Start Empathy
Start Empathy is a relationship mapping exercise that helps participants build useful connections and understand how people, roles, or ideas relate.
How to run it
- We need to learn to see things "with a fresh set of eyes
- Create note cards that represent a person that the participant will empathize with
- Share with the participants that empathy will be the topic for the next few minutes and rather than just
- talking about it, share that everyone will get a chance to experience and practice it
- Pass out the note cards to each person individually
- If you have more people than topics, you can easily
- Just make sure to have a balanced number of duplications
- To improve the quality of the thinking, ask the group as a whole to consider a situation like growing unemployment or war or the topic/theme of the gathering and answer the following questions silently What was his/her perception of the occurrence?■ What was troubling about this occurrence?■ What were the emotions that he/she felt at the time of the occurre...
- After a couple minutes with each person having time to envision what it is like to be that person ask that
- i.e., if there were 5 eccentric billionaires, have them all join in one group
Run this exercise live
The facilitator console stays in this browser. Its QR handoff is a short-lived participant snapshot containing only public exercise instructions, phase, prompt, and timer state.
What participants need now
Materials:
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Prompts to use +
We need to learn to see things "with a fresh set of eyes
Create note cards that represent a person that the participant will empathize with
Share with the participants that empathy will be the topic for the next few minutes and rather than just
talking about it, share that everyone will get a chance to experience and practice it
Pass out the note cards to each person individually
If you have more people than topics, you can easily
Run this with your AI assistant +
Works with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or your own local model: paste this prompt and your AI will co-facilitate this exercise with you.
Adapt this exercise for my exact room. Exercise: Start Empathy. Readiness: Publishable Draft. Core moves: We need to learn to see things "with a fresh set of eyes; Create note cards that represent a person that the participant will empathize with; Share with the participants that empathy will be the topic for the next few minutes and rather than just; talking about it, share that everyone will get a chance to experience and practice it. Return a concise facilitator script with timing, wording, safety notes, and remote/in-person adjustments.
Origin unverified
- Where we observed it: The strongest current observations come from Relationship Makers Handbook; aggregators are listed as additional observations, not origin proof. (1 source observed, including Relationship Makers Handbook.)
- What that means: we track where an exercise has been observed in public sources. We do not claim to know who created it, or how popular it is.
- No efficacy claims: appearing in this library is not a claim that the exercise is proven effective. Facilitator judgment and context decide whether it works for a given room.
- Corrections: if you have evidence of an earlier or more accurate source, read our methodology and trust boundary and tell us.