“For all the bold leaders embracing a more human-centered approach and performing at the highest levels, your choices impact and influence your colleagues, families, and communities, that’s a win for us all.” This is just a small snippet from the dedication of The Empathy Dilemma which is out today! I am so excited to share this book with all of you who have been with me as listeners to this podcast and during this journey. Listen in to find out how you can get your hands on the book, whether one copy or hundreds of copies, and to find out more about how we can all get this book into the hands of a wider audience and spread the hopeful message of empathy to leaders everywhere. I hope you enjoy the book. I hope it is valuable for you and your team. I hope you implement some of the tactics and let me know how it goes! I’d love to hear from you.
To access this episode transcript, please scroll down below.
Key Takeaways:
- Once you embrace empathy and see another person’s point of view, you can’t unsee it.
- If your favorite bookstore does not have The Empathy Dilemma, you can ask them to order it! It is widely available now everywhere books are sold.
- To spark a movement of empathy in the workplace and a new paradigm for culture and work, please rate and review the book on Amazon and give an honest review, whether you thought it was just okay or you thought it was amazing – it will help spread the empathy movement further.
“This book is for those leaders who want to embrace the new paradigm of leadership, but are struggling a little bit. I wanted to provide you some context, but also actionable strategies and tactics to shore up your foundation so that you can be empathetic with your teams while still expecting high performance, accountability, and results.”
— Maria Ross
From Our Partner:
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Connect with Maria:
Get the podcast and book: TheEmpathyEdge.com
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FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
Maria, welcome to the empathy edge podcast, the show that proves why cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. I’m your host, Maria Ross, I’m a speaker, author, mom, facilitator and empathy advocate. And here you’ll meet trailblazing leaders and executives, authors and experts who embrace empathy to achieve radical success. We discuss all facets of empathy, from trends and research to the future of work to how to heal societal divisions and collaborate more effectively. Our goal is to redefine success and prove that empathy isn’t just good for society. It’s great for business.
Hi everyone. It’s Maria here, and it is book launch time. Woo hoo. I don’t have like, a party popper for you or anything like, I don’t know what other noise to make to show you that I’m celebrating that the book, the empathy dilemma, how successful leaders balance performance people and personal boundaries, is now available, and I could not be more thankful to so many people who helped make this book a reality. There is I often say there’s one name on the cover, but you have no idea the cadre of people behind what makes a book come to life. So I hope you will check it out. It’s at the empathy dilemma.com or all your favorite places to buy books. If you want to support a local bookstore and they’re not stocking it, they can order it because it is distributed widely through my publisher’s distributor, so they can order it and you can support an indie bookstore at the same time. Or you can even get it@bookshop.com which supports local indie bookstores as well. Or get it at Amazon, if that’s easier for you, just get your hot little hands on it. There is a paperback available, there’s the Kindle version available, and there’s also the audiobook available. So pick your poison, choose the format that works best for you. I wanted to just talk a little bit in this month’s hot take about a reminder of why I wrote this book and why it’s the follow on to the empathy edge, because I think it’s important for you to know the role that you played in making this book come to life. So when I wrote the empathy edge, that was out of a personal desire to make the world more empathetic and to start in the place where we spend the bulk of our time, which is at work, and I came at it initially from my work around branding and marketing and understanding that empathy is the key to successfully connecting and engaging with the right audience. And then I did a lot of research to add to that around leadership and culture, because I talked about the three concentric circles that you must have empathy exist in in order to be an authentic brand in the market. And it was the work around leadership and culture that really enchanted me, and that I was out speaking about doing workshops, doing keynotes, talking at conferences.
All the things were mostly around that I did a few conferences where I talked about how to create an empathetic brand in a digital world. And I still talk about that in some circles, but the bulk of it was meeting with leaders, with HR leaders, with folks in charge of culture or deib or employee engagement or customer engagement, the folks that really fuel, the people that enable innovation and high performance to exist. And it was from talking to them and hearing from them and doing this podcast Since 2020 that I realized the book that that folks needed was this one that I’m launching now, the empathy dilemma. Because the empathy edge was written for the skeptics. It was written to convince people of the business case and the ROI of empathy. And it accomplished that, and it’s it helped spark a movement, especially, which was accelerated by the pandemic. This book is for the converts. This book is for those of you who said, Yes, I want to be a people centered leader, but Maria, here’s the reality, and here’s where it gets hard, and here’s where I’m having a challenge, and here’s where I’m burning out. And so this book is really for those leaders who want to embrace the new paradigm of leadership, but are struggling a little bit. I wanted to provide you some some context, but also some actionable strategies and tactics that you could use to shore up your foundation and enable you to have a full well to draw from so that you can be empathetic with your teams while still expecting high performance, expecting accountability and expecting results. And if anything you’ve learned here is that I am about both and not either or empathy and high performance. Empathy. Life and ambition, empathy and results.
