Leading with Self-Empathy
- Kim Meninger
- 4 hours ago
- 22 min read
In this episode of the Impostor Syndrome Files, we look at self-empathy as a practical skill you can use in everyday life. My guest, Melissa Robinson-Winemiller, is a former professional musician and university professor who later founded EQ via Empathy where she works today. Melissa shares how a tough career pivot pushed her to study empathy and write the book, The Empathic Leader.
Here we talk about how to build your self-empathy muscles in easy moments first so that you have the skills available to you when the stakes rise. We also explore why high achievers take the blame when things go wrong yet wave away credit when things go well, how empathy and judgment cannot coexist, and a simple practice to interrupt reactivity so you can lead with more clarity at work and at home.
About My Guest
Dr. Melissa Robinson-Winemiller isn’t just talking about leadership: she’s challenging us to do it differently. With over 20 years of cross-industry experience, she helps leaders build emotionally intelligent cultures that don’t just feel better, they perform better. A TEDx speaker, EQ coach, and author of The Empathic Leader, Melissa blends research, real-world insight, and lived experience to make empathy actionable at every level of leadership. She’s on a mission to prove that the so-called “soft” skills are the ones driving the hard results — and the future of leadership depends on them.
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Connect with Melissa:
Website: https://eqviaempathy.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/empathyqueen.eq/
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Transcript
Kim Meninger
Welcome Melissa. It's so great to have you here today, and I'd love to start by inviting you to tell us a little bit about yourself.
Dr. Melissa Robinson-Winemiller
You bet, Kim. And first of all, just thank you so much for having me here. I mean, this is something imposter syndrome is something that I've seen affect so many people over the course of my career, and you know, myself included. So thank you for tackling this head-on, and for your audience, for being open to your guests and what you have to say. So, just okay, I had to put that up. But, yeah, I mean, I'm a career woman. I've been a professional musician. That's where I started, you know, and I'm I was up on stages. I was playing with people like Ray Charles and David Ogden Stiers and Manheim steamroller and, and all of that stuff, which you know when we're talking about imposter syndrome, being in a position where you've got to be public facing on a stage like that all the time, especially when you have people that are constantly telling you you're only as good as your last performance, and if you're not practicing Someone else's athletes get that a lot too. I mean, it becomes very ingrained. I think it does for a lot of us anyway, because of the way we're trained and the way, you know, we're kind of brought into what we do. But the arts get it especially, I mean, like dancers, you know, if they put on any weight at all, they're hammered on, they're, they're treated really harshly. Yeah, it's, it's, it's a different field. But yeah, that's what I did. And I did that for until I was in my early, mid-40s, and then at that point, I was a university professor. I was a professor of French horn, and I was assaulted by one of my colleagues, which was really difficult, besides, I mean, to be in a rough field and then have that happen. And long story short, I ended up having to leave music because of the fallout of everything that happened with that, which then fed into the imposter syndrome of, well, look, I failed, even though the truth of the matter is, I didn't fail. I was taking on someone else's bad behavior. I was taking on the toxicity of a really horrible system. I was put in a position that I wasn't going to win, but I still took that blame and that judgment on myself, you know, which I again, when I talk to other women that have been in similar positions, it's the same kind of thing we you know, what could I have done? Should I have said something sooner? Should I have not said anything at all? Should I have, you know, completely changed the way I handled this. So after that, I kind of spun out for a while because I just, I'd always been a musician, I didn't know what else to do. So I ended up trying to pin down what had gone wrong, you know, what was so broken that this is what had happened. And I started coming to this idea of empathy, which is, you know, understanding and connection by taking the perspective of the other. And I mean, I'm serious enough about it that I've started a second doctorate on it. It's an interdisciplinary leadership and my dissertations on leadership and empathy, because I want to be the person who can talk about this. But in the process of doing all this, I've actually pinned down this idea of self-empathy, which is something I think a lot of us are missing. And I've written a book on leadership and empathy, but I just finished a TEDx talk specifically about self-judgment and self-empathy, because I think a lot of us, when we're looking for answers, we're looking for answers to things that have plagued us. And I think for me, that's a lot of what this is about is understanding not only why I didn't see the empathy when I needed it from others, but also trying to understand where I was missing the boat on empathy for myself. So that's a Cliff Notes version.
