Dr. Jim Loehr | Empathy & Compassion: Saviors of Humanity
Humanity has a dangerous flaw. Despite the amazing progress we've made eradicating diseases, extending life, creating safe and often fulfilling workplaces, and developing a wide variety of magical machines, humans still fight wars, hate irrationally, and create groups of others who are intentionally marginalized. Our big brains have helped us create incredible tools and marvelous works of art. Still, they have a seemingly ingrained tendency toward violence and the marginalization of outside groups. As humans continue to create more devastating weaponry, performance psychologist Jim Loehr believes empathy and compassion are what can save us from us.
In this interview, Dr. Loehr discusses “our species' penchant for aggression and violence.” To overcome our natural biological scarcity mindset, Dr. Loehr goes on to talk about a 20-week program he has developed for parents, teachers, and coaches that aims to create shared learning environments where people can strengthen their compassion and empathy muscles, practice acts of collaboration, and train themselves to manage their emotions to avoid aggressive overreactions.
Dr. Jim Loehr is a world-renowned performance psychologist, whose ground-breaking, science-based energy management training system has achieved global recognition. From his more than 30 years of experience and applied research, Dr. Loehr believes the single most important factor in successful achievement, personal fulfillment, and life satisfaction is the strength of one’s character. He strongly contends that character strength can be built in the same way that muscle strength is built through energy investment, and has brought this topic to life in his book, Leading with Character: 10 Minutes a Day to a Brilliant Legacy. His latest book is Sapiens Reinvented.
Don MacPherson: Hello, this is Don MacPherson, your host of 12 Geniuses. Are compassion and empathy — the ingredients that will save humankind? That’s the question I ask today’s guest, Dr. Jim Loehr. Despite the amazing progress we’ve made, eradicating diseases, extending life, creating safe and often fulfilling workplaces, and developing a wide variety of magical machines, humans still fight wars, hate irrationally, and create groups of others who are intentionally marginalized. I personally believe humanity is on the precipice of abundance for all 8 billion people who inhabit our planet if we can only get out of our own way.
To overcome our natural biological scarcity mindset, Dr. Loehr and I discuss a 20-week program he has developed for parents, teachers, and coaches that aims to create shared learning environments where people can strengthen their compassion and empathy muscles, practice acts of collaboration, and train themselves to manage their emotions to avoid aggressive overreactions. Dr. Jim Loehr is the co-founder of the Human Performance Institute and author of 19 books. He is perhaps best known for his work helping to optimize the performance of elite athletes. In addition to his work with athletes and executives, Jim and I focus on humankind’s propensity toward fixed mindsets that often result in violence and how to overcome these natural tendencies. It’s a truly fascinating conversation with an equally fascinating man.
Jim, welcome to 12 Geniuses. I’ve known of you for probably 15 years or so, and my good friend Doug Lennick reintroduced me to you through your book, Sapiens Reinvented. We’ll talk about that book. But before we get started, can you tell us about your background?
Dr. Jim Loehr: Yeah, I started out my master’s in doctorate were in psychology, really specializing in community mental health. And I became a licensed psychologist in the State of Colorado. And then when I was quite young, I was offered a fairly large job, the executive director and chief psychologist of the San Luis Valley Comprehensive Community Mental Health Center that served the whole central and southern part of Colorado. We covered an 8,600 square mile area, nine offices, multimillion-dollar operation. Yeah, that’s what I was trained to do. That’s what I thought I would do for the rest of my life. But I became associated with an exercise physiologist in the catchment area by the name of Dr. Joe Vigil. And he is a track and field legend, and I’ve always been involved in sport. I’ve loved sport participation.
And he got me to think about the application of psychology to human performance. And at that time, in the late 1970s, I said, “What can you tell me as a psychologist that’ll help my athletes, my track and field athletes do better?” And I said, “Joe, I have no idea. I’m like a deer in headlight here.” I said, “I know how to help people who have mental health issues, maybe get a little better, but I have no idea how to take everyday people who are pretty healthy and help them to become extraordinary.” And he said, “Loehr, that’s going to be a huge area. You like pioneering new things. Why don’t you look into it? Why don’t you do a literature search for me and see what you can come up with?”
