Our Gaze Upon the World
Sweet Bites for May 3, 2024
Hi all,
Welcome to another edition of Sweet Bites, Mind Candy’s bite-sized newsletter with thought-provoking finds to send you into the weekend with.
This week we finished off our exploration of emotions with a dive into the emotion of EMPATHY (links for all this month’s posts below).
This email forwarded? Want full email or to support my work? Update your subscription below.
🎯Poll Time!
Last month I polled everyone to see what the appropriate number of newsletters per week were and it was split nearly evenly between one and two per week (I had been writing three).
For the month of April, we piloted sending two, Monday Meditations and Friday Sweet Bites with the Wednesday Wisdoms being published via Substack Notes.
Which leads us to today’s poll:
🦉 Wisdom
“For what else is tragedy but the dramatized sufferings of people, bewildered by an admiration of externals?”
Epictetus
Enchiridion 1.4.26
✏️ This Week’s Wednesday Wisdom
As a reminder, I have been posting Wednesday Wisdom’s via Substack Notes for our trial this month. If you haven’t already, complete the poll above!
You can download the app below if interested and follow all the Notes I post.
📖 Story
There is no better way to learn a concept than through a story. The below short demonstrates how a small change to one’s perspective can make all the difference in how we embrace life, as well as those within it.
🛠️ Tactic
In his new book, How to Know a Person, David Brooks outlines ways how we encounter the world and the importance of our actions towards it.
We all “show up in the world,” according to Brooks, with both a physical and mental presence. Our physical presence is the first things others see about us, it is our calling card.
Then there is the mental presence, and this permeates out through our physical actions. It is this gaze, as Brooks calls it, this first visual impression we give, that tells others what we’re all about.
“That gaze, that first sight, represents a posture toward the world… A person who beams warmth brings out the glowing sides of the people she meets, while a person who conveys formality can meet the same people and find them stiff and detached…”
The world and others gives us what we give it. How we hold ourselves, the thoughts we internalize, these reverberate through our actions and tell others how to interact with us.
If you want something from the world and others, make sure you are projecting exactly what that is.
“The quality of your life depends quite a bit on the quality of attention you project out onto the world.”
💡 Concept
Daniel Goleman, one of the pioneering psychologists on the study of empathy and the author of the best-selling book, Emotional Intelligence, outlines what he calls the “emotional triad”, three key attributes making up the emotion.
Cognitive Empathy
Cognitive empathy is what we most often refer to when we think of empathy, it is our ability to understand others, to see things from multiple perspectives.