Kim Meninger
Well, I so appreciate your sharing that, and I'm really sorry for what you went through. I think it's always interesting how we move forward from those defining moments in our lives. And I wonder, as you look back now, how do you feel about where you are today? And you know what that sort of how do you make sense of that pivot or that transition in your life.
Dr. Melissa Robinson-Winemiller
I can't make sense of it. I mean, you know, I mean, sometimes just bad things happen to good people. And there's no, I don't know. I mean, I know there's the idea too, that the universe doesn't do things to you, it does things for you and that, you know, there's, there's always a reason for everything. I don't, I don't know. I don't have an answer to either of those. I'm still struggling with those myself. So if anybody has an answer, I'm listening. But, you know, I do think, though that I but for everything that had happened, I wouldn't be here doing what I'm doing and looking around at society in general, and you know people in leadership positions in particular, but also, you know, just people in society, people in the world, people just trying to get by, people in toxic situations and toxic workforce situations. I'm actually in a position now to be able to maybe help some of this and affect some of it. So as as much as it was really crummy, and I really don't want to do it again, I wouldn't be here if I hadn't had that experience, and I wouldn't understand it from the inside out the way I think I do. So I guess that's as close to making sense of it as I can.
Kim Meninger
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't think it's ever possible to make sense of the events that you know, the external event that happened to you. I think that what I'm taking away from it is the way in which you chose to move forward, right in the face of it. And I think that your work is so important, and I have no doubt that you're impacting lots of lives through the work that you're doing. So I think the way in which you sort of took control of your, your own destiny, so to speak, is really powerful.
Dr. Melissa Robinson-Winemiller
Well, thank you. I appreciate it. And I mean, for anyone who's listening, who's finding themselves in, you know, similar positions, or positions that feel the same. I didn't get there right away. I actually spun out between one and the other for six, seven years while I tried to figure out what happened next. So I think there's something to be said for understanding that you have to take your own path, that what everybody else prescribes may or may not work for you.
Kim Meninger
Yeah, I think that's a really good point, too, and it's interesting hearing you talk about the blame that you put on yourself, right? Because I've been thinking about this a lot lately too. Is how lopsided we are in terms of taking credit, so to speak, right? So we're so quick to assume blame and responsibility for the bad things that happen in our lives. But when something goes well, we chalk it up to luck or, right, oh, that was just a fluke. That was fate. That was luck, as opposed to being willing to, you know, sort of say, hey, you know, that was a result of my efforts and my hard work and my, my skills, and so it feels to me like there's this really big imbalance, and you can't have all the responsibility for the bad stuff and the responsibility for the good stuff, right?
Dr. Melissa Robinson-Winemiller
Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I think for some of us too, that that feeling of, oh well, that was just luck, or I didn't do that, or it wasn't that, wasn't me, is kind of what keeps us moving and always grabbing for the next ring. We never take the time. We'll wallow in the Oh God, what did I do? How did I bring that on? But we don't take the credit for the victory. And so instead, we're like, constantly striving, constantly striving, constantly striving, constantly going. And that gets exhausting after a while.
Kim Meninger
You're right. And I think that goes back to what you were saying too about you're only as good as your last performance, and that feeling of, I have to keep proving myself, that I have not established myself yet. So there's this, this next thing that could be the, the end of my career if I don't do it well, right? And so that constant pressure to perform, whether that's literally performing in the sense that you're describing or even within a workplace.
Dr. Melissa Robinson-Winemiller
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I was sharing with you before the show. I mean, my TEDx went up about a week ago, and I'm so excited because it's gotten 30,000 views, which is fantastic. It means people are wanting to grab on to this idea of self-judgment and self-empathy. But even now, I'm like, well, it wasn't me. I got lucky something that the algorithm put it out there. It's, you know, give it a week, it'll fade. And it's, it's kind of like I'm so willing to take, I was so willing to take on that blame of everything else that had happened. I mean, or at the very least, be willing to accept that both of them have a component of luck.
Kim Meninger
Right, right. Exactly, exactly. I want to talk a little bit more about this idea of self-empathy. How do you define self-empathy?
