The feeling that arises in witnessing another person’s suffering and the motivation to step out of your comfort zone in order to help that person is known as compassion.
This is an effective response appropriate to someone else’s situation. This is the kind of emotion that gets easily brushed off in modern society but the empirical data supports that compassion is a clear antidote for loneliness, depression, and anxiety.
According to experts, compassion is good for health as it helps you to live longer. Connecting with others in a meaningful manner can help us to attain better mental health, improved physical health, and a faster way to recover from diseases.
Agreeing on one point:
Jack Ma, Dalai Lama, and Jeff Weiner all agree that compassion is a set of practice that enriches the lives of individuals, help to build better organizations, and creates a more peaceful world.
Jack Ma believes that success can be attained with the help of LQ i.e. love quotient. The success of this measure is not done by worth, but by the ability of compassion to others. For Jack, becoming a money machine is of no use but what matters is the contribution to the rest of the world, and most importantly — what difference have you made in others’ life?
According to Dalai Lama, the practice of compassion is something sacred. Warm-heartedness reduces your blood pressure, anxiety, and stress in a much more appropriate manner.
While walking on a train, you come across a person who has been crushed by a boulder. Assumingly your reaction would be the feeling of suffocation he must be feeling or being unable to help. But a compassionate reaction would be to feel the excruciating pain he would be feeling in his body and the emotional trauma he must be going through. When you do anything to help him out and ease his pain, this feeling of compassion is invaluable when it comes to relating to others.
People are becoming more and more of this feeling and according to LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, it is better to go from this world as a compassionate person and be able to confront the troubles of people without being burdened by their weight.
The better lifestyle to adopt is to live with compassion instead of empathy.