And there was so little at that time. But I got so intoxicated with the idea of merging the two things I love most, psychology and sport. And so, I resigned to a 23-member board of directors and told them I was going to apply psychology to human performance. And they thought I had duly lost my mind. They thought, oh, it’s a ploy for more money. They asked me to leave the room, and they almost doubled my salary. And I said, “No, this has nothing to do with money. I’d like to try to make a contribution in this area if I can.” So, I moved to Denver and set up a private practice, and realized I didn’t know anything. I mean, I didn’t know anything about this. So, I tried to figure out where to go.
I went to the Jimmy Connors United States Tennis Center in Sanibel. They just opened. And I ran that facility with the understanding I could really study Jimmy and do videos. He was the number one competitor at that time. And then I went on to the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy, where I spent the next six years collecting data. Nick asked me to come and set up my Sports Science and Sports Psychology Institute there. And I had access to some 240 of some of the best young players ever, was the most prolific player development period in the history of tennis. Andre Agassi, Jim Courier, Monica Seles, David Wheaton, Martin Blackman, on and on and on. And every day, I’m a data guy, and I collected, I still have boxes of data, where we use computers to calculate the ideal range of heart rate for tennis players and the between-point time and all kinds of data collection on the kids.
And that was worth, yeah, at least one or two PhDs or more for me. And then I felt like I had an understanding of what I really would like to do. So, I joined forces with Dr. Jack Groppel, who had his PhD in bioengineering. And we formed the Human Performance Institute, which, in 1991, everyone said it would not be successful. We really wanted to apply all that I had learned and Jack had learned in his bioengineering work. We wanted a science-based approach. And we ended up working with 17 number ones in the world and thousands of people below that. We worked with Army Special Forces, Navy Seals. We worked with sumo wrestlers from Japan. We worked with world-class chess champions, thousands of corporate athletes, we call them.
It was a living laboratory — race, car teams, entire hockey teams. We had a nine-acre campus that was just incredible. And we were very profitable. Eventually, it was sold. Johnson & Johnson went crazy over it. And we sold it to Johnson and Johnson. And I stayed six years on to help with the transition. And when we left, we had about 400,000 people who had gone through the program. And all the data that we collected on those people, when you walked in, we drew your blood. We had a pretty extensive blood chemistry panel. Put you in a BOD POD to assess your lean body mass, all kinds of tests. And then we correlated that with all the outcomes that people wanted.
We put everyone on a 90-day mission of their own choosing, and we tried to figure out whether or not they succeeded or how close they came. And that is how we built a program that really had quite an impact on people’s lives.
Don: Was the improvement mostly physical or psychological, or a blend of both?
Jim: People came there because they wanted to win more. They wanted to perform at a higher level. And all we were doing, what we realized, was helping each of these young men and women or teams get healthier, and healthier physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. And what we actually found was the one that correlated most directly to sustained high-performance over time was the dimension of purpose and character. And it was a complete surprise to me. So we looked at human beings, what I believe the way they were designed as multi-dimensional energy systems. There’s physical energy, emotional energy, mental energy, and spiritual energy, which is the energy of purpose, the energy of the human spirit, and the energy associated with character. And so those were the big insights, and it was a little embarrassing. It took us a lot of work to get to those conclusions.
Don: A lot of people may not know that tennis, when you’re a singles tennis player, a match may last four or five hours.
Jim: Right.
Don: So, the level of resilience required to perform at a high level throughout those four or five hours is really, really high. But also, physical — you have to be physically fit, like top physical fitness. And I just find that to be a really interesting sport, much like boxing, where, yes, you have a team, but when you’re in the arena, it’s you.
Jim: You know, you’re a hundred percent right. I did a survey and had about 21 different characteristics to which is the most challenging sport, looking at how long it can go, there’s no clock, there’s no timeouts, the pressures, the scoring system, everything. And boxing and tennis were at the top of the list. Which, again, was kind of a surprise. But it’s a great testing ground. It’s a really a compressed version of life. And it really very quickly reveals your strengths and, most importantly, your weaknesses. I mean, the stress, the pressure. If you have physical weaknesses, mechanical weaknesses, if you have emotional or mental weaknesses, and you have a really tough issue with really who you want to be with your purpose, identity, and so forth, you’re probably willing to cross lines, cheat, do whatever you can to get to the top. It’s almost a Rorschach test for everyone who plays.
