Sympathy and Understanding Grow in the Trenches

Albeit years later, I remember seeing Granny’s black eyes like it was yesterday. I’m a fixer, sympathy has never really been something I’ve done well with. That said, I’ll let you guess at the emotions I was flooded with. Unless I’ve missed one unintentionally, we’ve looked at all eleven of Napoleon Hill’s leadership attributes as I’ve challenged you with Making the Best of YOUR Bad Situations. His first (unwavering courage) and third (keen sense of justice) were pressing me to take action, but leaning into the second is exactly what prevented me from doing anything in the moment that would have kept me from doing anything to truly fix the situation; I needed to do everything in my power to maintain self-control! 

Earlier in this process, I called specific attention to the stark difference between sympathy and empathy. Here’s what I pulled from a Google search back then as a reminder: “Sympathy is feeling concern or compassion for someone's hardship. Empathy is the ability to truly understand and feel what another person is experiencing from their perspective.” With this being the grandmother who had played such a key role throughout my life, concern and compassion were indeed what I was feeling - both of which were pushing me to fix something. Everything I wanted to do in that moment would have only landed me in a fix. 

Caregiving conflicts and the defense of vulnerable people often feel like thankless, high-stakes risks that invite institutional pushback or personal isolation, but when rooted in prior lessons of sympathy, justice, and full responsibility, they forge unshakeable relational power and cooperative influence. Making the best of these situations isn’t about winning every confrontation with a system—it’s about using moral advocacy as soil for deeper empathy and influence that compounds far beyond any single facility or blacklisting.

We’ll get to fallout soon enough; that’s more that I can build out here without veering off this emphasis of how sympathy and understanding grow in the trenches. Sympathy isn’t pity—it’s the disciplined choice to understand another’s pain and act on it even when the cost is high. Sometimes, the initial cost is maintaining the self-control necessary to avoid taking decisive action that leads to unintended consequences (like going to jail). The true test for me in that situation was maintaining composure and working through every option we had at our disposal to systematically address and document the issues, identify resolutions the staff could take immediately to provide the care Granny needed, all while digging into every option we could find for removing them from the situation.

While there were indeed regulations dictating the care and coverage they were supposed to be providing, we still needed their cooperation (Hill’s eleventh leadership attribute) - at least until we found another option. Gaining that cooperative effort was only going to happen by displaying every bit of pleasing personality (the seventh leadership attribute) I could muster. And I did that as well as I knew how, but certainly not as well as I could have. We’ll look at a few steps we took in that process next, even without a title or authority to enforce compliance. My challenge for you now is to consider a conflict you’ve listed to this point. Think specifically about how the sympathy and understanding attributes apply. What seed of greater relational influence might (still) be hidden? What can you do to begin nurturing that seed?