ABSTRACT
There are three types of empathy: cognitive, emotional and somatic. Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand another person’s perspective by thinking about it. Emotional empathy is the ability to feel what another person feels without thinking deeply about the process. Somatic empathy is a physical reaction in the somatic nervous system that mirrors the experience of another person. To maximise our empathic influencing we ideally need to develop all three types of empathy. This chapter explains each form of empathy in simple terms, how all three types apply in professional settings and, most valuable of all, how they can be integrated into the development of authentic leadership.