Don: You’ve written a number of books, and the book that I read of yours most recently is called Sapiens Reinvented. I want to ask you why you wrote that book and what will people learn by reading it?
Jim: Over the years, I’ve become increasingly concerned about where our species, Homo sapiens, has been moving. Because of our propensity for violence and aggression, with nine countries possessing nuclear arms, that is, for me, the greatest threat to humanity is the fact that we now have nuclear capabilities. And, at some point, particularly with AI, I was talking to someone with AI, who’s one of the cutting-edge people with AI, he said AI will enable an individual to create their own atomic bomb in their own backyard. All you’re going to have to do is get enough uranium and nuclear material to do that. But the idea of being able to do it now is common knowledge and can be put into an AI formula and can be done. So, I thought, if I could in any way change that trajectory by looking more deeply into why we have this propensity for violence and aggression and why we can’t figure out how to get along on planet earth — Since the beginning of our species, the idea was to really find ways of protecting yourself and your family and anyone who could come up with a better weapon that would ensure your safety in the survival of your progeny.
You know, that was great. And so we have become better and better at advancing weaponry from the crudest implements of rocks and sticks and stones to unbelievable projectiles and spears and arrows. And then now we have rockets of all kinds and poisons of all kinds. Humanity, what we have seen is a remarkable evolution in how to kill other people, how to take down our enemies. And then when we dropped the first two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we now know that we have the potential to do harm at a level that even there will seem like nothing. It will destroy planet earth. There are enough nuclear bombs to destroy planet Earth multiple, multiple times. So, I went in and tried to figure out, what was the beginning of this? How did we develop prejudice? How did we develop slavery?
How do we justify, what kind of moral justification do we have for committing these unspeakable acts of inhumanity to our own? But I was down that rabbit hole, and I wasn’t sure I could come back. It was so horrific. It caused a darkness in my life that was just staggering to think we would do this to our own. But I wanted to go further and try to come up with some kind of solution if I could. How do we reverse this inevitability? It appears to be inevitable. And just right now, we have the Ukraine War, the Russia-Ukraine War, the Middle East is on fire. We have so many areas of, you know conflict in the world. In the book, which was… I tried to keep it brief. I could have made this a thousand-page book, but no one would ever want to go into it.
Going into the Rwanda genocide, going into all of Hitler’s final solutions, going all the way back to the Crusades and all the violence and all the things, burning people at the stake, skinning people alive for holding a belief that they didn’t believe was actually the righteous one. And then how do we curb this? First, what is the reason that we have gotten to this point, and is there any hope that we can reverse it before someone pulls the nuclear trigger?
Don: What did you learn about why or what the motivation for this incredible othering is and the torture and the ability for humans to treat each other so poorly?
Jim: Our number one imperative, each one of us, is survive. Survival at all costs. That is what’s genetically built in to the human species. There’s just no denying it. And then the second genetic mandate is to make sure that your progeny survives. So, people are crazy about their own survival is number one, and then the survival of their family. And, as men evolved, they began to realize that the chances of survival are much better when you come together, when you develop a community of people searching for food, you can share food, you can defend against aggressors, you can wisdom and all this stuff. And so, man is really a social creature. And in the earliest years of evolution, those who came together in a common kind of theme to take care of one another and to protect against outsiders, that really satisfied this powerful genetic link-coded mandate to survive and to allow your progeny to survive.
And that is where I think that’s how it all begins. That’s where the origins of prejudice of all the inhumanity. Because what happens is you begin to realize that there are others out there that don’t look the same as you do. They don’t have the same rituals, and we’re competing for the same resources. And so, there’s an element of distrust that began to develop, and that if you didn’t look the same, if you didn’t act the same, if you didn’t have the same respect for boundaries and everything else, and resource, then this gave you almost a genetic mandate to take them out, to do whatever you can to protect your own.