The good news is it can coexist if you have these five pillars of empathetic and effective empathy in place as a leader. So that’s what the book is going to share with you. That’s what we’ve been talking about the last few months. And I really hope you will check it out and enjoy the advice, and I’d love to hear from you. So please, if you read the book, review it online. First of all, that’s a huge help. The magic number of reviews on Amazon, just FYI is 100 if I can get 100 reviews, the book will show up more in search and be shown to people who really need it. So if we really want to spark a movement of empathy in the workplace and a new paradigm for culture and work, please rate and review the book in Amazon and give an honest review, right your your candid review. If you thought it was MEH, write that it was MEH. If you thought it was great, I would love five stars. But whatever it meant to you, please take that time to just write a few sentences, because it means so much in enabling the book to spread farther faster.
So the other thing you can do is tell your friends and colleagues, and you can also purchase the book in bulk for a discount through my bulk distributor, porch light books, and that link is listed on the empathy dilemma.com so if you’re buying about, you know, more than 10 copies, I highly suggest, actually, I think it’s more than 50. I highly suggest you take advantage of the price discounts if you buy in bulk, and then I also offer discounted speaker fees for folks that order in quantities of more than 250 so if you do that, please reach out and contact me. You can DM me on social, red slice Maria at Instagram. You can DM me through LinkedIn, Maria J Ross. You can email me if you like, or fill out my contact form on my site, but please, if you’re going to order a bulk amount, let me know that you have and we’ll work something out. We’ll do something cool for your team to add on to their learning and help them apply the skills and the tips to their everyday work life. So before we wrap up, I wanted to share something special with you around the book, and that is, I wanted to share the dedication with you because, as I mentioned, there’s, there’s a lot of people to thank, and I don’t have time to read all the acknowledgements. I wish I did, but they are in the book and they’re also in the audiobook, because I had to add more people into the audiobook acknowledgments because the book had already gone to press.
So there’s so many people to thank for this book, and most especially you listeners who gave me lots of feedback, lots of things to think about, and enabled me to figure out what questions needed answering. So thank you. But I do want to read to you the dedication of the book for all the bold leaders embracing a more human, centered approach and performing at the highest levels, your choices impact and influence your colleagues, families and communities, that’s a win for us all, and as ever, for Callum, my everyday empathy practice partner, it is about the consistent attempt, not perfection, as you grow up in this beautiful yet often heartbreaking world. My work is dedicated to helping you and so many others understand how to embrace difference and find connection and how much richer your life will be for it my love that’s for my son. He is the one that sparked this whole foray into finding out how empathy can help us be successful. Because I was so frustrated by the models of leadership I was seeing in the world when he was he was younger, and I thought there have to be leaders and brands winning with empathy and not with unethical behavior or hatred or cruelty or greed. And as you all know, I was delighted to find the research and the data proving that empathy can be a strategic advantage and a competitive advantage, and if that’s the reason someone learns to embrace and practice empathy, I don’t care. I really just want them to do it, because once you embrace empathy, once you see another person’s point of view, you can’t unsee it.
So I don’t really care how someone gets to it, even if they get to it through selfish motives, because they will be transformed from the outside in I hope you enjoy the book. I hope it is valuable for you and your team. I hope you implement some of the tactics and let me know how it goes. Reach out to me again on social or my contact form on my website, again. Don’t forget the empathy dilemma.com. Is where you can find all the links to buy the book, or you can request it from your local bookstore, and they can order it. Don’t forget to contact me if you order a large quantity, because we can do something special together. I can video bomb your Zoom meeting, or we can set up a Q and A with your team, or we can even arrange to do a discounted workshop to help your team embrace the principles and practice how to strengthen their empathy, to boost collaboration, performance, innovation and protect their mental health at the same time, thanks everyone for being here and until next time, remember that cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Take care and be kind.
For more on how to achieve radical success through empathy, visit the empathyedge.com there you can listen to past episodes, access show notes and free resources. Book me for a Keynote or workshop, and sign up for our email list to get new episodes, insights, news and events. Please follow me on Instagram at Red slice. Maria, never forget, empathy is your superpower. Use it to make your work and the world a better place.