Dr. Melissa Robinson-Winemiller
So, if empathy, people have this idea that empathy is about feeling, and feeling is part of it, but it's not all of it. It's not even the tip of the iceberg, really. Empathy actually has 43 different definitions over the last 100 years or so. And yeah, exactly that's, that's the reaction, though, really. So, I mean, feelings are one of those, but there's all this other stuff that happens. So if you're looking at it in terms of, like a big umbrella, what it is, is understanding and connection through perspective taking. So when we're talking about self-empathy, what we're really looking for is understanding and connection and actually understanding your own perspective in the world. Because if your perspective is, oh, I had this coming, I'm going to take the blame for all of this. This is all. You know, it's this. The bad stuff that happens is always my fault, and therefore, I don't feel I feel like an imposter. I don't feel like I fit here. But. Well, you're not really understanding and connecting with yourself. For one thing, because, you know, you're, you're kind of taking on all this outside judgment, but you're also not really taking different perspectives. You've got this perspective of being in the sock, which is what Brene Brown calls it, but you're not looking at it from a different point of view. You know, if you can step outside yourself and take a look and say, Well, how does this really look? How does this look from the outside? How would it look, you know, from my mom or my dad? How does it look from my friend? How does it look from, you know, that one trolley person on Facebook who won't go away, whatever you know. So when you're talking about self-empathy, you're still wanting to understand and connect in a very real way, by understanding a full perspective and not just that perspective of being in the suck.
Kim Meninger
I think that, that holistic perspective that you're describing is a missed opportunity. And I say this as somebody who understands that Well, I could use a little more self-empathy myself, and I wonder if your research teaches us anything about like where to start when it comes to this, because I think so much of this is ingrained in us from really early moments in our lives and our and of course, biology doesn't help, because we got such a negativity bias. And so if we are trapped in some of these, you know, mindsets, what can we start to do differently?
Dr. Melissa Robinson-Winemiller
So I mean, again, you know the thing about well, in four steps, it makes it sound simple. It's not simple. It takes work. You know what I mean? Right? Easy leadership in six days. Yeah, okay, right, yeah, right. And we're that easy. Everyone would be doing it. Boy, I wish, but with self-empathy, if you can kind of break it down into four broad steps. And this is the thing about it is it isn't a one-and-done kind of thing. It's one of those repetitive, iterative things where you're like, I'm doing the four steps again, I'm doing the four steps again. I'm doing it again. And the first one is self-observation. It's being able to step outside yourself and watch what you're doing. And the important part of that is to be able to stay critical, not caring. And what I mean by that is you're looking at the information like a computer. You're taking in information, you're looking at patterns, you're crunching data, but you are not assigning emotion, you're not putting values on it, you're not being judgmental, you're just watching and learning. You're gathering information. So self-observation is one. Number two is self-reflection, and that's where we turn the lens in, and we try to understand what's going on, on the inside. You know, why did I react the way that I did for that? Why am I thinking those thoughts? Is this actually me, or is this something societally that's been laid on top or from social media, or from the media itself, or from my parents? Because we very rarely have that absolute core of who we are without a whole bunch of layers on top of it. You know, it's just we as humans are complex, and that's what happens. So after self-reflection comes self-awareness, and this is where you turn the lens outward and see where these things are affecting the world and how they're affecting the world. You know, it when I blew up at that person, because I actually felt I didn't get my work done, what actually happened out in the world? And then how did those ripples go out and come back? You know, because ripples, they don't just go out, they come back. So, you know, understanding your place in the world through this idea of, of, of self-awareness, which then leads to self-empathy, and that understanding and connection through perspective taking, because you've taken the inside perspective, you've taken the outside perspective, you understand, or try to understand, you know better, how your place is in the world, how you fit. And now you can say, you know, self-empathy would say, I really need to give myself some self-compassion, which is, you know, an understanding that maybe in that place I was doing the best I could with the tools I had at the time. Or maybe self-empathy would say, you know, I understand what I did, but I really maybe should try to, you know, first forgive myself and then ask for forgiveness from this other person, or whatever it is, you know, but it's an understanding and connection through perspective taking, and that's kind of how you can get there. But it is. It isn't that easy. It is, you know, stopping and thinking and going over it, and, oh, yeah, I should have done that. And what about this? And, and, I mean, the thing is, if you ever feel any kind of judgment creeping in, empathy and judgment cannot exist in the same space. Period. Ever. So, if you feel any judgment coming in, either for yourself or for someone else, you're not feeling empathy. And that's when you know that you need to stay take a step back into critical not caring. So yeah, that's the long and the short of it.