And so, your morality started there. You protect your own and you protect yourself at any cost. And if it means the annihilation of another life form, and then you dehumanize them, they’re not the same as you. And when you dehumanize someone, it means they are at a lower level, and that you can purify whatever the species might be at that time. You can justify whatever it takes. And if it means taking another life or actually torture, whatever, you have to make sure that other people don’t mess with your people. And then a bunch of other things happen in the revenge category when one… And that’s how man began to operate in this unbelievable world of uncertainty.
And so, there was us and there was them. And if they didn’t have the same attributes and the same look and the same ideals and so forth, they didn’t worship the same gods, they were very quickly perceived as being a threat.
Don: One of the things that I found fascinating was this biological tendency to protect oneself and protect the tribe or family or progeny. But it doesn’t seem like it applies right now. And what I wrote in the margins is that it’s not necessarily true because climate change and advanced weaponry, these are the threats of today. And so, why are we not coming together and protecting ourselves and our progeny against these threats?
Jim: Well, first of all, if there was a, an immediate threat that people could sense right away, people now, they’re all over the world. They’re still struggling to get enough food. They’re struggling for water, safe, and then you have all the political violence that’s being perpetuated on many different levels, different governments all over the world. And the existential threat is so much greater in some of these just life and death survival issues than climate change, which seems to be, are we more likely to die in five years or 10 years from climate change or from a nuclear holocaust?
Don: The way that I’m interpreting this is that worrying about climate change and advance weaponry is a luxury, right?
Jim: Right.
Don: If you’re worried about feeding your family, taking care of them, their health, finding water, that’s so far down the line. Climate change is so far down the line. AI anxiety is so far down the line if you know about it — that that can’t be a worry right now.
Jim: I think that’s pretty much it. And I’m trying to raise awareness of this nuclear threat to humanity because most people are not even aware that this might even be happening, that we’re moving toward the edge of the cliff in an inevitable way, in my judgment. If you look at the facts, we’re getting close. Right now, we’re on the edge of a nuclear abyss, and one mistake, and planet earth is over. And so, I just think it’s an issue of what is the highest priority for people at any moment in time. And I will tell you nuclear threat is not it, nor is climate change.
Don: There were a couple of times where I wrote luxury in the margin of the notes, and one is on the first page of the book, where you talk about the Homo sapiens’ brain, and you say that it instigated an ongoing search for meaning, purpose, and a deeper understanding of existence. And I had the question for you is — is this true? It seems like search for meaning is a luxury, a present-day or a modern-day luxury. 200 years ago, 90% of humanity, all of humanity was living in abject poverty. And so, if you’re living in abject poverty, your meaning is to get through the day. So, I wondered if you have a comment on that?
Jim: No, I think you’re a hundred percent right, Don. That’s exactly what my conclusion has been that with this advent of a prefrontal cortex, development of this amazing ability for abstract thinking and so forth, the highest priority is to survive and to get your family to survive. And then once you get that, if you have those basic needs met, the next issue is survival for what, why am I here? What is this all about? But if you’re looking for water all day, it’s hard for you to really extrapolate something that’s an existential question in your life. Why am I here? I want to say why I’m here, I’m trying to get water from my family so we survive that. That’s as far as you can go. But once you have the basic needs met, then all of a sudden people start questioning, “Well, what am I supposed to do with this thing we call life? I mean, I’ve been given this gift of life, I don’t even know what the hell it’s all about. What am I supposed to do with it?”
That’s what we call existential angst. But that comes after your basic needs are met, basic needs for survival.
Don: I’ve been thinking about this for probably five or six years. In an aging AI world where abundance is almost guaranteed, purpose is all that matters.
Jim: Right.
Don: And I wonder what you would say to purpose because my purpose has been, for the last eight years, providing for my family. And if we have robots, and if we have AI, and we have this world of abundance, the way that I realize my purpose will have to change. And I wonder, you have written on purpose, I wonder what kind of advice you have for people around finding their purpose.
