Accessing Empathy and Humility to Become a Better Advisor Across Cultures

Introduction

In the work that is undertaken by college advisors, counselors, and mentors, deep empathy is key in connecting with students and ensuring students feel seen, heard, and valued. Students today have so many pressures and pulls on their time and attention, and need people in their lives who can truly understand their situation. College advisors, counselors, and mentors are well-positioned to serve as people in students’ lives who listen to understand their experiences. Providing support with empathy and compassion at the core is particularly important for college student services and student affairs function areas, and essential when serving a diverse student body. Offering empathy is necessary for diversity to be appreciated and for advisors, counselors, and mentors to respond to students’ needs effectively. Unfortunately, many colleges and universities do not yet shape their support services with a focus on minoritized student populations. Still, colleges continue to perpetuate an environment where racism is a factor in campus policies, in the experiences of faculty, and throughout college student life (ASHE Higher Education Report, 2015). There is any number of underserved student populations such as first-generation students and undocumented/ DACAmented students, who are in critical need of care to handle lives of stress and overload (Amirkhan & Velasco, 2021; Helmbrecht & Ayars, 2021).

Accordingly, college students are often looking for an oasis of calm, understanding, and respect from college staff and faculty, and the practice of deep empathy can provide what students need. But what is the practice of deep empathy? And how can these connections be made across a campus community that is rich in diversity and difference?

Deep empathy can be defined using a variety of terms. Zaki (2019) describes it as, “an umbrella term that describes multiple ways people respond to one another, including sharing, thinking about, and caring about other’s feelings” (p. 178). Clearly, empathy requires human contact, time, and listening skills. However, as Jamison (2014) describes in The Empathy Exams: Essays:

Having determined that college students today need empathetic counselors, advisors, and mentors, and having established that the student body of today is very diverse in terms of social identities, the goal for educators is to: (1) understand the connection between empathy and equity; (2) truly know that self-awareness and deep learning about one’s own social identities is key; (3) learn that making errors in our efforts to be transparent is common, and make peace with our own fallibility; (4) commit to practicing the skills to build empathy in student relationships; and (5) closely examine the roles of authenticity, vulnerability, and self-care in empathic practice.