
- Expressing complex emotions: Poetry allows writers to articulate feelings they might not otherwise express. By reflecting on their own emotional landscape, they become more attuned to the emotions of others, fostering empathy.
- Seeing through others’ eyes: Poets often write from perspectives different from their own, imagining life through the eyes of another person. This act of imagining or inhabiting another’s experience builds the capacity to understand and empathise with others’ struggles and joys.
- Connecting with shared humanity: Writing about universal themes like love, pain, hope, or fear creates a sense of shared human experience. This realisation can deepen empathy, as it reminds the writer of common emotional ground between themselves and others.
- Building emotional resilience: The process of transforming personal emotions into poetry helps writers process difficult experiences and empathise with others going through similar situations, cultivating a greater understanding of diverse emotional experiences.
Through writing poetry, individuals develop both the sensitivity to their emotional states and the ability to empathise with the feelings and experiences of others- which within an organisation ultimately creates a happier and more creative workforce.
