The Capacity for Empathy: Starting from Listening, Catching the Other Person's Soul

Full text transcript

Spotify :

EP8 CLEC James Talks: The Capacity for Empathy: Starting from Listening, Catching the Other Person's Soul 2026-08-13

Hello everyone, today is episode 8 of CLEC James Talks.

Yesterday we talked about the capacity to love; today let us talk about the capacity for empathy.

1. Listening Absorbs Nourishment; Speaking Is Only Output

For a person capable of empathy, over time their own energy grows stronger and stronger. Because every time you communicate with someone, you have to listen very carefully to what they say, and listen with your heart. In that process you raise your own ability and energy, and that is a very rare opportunity.

Expressing your own opinions, your own ideas, or the things you happen to know, is in fact a relative ignorance, or a relative immaturity.

Yesterday I was chatting with a friend. Of course some relationships have not been handled well, and I said: honestly I am still very immature myself. If there is a relationship you can no longer go back to, the reason you cannot go back is that you were too immature at the time. If we had been as mature back then as we are today, or had what people call an "old soul," then the mistakes we made in the past, or the so-called relationship with no way back, could have been avoided.

2. Read the Soul Between the Lines and Extract the Essence of Others' Experience

Listening calmly to someone speak is a special ability; and hearing another person's heart, experience, and the feelings of their soul is even more the nourishment that feeds our minds.

When someone recounts their experiences and thoughts, they are in fact training our brains. It is like artificial intelligence models training each other and extracting each other's knowledge and abilities. From other people's experience you extract the essence of their life directly.

If you can listen to others with your heart, that is an ability, and it is extremely efficient for seasoning and elevating your own life. Because before the other person speaks to you, they have already condensed and thought it through before saying it. Why would we not carefully absorb this nourishment into our minds? If you keep talking about what you want to talk about, saying what you want to say, or telling others what you know, you are in fact outputting rather than absorbing nourishment.

Once you have faced many people and gained a great deal of experience in empathy, you will have trained yourself into a powerful ability to handle every kind of communication problem.

3. Catch the Feelings First; Only Then Does Advice Mean Anything

We should be very grateful for, and enjoy, "the ability to listen." Every time you listen it is like reading a book. A book you read with your eyes and think about with your mind; but when listening to someone speak, listening carefully, hearing their mood, hearing their soul, that kind of learning is very much worth it.

It is like a large language model in artificial intelligence: you have to feed it a great deal of information and let it learn for itself. There has to be enough information before learning is possible; with no information, trying to create something out of nothing is extremely difficult.

Why is it that some friends, after watching a great many CLEC videos and taking in a great deal of information, begin to be able to make videos and write articles? It is because you absorbed a great deal of nourishment, and all at once there is an energy that wants to come out, and that energy is the right kind. So only by continually absorbing, listening to others, and learning to listen to others and empathize can you begin to truly learn; that is an ability.

The capacity to love: the first step is "the ability to listen," next is "the ability to catch and hold the other person," and then "the ability to catch and hold their feelings and emotions." Once you have these abilities, you will naturally say:

"Right."

"Yes."

"You did great."

"I understand you."

"You are right."

Only with that kind of empathy is there room to keep talking.

Afterwards, if the other person needs your answer, you can start to offer guidance: "Perhaps it could be like this; think it over for yourself..." Do not give them a conclusive answer directly; instead ask them, "Would it work to think of it this way? Have you thought about it like this?" and let them try to find the answer themselves.

4. Conclusion: Empathy Is the Basic Ability That Makes Life Happy

If you have not caught the other person's process and emotions and are in a hurry to hand out an answer, their first reaction will certainly be that you are brushing them off, or that you are merely showing off your own knowledge and ability, wanting to tell them "I understand a lot, I am impressive." Do you think anyone will accept advice like that? Of course not. If no argument breaks out, that is already a mark of the other person's self-restraint.

I am constantly practicing this myself: how, within empathy, to make my answers less sharp and acceptable to the other person. To be accepted, there has to be enough groundwork laid first: understand their predicament and their mood first, and only then talk about how to face the problem.

In pursuit of the best and happiest life, and happiness is a human right, whatever you do, you have to keep the relationship in good shape before you can be happy. To make life happy and nourish our spirit, in the relationships between people, "empathy" is the most basic ability.

That is where we will stop today. See you next time, bye-bye!