Kim Meninger
That is a really, I,I love that, that statement that you just made about empathy and judgment not being able to coexist, because I think that's a good check on where we are with ourselves. And I'm always looking for what are those early signals that we can use to tune into how we're feeling, how we're talking to ourselves. And I think that that's a really good one to, you know, get more aware of as you're talking about it, and observing yourself and just really understanding how you show up in different situations.
Dr. Melissa Robinson-Winemiller
Yeah, well, and the more you become aware, the more you realize how much it's come up without you even knowing it. Yeah, because, you know, we do tend to be very judged. It's part of it's like you were saying, it's part of our neurobiology. You want to be able to judge a situation so that, oh, if I walk into the cave with the saber-tooth tiger, that's probably a bad idea. He's a bad guy. I'm going to stay away. But in the modern world, unfortunately, we have all these thoughts iteratively all the time, and we don't even realize it's happening. Yeah? So you know, the more you can become aware and observe what's going on, the more sometimes you go, Oh, I had no idea I was even doing that.
Kim Meninger
Yeah. [Wow.] And I'm glad you pointed out that this is not easy work. I think it's, it's important to be realistic about it, that, that iterative nature of it is so important because thinking about the fact that we've all been on these lifetime journeys with thought patterns and wiring that has been there for a very long time, right? It's not realistic to think that we're going to reset the way we see ourselves and the world overnight, but consistently working on it, I think, is what you’re…
Dr. Melissa Robinson-Winemiller
Yes absolutely. And I think the thing to remember, too, is that whenever you're dealing with these big behavioral things, it's never a yes or no kind of thing. It all exists on a spectrum. You know, human behavior is on a spectrum. So when we're thinking about empathy, you're going to have some on this side that have no empathy. That's going to be your dark triad, Psychopaths, sociopaths, machiavellians and narcissists. But you also have another side. This is dark triad. There's a light triad. There are people that that are show such huge amounts of empathy, and there's, there's a little different criteria that goes into it, but you know, the bell curve, most of us land in the middle. So even if you can't raise your empathy all the way up to the light triad, can you raise it by 5% can you work on that as a skill? Because part of empathy is a skill, and get just a little better or a little more. I mean, if we could raise the empathy on this planet by 5% it would be a noticeable difference. It doesn't have to suddenly be Nirvana and puppies and rainbows. It could just be 5%.
Kim Meninger
Yeah, that's a really important point too. I'm curious too, because I worry that our worlds is not adequately structured for the kind of self-reflection that we're talking about. I just feel like we are so busy and we're so hyper stimulated and we're so I mean, I took my kids shopping this weekend for their Halloween costumes, and I was just so discouraged by the amount of anger in the drivers around me, like just people, their first response was to just shout and, you know, use inappropriate hand gestures and all kinds of stuff with when you're trying to merge in. And I'm just thinking everybody's so on edge, everybody's so angry and so reactive, and it feels like there's this need for us to all slow down and be more thoughtful, but I worry that that space isn't there, and, and what do we do to kind of create more space for ourselves, given that the world isn't going to help us out there?
Dr. Melissa Robinson-Winemiller
Oh, the world is absolutely not going to help us out. Yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right, and we could. That's a whole other conversation, that'll take about six hours. But, you know, it's, it's like Gandhi said, right, be the change you want to see in the world. So if you want to carve out that time, then you have to carve it out. You have to say, All right, I'm going to take this time, and if this person all of a sudden goes bananas, I have to just understand. Maybe their mother just died. I mean, we've heard this before. Maybe there's something going maybe they're about to lose their paycheck because of the government shutdown. Maybe, who knows, but that's them. The only thing I can control is me. So I'm going to control me in the way that I want to be. See, you know, don't let a temporary person create a permanent problem.