Jim: That was probably the most important stake we put in the ground with all the people that came to the Human Performance Institute. We came to realize that just like the universe, there is quantity, quality, focus, and force of energy. And we are reservoirs of potential energy and that we want to convert that to kinetic energy. And in the universe, the ordering force, it’s called entropy. Everything moves towards chaos and disorder and disintegration by its very nature. The ordering force in human energy, we came to really believe, was purpose. If you don’t have a purpose, or you have the wrong purpose, you’re going to have a very, very difficult life. You’re not going to have a lot of fulfillment, satisfaction, happiness. And there are so many false purposes.
And so, what we did at the Institute was help people to do deep dives into what life really means for them. And the only way we could get them to do that was to go to the end of their life. And to actually say, your life, you get to choose what you want on your tombstone as what you really wanted to have happened in the time you were here. And it really forced them to really look at, well, what is this all about? What are you going to use as the ultimate criteria for a life of real success? And that’s what they were allowed to put, maybe four or five or six words on a tombstone, or a sentence or two that described for them the ultimate criteria for success. And then we work backwards in terms of that is your purpose. I call that getting home. And everyone wants to get home. And now you’re going to have to work at that every single day of your life.
And now, all of a sudden, here you are — what can I do now to make sure that I can get home? And that I have to earn those. I don’t just get those by showing up. For me to get home, I’m going to have to really work hard every single day to earn the right to have those words of an extraordinary mother, father, caring, inspiration, a very gracious person of integrity, whatever it is. That was the cornerstone. That was the single most important stake we could get in the ground, even for someone who came and they wanted to win more in a particular sport. We got the purpose right first, and that was the ordering force for everything else.
Don: And can you talk about, because I know resilience has been a topic that is important to you, and I’m sure you worked with your clients on elevating their resilience, but can you talk about the link between purpose and resilience? I’ve had Navy Seals on this show, and I’ve had Johnny Rodgers, who won the Heisman Trophy 52 years ago. He was in the hospital with COVID, and he talked about how he was very, very close to dying, and he was sipping air. He was laying there sipping air, and he says, “I can get through this.” And he thought about his family and he thought about all of these things, but this link between purpose and resilience is so strong. And I wonder if you can talk about that.
Jim: It’s a really important connection that if you have a strong reason for living, you’re going to fight to stay alive. If you get up in the morning and you don’t really have any real sense of what are you going to do today, or why am I here, or whatever, and that becomes, or all you’re doing is kind of chasing some kind of pleasure, some hedonistic, there’s not that much of a sense of urgency in having today mean something, that your life actually has value. You were given this gift, and there has to be a return for this gift. So, whether it’s being around longer for your family, whatever it is to make a contribution in some way. Every day I wake up, I really want to know: how can I make this day connect a little more to my getting home when I pass?
If you don’t have a reason for fighting back, you probably won’t. And that’s what purpose is. And it really, almost always, we develop this notion of a self-transcendent purpose. You’re going to fight a lot more, you’re going to be a lot more resilient when you’re fighting for a cause much bigger than yourself. That if you’re fighting for your family, for your nation, for a good that transcends almost anything and everything, you’re not going to give up. You’re going to fight to your last breath. And so, it’s like the more you figure out that your life really is not about you, it’s about what you can do for others. And even in a competitive arena, that’s what we were all about.
We were about being a stronger, better competitor. We really helped them understand that, if you read Andre Agassi’s book on Open, he had to rediscover a purpose. He could get to the top, but it was very empty with the purpose just to be more famous, to make more money, have all the things he wanted. But then he rededicated his life and his fame and his money to help kids have an opportunity at education, a charter school that he felt he could make a difference in their lives. And he got all his sponsors. And he, again, went from 141 in the world, where he was number one, back to number one. And he revered himself. He got rid of the artificial hair, just was himself. And everything he did was to help these kids.
And that is, at Hall of Fame ceremony, he had a bunch of those people make presentations about how this school and this experience had changed their lives. There was not a dry eye in the place. And that’s what made him, I think, understand how important purpose is to even someone you think, well, how does that affect my ability to compete? I mean, I’m all about in an individual sport, get Olympic medals. Well, there’s more to that than you think.
