‘3 minutes with’ is our initiative to support positive communications, gain an insight into local businesses, learn from their experience and take away their top tips. This month, we hear from Gabriella Fryer, Marketing & Communications Manager at the Herefordshire and Worcestershire Chamber of Commerce. “Your empathy is your biggest and most powerful strength, don’t…
By Ruby Edwards2 min read
‘3 minutes with’ is our initiative to support positive communications, gain an insight into local businesses, learn from their experience and take away their top tips. This month, we hear from Gabriella Fryer, Marketing & Communications Manager at the Herefordshire and Worcestershire Chamber of Commerce.
“Your empathy is your biggest and most powerful strength, don’t let a ruthless business dampen it.”
I’m a through and through empath. I never thought it was a strength growing up, the ability to connect and really ‘feel’ with others. So often it has been defined inadvertently as a weakness, with the word ‘over-sensitive’ thrown around in business meetings and board rooms. In the early years of my career I was often made to feel that to be successful I’d need to toughen up. Society also tell us this. Take the movies for example, the go-getter successful lead or business are not generally portrayed as those who are highly sensitive.
But this piece of advice really stuck with me, and as I have grown older and progressed in my career and specialism, I have hung onto the importance that surrounds it.
In marketing, empathy is everything. As marketers we aim to appeal to someone based on a want, need, fear, curiosity and a million other emotions. We have to connect with someone without ever meeting them, and invoke an emotion. That makes us not only very intuitive but very powerful. People are naturally drawn to empaths, so they make great leaders and listeners. Again, within marketing, these people are essential, and in fact, anywhere in your business.
“Empathy should be embedded into the entire organization,” writes Belinda Parmar in the Harvard Business Review. “There is nothing soft about it. It is a hard skill that should be required from the board-room to the shop floor.”
We all have strengths and weaknesses. And many of us have strengths that others will define as a weakness. All of our traits have a place if embraced and harnessed in the right areas. It’s all about understanding and empathy.
My top tips are:
- Empathy is a sustainability tool that can help us create a far better environment in which to live and work. It is both something we can learn how to use and a resource that we can use to learn
- Discover and uncover the type of people who make up your team
- Harness your empaths within your team, they are the connectors and the ones who can feel your customers desires.
About working with us, Gabriella says:
Now more than ever, PR and effective communications are the driving force for businesses needing to secure market share, credibility and reputability. Ruby is an exceptional communicator with a deep understanding of varying business types, needs and challenges and can effortlessly transform ideas into compelling story telling.
More Testimonials can be found here.
To join in with our 3 minutes with initiative, please email: ruby@webdevserver.uk.