Kim Meninger
That's a really powerful thing too. I think that's really important, because one of the things too, that I think about is just those temporary people can consume so much of our energy. And then you talked about the ripples, right? So if I get really emotionally invested in a very, very external, non-important situation, and then I carry that with me, how does that affect the way I show up, to my children, to my colleagues, to my partner, right? All of that, and what, what's the ultimate effect of that, right?
Dr. Melissa Robinson-Winemiller
And it does come back. Because, I mean, how does that affect your children and your partner, which in turn, then how they treat you? Ripples go back and forth. So if you put that out, that's what's going to come back, one way or the other. On the other hand, if you're putting out that, okay? I'm going to use more empathy for myself. I'm going to use more empathy in the world. At the very least, I'm going to try to understand that whatever this person is doing has nothing to do with me and I can't control it. Then how does that ripple out to your kids and your partner, which in turn, ripples back to you? You're making an impact just by showing up.
Kim Meninger
Yes, yes. And I think one thing that I am thinking about personally right now, because I will be honest, I didn't behave as one of those situations over the weekend, right? But is, I think going back to your point about it being iterative is also being like, showing ourselves grace in the learning process too. Like, I am really, really committed to doing better, but I have slip-ups, and I think it's really important to not go into that. Like, I failed. There's no point in trying, right?
Dr. Melissa Robinson-Winemiller
Because that's self-empathy, my perspective, in the moment, I had this come at me, and I broke. And you know what? I'm a human being. I'm just doing the best I can. I let it get to me next time I won't, yeah, or maybe next time I will, but I'll keep trying,
Kim Meninger
Yes, and I think that's the really important piece, is keep trying too. Yeah. And I'm curious if you have thoughts on how to have this conversation with others like I think there is a way in which we all are trying to do a lot of work on our own. But as we've talked about so, much of this is a universal challenge, and so I wonder if you have thoughts on just extending this conversation to other people, like I always try to look for where does the collective opportunity lie? Because rather than each of us trying to do this in our own little silos. How do we work together to try to tackle this?
Dr. Melissa Robinson-Winemiller
Yeah, so I think you're coming back to perspective-taking again. So if you're having, you know, issues with someone else, and you want to be able to bring this conversation to the table, or even if you're not, I mean, that's the thing people forget about empathy too. It's not always the deep, dark stuff. We pull it out like a first aid kit, but it also is when things are happy, when you're in a room and someone got engaged and you feel that, ha, you know, the whole room, that kind of thing. So at any point, you're still understanding, connecting through perspective, taking, not just when things are deep, dark and heavy. So there's no reason you can't, you know, as you're talking to this person, say, look, tell me what it is to be you. Can you explain to me, if you don't want to tell me how that feels, that's fine, but can you explain your thought process? Can you explain to me, maybe what went into this? Not because I want to judge you, I don't want to pick it apart, but I want to understand where you're coming from. Can you help me understand where you're coming from, you know, because no one's going to understand their perspective better than they are. And if you actually take that time to reach out and connect, one of the beautiful things about empathy is it actually works in both directions. So if you're trying to reach out and understand and connect, there are going to be a lot more likely to reciprocate that.
Kim Meninger
I love that too. That goes back to being the change you want to be, right, because it's so easy to just get judgy, or, you know, to, to engage in conflict situations, in particular, in really unproductive ways. And I think that a lot of it comes down to modeling behavior. Because I think about this as a parent too, is this is learned. You mentioned that before, too, that empathy is a skill, and there are obviously people whose brains work differently. You talked about the dark triad, right? Like we could have a whole separate conversation about those people. But for the part. I think for the most part, I think like the when we talk about the bell curve, the average person has the capacity for empathy, but they may not be using that muscle on a regular basis too, right? So even modeling as a leader to your team, modeling it as a parent to your children, I think there's a lot to what you're saying.
Dr. Melissa Robinson-Winemiller
Yeah, and not being upset if you don't feel it's perfect, because you're modeling that as well, that I'm not perfect. I am not perfect, but I'm trying, you know, I'm not going to get weird if you don't get 100% just, let's, let's just keep trying together, because the worst that can happen is still better than what's already happening.