Don: Yeah. I would imagine that the first time to number one and the next time to number one were vastly different in terms of joy and appreciation.
Jim: Exactly. And fulfilment.
Don: And fulfillment, yes. I’m somewhat familiar with that story. So, thank you for sharing that. And I want to transition to purpose after career because the next person I’m talking to in an hour or so is a chaplain, a U.S. army chaplain. And I want to talk with her about members of the military when they retire. Because you have this incredible purpose when you’re part of serving the nation. And you have this comradery and brotherhood and sisterhood, and you’re part of a unit. But then that goes away. But the same thing happened for you and your clients, right? Jimmy Connor’s, the spotlight’s on him. He’s the number one player in the world, and then he retires, or Andre Agassi, or any of these incredible athletes. So, what sort of work did you do for people to help them discover their purpose once their career was over?
Jim: So, this is a pretty startling statistic, but I do a lot of work with wounded warriors. And 22 veterans commit suicide every single day. It used to be 24, they’ve gotten it down to 22. But that’s 22 people a day commit suicide. And the reason they commit suicide is they can’t rediscover their purpose. Why am I here? I was an independent, I was very strong, and now I’ve gone from taking care of others, now everyone has to take care of me. What can I possibly do with my life? I don’t want to be a burden on others. I want to have something. So, we did a lot of work. We brought in wounded warriors into HPI from all over the country, and we try to help them understand the importance of purpose and rediscovering their purpose. Because without that, there’s almost no way they can win that battle.
And they have to have a reason deep in their soul for every single day is a nightmare. When they can’t do anything and they have to rely on others to take care of them, what is the reason you’re going to survive your… survival for what? And the same thing is true with professional athletes. Once you’re out of that, then you’ve got to reinvent yourself. So, what is this chapter all about? One of the most critical points in a person’s life will be when they retire. And the reason is that all of the juices, everything that drove them, suddenly is taken away. Their identity, everything that they have been part of for so long, the accolades, the money, everything, now all of a sudden that comes to a screeching halt. And now you go, “Well, so what am I just supposed to do now? Die?"
If you can’t come up with a reason and become as excited about the next chapter as you were about the previous chapter, you’re probably going to check out early. And the statistics actually affirm that. So, it’s a very critical point in retirement. And in fact, as you go into that space, whether it’s from sports or anything else, you’ve got to start looking forward, and having a kind of a landing pad that gets these juices flowing and excitement about what you can be doing. And I have to say that in almost all cases that we have studied intensely, it has very little to do with you.
I mean, if you just want to go in and do crossword puzzles, I mean, for yourself and to keep your brain active, but the more you can find a reason to have an existence that transcends your own self-interest…
Don: Serve others.
Jim: You’ve got to do this for a purpose that’s bigger than yourself, whether it’s to educate others, to teach others. To be something more than just in the space of your own life alone.
Don: We have these prehistoric brains and 21st-century technology. And the challenge between those two really puts us in the place of what we’re discussing here, right? Is we have the scarcity mindset, but we have these tools that can lead to abundance. And that isn’t, necessarily, are behaviors aren’t in alignment with this abundant world. So, it is just fascinating.
Jim: It’s so interesting. I am always shocked when I realized that we have all the technology to get to the moon and back and all SpaceX, and we’ve been able to go into all these invisible worlds of vaccines and bacteria and viruses and developed protocols that are just stunning in terms of brilliance. The one thing we have been unable to do, which I think is really tragic, is curb mankind’s propensity for violence and aggression. And we’ve done a better job at reactive aggression, but proactive aggression, which is unique to our species, is where all this comes from. Where you’re thinking about how you can take an enemy out, that was an act of proactive aggression in that assassination of the healthcare executive. And it’s so interesting. We have so much technology. Will AI help us to be able to figure out ways to change or alter the brain’s processing of information so that empathy and caring and warmth and love dominate as opposed to some of these other more primitive emotions, and so forth? That’s the greatest challenge, I think, facing this generation, and that’s why I wrote the book.
