Public transcript

Brené and Adam Grant on the Skillsets of Empathy

By: The Curiosity Shop with Brené Brown and Adam Grant
Length: 48 min
Published: 15 October 2025
Language: English
Text from: the audio
Transcribed: 29 September 2026

Read the full transcript Open on Spotify

Notes in English.

Summary

Brené Brown and Adam Grant unpack the tactical skillsets of empathy, distinguishing cognitive empathy from affective empathy and walking through Brené's five empathy skills: perspective taking, staying out of judgment, recognizing emotion, communicating understanding, and practicing mindfulness. They then break down Brené's eight empathy misses—including sympathy, judgment, minimizing, comparing, and fixing—and role-play examples of each. Both admit their own tendencies (Adam's minimizing and fixing, Brené's blaming) and land on the shared takeaway of asking 'what does support look like right now?' rather than guessing or imposing solutions.

Key points

Brené defines cognitive empathy as drawing from your own experiences to acknowledge what someone might be feeling without feeling it yourself, which builds connection and trust.
Affective empathy—feeling what someone else feels—is described as dangerous because it leads to enmeshment, over-identification, and even secondary trauma.
Perspective taking is listening to someone's experience of walking in their own shoes and believing it, even if it doesn't match your lived experience.
Brené's five empathy skills are perspective taking, staying out of judgment, recognizing emotion, communicating understanding, and practicing mindfulness (from Kristin Neff's work).
The eight empathy misses are sympathy ('I feel sorry for you'), judgment, disappointment, discharging discomfort with blame, minimizing or avoiding, comparing and competing (the 'suffering Olympics'), avoiding hard conversations, and trying to fix people.
Adam recognizes minimizing and fixing as his own traps; Brené admits to blaming and wanting to fix things for the people she loves.
The core practical question is 'what does support from me look like right now?'—which may include offering specific options rather than shifting the whole burden onto the person to ask.
Brené cautions against 'let me know if I can do anything' because nine times out of ten people don't know what they need until asked directly.
Brené and Adam share the same takeaway: ask what support looks like, offer a couple of specific things you could do, and remember that everyone misses at empathy sometimes.

Questions it answers

00:56Empathy as a skillset

Why does Brené say empathy is a set of learnable skills rather than a feeling?

Empathy requires skills building and muscle memory, like the 45 actions it takes to make a left turn in a car. You're not going to get it right every time, so the practice is committing, screwing up, and trying again.

Empathy is built through practice, not innate traits.
MSW students' early role plays felt terrible but improved with repetition.
Everyone screws up empathy sometimes.

05:00Cognitive vs. affective empathy

What's the difference between cognitive and affective empathy?

Affective empathy means feeling what someone else feels, which Brené calls dangerous because it leads to enmeshment and disconnection. Cognitive empathy means drawing from your own experiences to acknowledge what someone might be feeling without feeling it, which drives connection and trust.

Affective empathy can become secondary trauma.
Cognitive empathy builds trust and connection.
It requires emotional granularity — a sophisticated lexicon of emotions.

06:29Perspective taking done right

How do you take someone's perspective without making it about yourself?

It's listening to someone's experience of walking in their own shoes and believing that experience, even if it doesn't match yours. Nick Epley's research on 'perspective mistaking' shows the more different you are from someone, the more likely you are to misunderstand them while thinking you get it.

Believe someone's experience even when it isn't your lived experience.
Perspective mistaking creates a false sense of understanding.
Brené's husband Steve accepted her mall parking lot experience was different from his.

11:53Jumping to solutions

Why do people default to solving instead of supporting?

Adam and Brené both identify action bias, problem-solving as a strength, and years of feedback that fixing is their value as reasons they jump to solutions. Brené counters that being chosen to listen is itself meaningful and not substitutable.

Action bias makes it hard to just listen.
Brené's family explicitly states what they need when sharing hard things.
Adam's line — 'your conclusion may be inaccurate but it makes 100% sense why you'd feel that way' — was healing for Brené.

16:53Asking what support looks like

What should a leader say when they see someone struggling?

Brené recommends one sentence: 'What does support from me look like right now?' This avoids guessing, avoids the burden-shifting 'let me know if I can do anything,' and often reveals that flexibility — not a blanket solution like time off — is what's needed.