Kim Meninger
Yes, that's exactly right. And it's funny, because I have this, we have this practice at home of using conversation cards to get because I have boys that are 15 and 10 and [oh, wow,] yep. My 10-year-old is really chatty right now, but my 15-year-old is kind of like, yep, nope, you know, Good, fine, right? Like getting him to speak up at all is, is a struggle, and so we use these conversation cards, and it almost gamifies our conversation, like he leans into it, because it feels more like a game to him, as opposed to like a com. If I asked the I asked the same question without the card, different response, but it's yeah, it stimulated a lot of really interesting conversation recently, where he was saying to me that something that I'd put into his lunch in preschool every day he didn't like, and that he was like, you know, finding ways to eat around and all the stuff. And I was like, Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. I had no idea. I thought, because you ate it every day, that you liked it and that you wait like but I was really happy that it came up, because it gave me a chance to kind of, it's the perspective taking that you're talking about, talking about, right? It's like, give him my perspective on what I was trying to do understand his perspective. And I think that that's, it's little things like that that can go a really long way, because who knows if he would have ended up in this therapist couch 20 years from now, talking about the fact that I gave him this really gross snack every day.
Dr. Melissa Robinson-Winemiller
Well, yeah, and you nailed it. I mean, it is perspective taking, and it's, it's both ways. I mean, you explained your perspective, you know, where I said, you know, can you explain your perspective? That's exactly what you did. My perspective was that you liked it. I didn't know any better because you didn't say anything, and his perspective was, well, yeah, I didn't like it, but I didn't actually speak up. So, you know, you both were able to find middle ground there because you were looking at it from the viewpoint of the other.
Kim Meninger
Yeah. So it's such a silly example, but it feels really appropriate to what we're talking about right now. Because I think, like you said, it doesn't have to be in the high-conflict moments either. I think even just having I think about in the context of work too. I love your Can you help me understand question? Because it's so easy for us to make assumptions about each other's motivations and behaviors, as opposed to just asking, Hey, can you help me understand this?
Dr. Melissa Robinson-Winemiller
Yeah, well, and I think too, I mean in terms of practice, right? You practice on the easy stuff so that when you get to the hard stuff, it's easier. So if you're already practicing on the easy stuff and creating that connection and understanding and perspective taking, then when you get to the hard stuff, those tools are already in place.
Kim Meninger
Yes, yes, that's a great point, too. We, and I often talk about that as you know you're, you're building those muscles so that when the hard stuff happens. Like, you said, you're already strong enough to handle it, so that's [Yeah, good point, yeah.] Oh my gosh. I am so fascinated by this conversation and your work, Melissa, I'm so grateful that you're doing it. I'm sorry that you got here the way you got here, but I think like what you've done with your experience and the way that you have transformed it into this very important work is really inspiring.
Dr. Melissa Robinson-Winemiller
Thank you, and that, that means the world to me. Because really, I just, I just want to be out there making an impact, one person at a time, one heart at a time. So if I can do that, if I can change a life, then it was worth it.
Kim Meninger
Speaking of changing lives, for people who are listening and want more of you, especially, you mentioned your, your TEDx talk, any other resources that you're willing to share, where can people find you?
Dr. Melissa Robinson-Winemiller
Yeah, absolutely. So I actually just got my first book out this past July 15. It's called The Empathic Leader. How EQ, via empathy, transforms leadership for better, profit, productivity and innovation. And even though it is a leadership book, I mean, in at the end of the day, we have to be leaders of one. So it's not like it's for CEOs or nobody. I think there's stuff in there that's good for everybody, and that's on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. And you know the usuals. Or you can find me at my website, which is EQ, via, which is via, as in Victor-I-A empathy dot com, and there's a link to my book. There's, I'm going to be putting up some stuff from the TEDx. There's a newsletter, there's some stuff there. And then you can catch me on social media, LinkedIn, Instagram, Tiktok, wherever.
Kim Meninger
Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Melissa. I'll make sure that the links are in the show notes for anybody who's interested. And thank you again for what you're doing and for being here today.
Dr. Melissa Robinson-Winemiller
It was my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me, Kim.