Don: And we get to choose that. That’s my opinion is that humanity gets to choose. I want to ask you this question because you talk about tribes and othering and things of that nature. Do you have a sense for how we can widen the community to include all of humanity?
Jim: Well, that is the answer. I mean, we protect family, but we don’t see all of humanity as part of our family. And so we are all part of the family of mankind. We are all part of Homo sapiens. And this begins in the earliest years of parenting. And that’s why so much of my answer resides with parents and teachers and people who are dealing with youth. We need to begin to reestablish a sense of community in the deepest recesses of everyone’s mind. That just because you are coming from a different area of the world, you look different, you have different religious beliefs, you have all kinds of differentiating characteristics — those are to be celebrated. Actually, they’re part of you, they’re part of all of us because we are part of this same species.
And the only way that we can actually come together and have this sense of a family of mankind is that we’re going to have to change the way the brain has been wired. It was wired to be very, very conscious of any threat to survival of any kind based on look, appearances, and economic gain, or territorial gain. I love this work that was done around this notion, it’s an African concept, Ubuntu, where this notion that we are all… I put a fair amount of the philosophy of Ubuntu in the book. And it’s a beautiful connection to all of humanity. That is what every child should be reading, that’s what parents should be reading to their children. It’s an understanding that we are all a little different, and our differences should be celebrated, not used to divide us and to really become threats to our own families or to our own nation, tribe, or village. But it’s a big pull, it’s a hard pull, and it has to be done fairly quickly because so much is at stake.
Don: I want to close on your 20-week training regimen, and you say in the book that it’s going to cultivate empathy and compassion. Can you talk about what the key elements of this program are?
Jim: So, every day and every week, and there are examples in the book for parents, for teachers, for around the family dinner table, whatever, you have a theme. And the theme might be empathy or it might be compassion. It might be just a sense of understanding what another person is going through in a particular situation. And we use the most really current science-based approach in neurological science to try to help anchor this. So, we go through all the sensory portals that we can — the hearing, sight, tactile with moving your hand and writing, speaking — the more you can bring all of these really powerful assets to altering the way the brain works at a very early age, to actually signal to the brain, we need a different way of processing the world today, we need to see each other as part of a family, and we’re going to treat everyone as family.
What does family mean to you? How do you want to treat someone that really has been aggressive or a bully to you? Well, how would you like to be treated if that, in fact, happened to you? What would you like to have happen if that were…? So, the more you get people into that space of thinking about what other people are experiencing and a sense that, hey, eliminate this notion of them and us. It is we. We are all part of this, and we have got to come together to cement a relationship with people clear across the globe and really celebrate our uniqueness as opposed to making this something that is the basis for discrimination or inhumanity.
So, the book goes through 20 weeks, and you are, literally, to practice this with family members, and it gives examples of how parents could do this. And it’s a big ask in the sense, can we change the world fast enough? I called it the world against aggression. So, we’re trying to find ways of solving problems without looking to aggression. Is there a way to work together as human beings on issues that we don’t agree on? And I go through all the neurological science surrounding this, how we define morality in our lives, and how can we change this magnificent neuroprocessing system between our ears that will prevent us from going off the edge to protect our species. And 20 weeks, I’ve piloted it with many different parents, with many different teachers, and they begin to see that something is happening. There is a change that starts to occur.
Marc Brackett in his program of Ruler, he has really shown how emotional changes can occur that are so healthy in kids if you start them young and you have a dedicated fully designed program for them that teachers embody and, in fact, embrace, the chances for change in these young people’s operating systems when it comes to emotional intelligence, feeling and caring for others, and control of this massive emotional brain that we have that has really ruled the animal kingdom and so much of humanity, that emotional brain has to be contained particularly in the context of aggression, anger, hatred, negative emotion. There’s a place for those, but it’s not well understood, and we need to contain this as best we can.
Don: Jim, fantastic conversation. Thank you for your time and thank you for being a genius.
Thank you for listening to 12 Geniuses. We will be back in February when I talk with Chaplain Karen Meeker. She is Command Chaplain at U.S.-Africa Command. We discuss her path into the military and we dive deep into the topics of faith, purpose, and leadership. Thanks for listening, and thank you for being a genius.