Empathy Practice
Worksheet

COMMUNICATION & RELATIONSHIPS TOOLS

A structured exercise for developing the perspective-taking skills
that strengthen professional and personal relationships.

Inhabiting Someone Else's Experience

Empathy does not come naturally to most high-achieving leaders - not because they do not care about people, but because they are trained to focus on outcomes, efficiency, and problem-solving. These are useful in most contexts. In relationships, they produce a specific failure mode: the other person feels analyzed rather than understood, and they stop bringing the things that actually matter.

Perspective-taking is the skill underneath empathy. It requires deliberately slowing down and asking what the other person is experiencing - not to agree with it or fix it, but to understand it accurately. Most leaders are faster at diagnosing a problem than at inhabiting someone else's experience of it. This tool slows that down.

The relationship you choose for this exercise should be one where connection has felt harder than you want it to, or where you have noticed the other person pulling back. Completing this worksheet will not resolve whatever is happening. But it will give you a more accurate picture of their experience, and that accuracy changes how you show up in the next interaction.

How to Use This Worksheet

  1. Choose one specific relationship to focus on. Not "relationships in general" - one person, one relationship that would benefit from more attention.
  2. Answer the perspective-taking questions from their point of view. Not what you think they should feel - what they likely do feel, based on what you know about their situation.
  3. Identify what they need. This may be different from what they have asked for, or from what you would want in their position.
  4. Name the empathetic action. One concrete thing you will do this week. Small enough to actually do. Specific enough to know whether you did it.
  5. Notice what this exercise was like for you. If parts of it felt uncomfortable, that is information worth bringing to your coaching conversation.

Before your next session:

What did completing this worksheet reveal about how you typically approach this relationship? What would it cost you to change that?

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Empathy Worksheet

Understanding Their Experience

What might this person be feeling right now in their life or in this relationship?

What pressures or stressors are they carrying that you may not fully see?

What do they need from this relationship that they may not be expressing directly?

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Empathy Worksheet (continued)

Seeing the Relationship Clearly

Where do you tend to fall short in this relationship?

What would a more present, empathetic version of you do differently?

Empathetic Action

One concrete thing I will do this week to strengthen this relationship:

When specifically will I do it:

How will I know if it landed?

Reflection

What was hard about this exercise?

What do you now understand about this person that you did not fully see before?

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