Nine out of ten people don't know what they need until asked.
Leaders are responsible for curiosity, not for solving personal or family problems.
People may need a few hours to figure out what support they want.

22:11The eight empathy misses

What are the ways we commonly misfire on empathy?

Brené walks through: sympathy ('I feel sorry for you'), judgment, disappointment, discharging discomfort with blame, minimizing/avoiding, comparing and competing (the suffering Olympics), avoiding hard conversations/compliance, and trying to fix the person. Each masquerades as empathy but lands badly on the receiving end.

Sympathy is the 'near enemy' of empathy — it looks similar but carries judgment.
Responding to someone's hard story with your own bigger story is one-upping, not empathy.
Empathy means staying other-focused on the person's actual concern.

38:04When people don't know what they need

How do you help someone who can't articulate what support they need?

Brené and Adam agree the resolution is context-specific: if you know someone well, asking is respectful; Adam suggests offering a couple of concrete options ('here are things I could do — tell me if any would hit the mark'). Brené's mistake of clearing a grieving employee's calendar for a month showed that gestures without asking can cause real damage.

Unrequested grand gestures can backfire and damage trust.
Offering specific options threads the needle between asking and just doing.
'Let me know if I can do anything' is the question Brené dislikes most.

42:31Personal confessions and takeaways

What did Adam and Brené each admit about their own empathy misses?

Adam confesses to minimizing (telling his sister his advice was validated by Instagram) and fixing; Brené admits to blaming and being 'mama bear-y.' Both agree that everyone misses at empathy and the shared nugget is to ask what support looks like and offer specific options.

Advice given to loved ones can be self-focused — driven by settling your own nervous system.
The markers of maturity for 20-somethings are autonomy and the courage to ask for help, in equal importance.
Sometimes the most honest move is saying 'I'm not the right person to help right now.'

Notes

Cognitive vs. Affective Empathy

Affective empathy ('I feel what you feel') is described by Brené as dangerous: it's enmeshment, over-identification, and can become secondary trauma.
Cognitive empathy means drawing from your own emotional lexicon to acknowledge what someone might be feeling without feeling it yourself.
Cognitive empathy requires emotional granularity, referencing Susan David's work from Harvard.

The Five Empathy Skillsets

1. Perspective taking — listening to someone's experience of walking in their own shoes and believing it, whether or not it matches your own lived experience.

2. Staying out of judgment — not putting value on what you're hearing.

3. Recognizing emotion

4. Communicating your understanding of the emotion — sometimes simply saying 'oh, shit' is enough.

5. Practicing mindfulness — from Kristin Neff's work: not pushing away uncomfortable emotion, but feeling it and moving through it.

Perspective Taking vs. Perspective Mistaking

Nick Epley's research across 25 experiments showed that the more different you are from someone, the more likely you are to misunderstand their perspective while believing you 'get it.'
Brené's example: her husband Steve initially resisted ('I fucking hate that') but ultimately accepted her experience of a mall parking lot at night as different from his.

The Eight Empathy Misses

1. Sympathy ('you poor thing, bless your heart')

2. Judgment

3. Disappointment ('you let me down')

4. Discharging discomfort with blame

5. Minimizing or avoiding ('it's not a big deal')

6. Comparing and competing (the 'suffering Olympics')

7. Not upsetting people / avoiding hard conversations

8. Trying to fix the person

Asking What Support Looks Like

Brené's powerful one-liner for leaders: 'What does support from me look like right now?'
Nine times out of ten, people don't know what they need until they're asked; giving them a few hours to think is fine.
Adam suggests bridging Bruce Feiler's 'just do something' advice by offering specific options: 'Here are a couple of things I could do — tell me if any would hit the mark.'

Personal Confessions

Adam admits to minimizing and jumping to solutions; Brené admits to blaming and wanting to fix.
Brené shares a story of sending her sister an Instagram screenshot of her own advice to prove it was good.
Both agree that empathy misses are universal — the practice is committing, screwing up, and trying again.

Transcribed automatically from the audio. Summary and notes written by AI from the transcript, so check anything important against the recording.