Episode 166: Dr. Nicole Price on Learning the Skill of Empathy and Her New Book, Spark the Heart
Return guest Dr. Nicole Price doesn't own a flower shop and isn't a floral designer — but as Vonda puts it, every flower shop would love to have her for a week. The CEO of Lively Paradox and former chemical engineer joins Vonda and Lori to dismantle the biggest myth about empathy: that you're either born with it or you're not. Her argument, and the heart of her new book Spark the Heart: Engineering Empathy in Your Organization, is that empathy is a skill — an intelligence stored in the brain, not the chest — and any leader, however technical or logical, can build it.
How an engineer became the empathy person
Nicole admits she used to define empathy the way most people do: being nice all the time, lowering the bar, letting people get away with things. That's not empathy. The turn came when a philanthropist in her town told her, "I get all of what you're saying intellectually, but I was hoping you would help me get it emotionally." Her first instinct was offense — he'd basically said he didn't care — but she realized he was asking her to help him care. There are two ways to learn empathy, she explains: lived experience (an aging parent, an illness, a child with special needs — things nobody can hand you) or study. And study works, even though most of us assume empathy is a birthright rather than a muscle.
"Fire them the moment you think of it" — and what changed her mind
Lori reads Nicole's own words back to her: she once told auditoriums of cheering HR professionals to fire people the moment the thought crossed their mind. Then Nicole was fired unfairly herself. That lived experience opened her eyes to the leadership side of "performance problems": are we giving people the tools to do their jobs, or are we delegating and dropping support, showing up jealous, and then getting mad at employees? In HR she noticed a pattern — managers reported performance issues, yet the employee had never heard any of it. Either every employee is a terrible listener, or many managers lack the courage to communicate high expectations clearly. And firing doesn't fix it: the next hire simply arrives with a different set of skill gaps.
Empathetic leadership doesn't mean nobody gets fired, either. Nicole's experience now is that by the time a termination would have come, the employee usually knows it isn't working and leaves — and when she has had to follow through, people have thanked her for everything she did along the way. Her coach's bar: if you can sleep at night without second-guessing the decision, you did everything you could.
Empathy vs. sympathy vs. enabling
When Lori worries that empathy can slide into enabling — driving the forgotten homework to school again — Nicole draws the line: feeling sorry for someone is sympathy, which has its place, but what people usually need is empathy: understanding what happened, run through the filter of what you know about life and responsibility. You can fully understand how hard it is to remember everything each morning and still let the consequence land, because building capacity matters more than rescuing. A quick self-test for "affective empathy": if you can watch children smiling — or a heart-wrenching movie scene — with a completely straight face, you probably struggle with it. The cognitive version is practiceable by anyone: recall a time you felt what the other person is feeling, then respond the way you would have appreciated.
Empathy is strength, not softness
To executives who see empathy as weakness, Nicole issues a challenge: try being empathetic for one week and then tell her it doesn't take courage. The easy path is the one engineering school teaches — treat people as interchangeable cogs so production never stops. Empathy means seeing individuals, asking "what happened to this person?" instead of "what's wrong with them?" It's extra work, and it's also what the post-Covid labor market demands: people would rather drive for Uber than be treated as less than human, and you can't fake caring — a "sorry you're sick" opener on a scolding email fools no one. As for "it's not personal, it's just business"? Nicole's research traces that adage to the mafia. People spend 40 hours a week with you. It's very personal.
Practical ways to build the muscle
Nicole's free 14 Days of Empathy runs seven days of reflection followed by seven days of small actions — Lori is doing it and posting the link in the Flower Clique members' forum so shops can do it together. Other tools: listen to one conversation a day with the sole intent of understanding (no solving, no judging); use behavioral interview questions to hear whether candidates seek to understand before enforcing rules; and read fiction — walking through a story in someone else's skin measurably builds empathy for that group. Spark the Heart, out in April, closes with simple practices plus reflection questions built for team book clubs, and Nicole is assembling free resources — classroom curriculum, sermon series, even empathy games — for anyone joining what she calls the empathy revolution. Find her at livelyparadox.com, on Instagram, or on LinkedIn.
Key takeaways
- Empathy is a learnable intelligence, not a personality trait — technical, logical leaders can absolutely build it.
- Before labeling a performance problem, ask whether you've actually communicated expectations and provided support; the next hire just has different gaps.
- Empathy is understanding, sympathy is feeling sorry, enabling is neither — you can understand fully and still hold the standard.
- Practice daily: listen only to understand, and read fiction from perspectives unlike your own.
- Employees want to be a person with a position, not a cog — and they always know when your caring is fake.
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