3 Ways empathy will help futureproof your copywriting career.

The third domain of Emotional Intelligence is Social Awareness.

And a big part of Social Awareness is feeling empathy for others.

We feel empathy when we open our ears and our hearts, and walk in the shoes of other people. We feel what they feel.

This is easier said than done.

When it comes to truly understanding the feelings of someone close to us, or just like us, we can score reasonably well. On a good day!

But when faced with feeling empathy for the feelings or beliefs of people who are not like us, or maybe even disagree with us, it’s a whole lot harder.

But it’s worth the effort.

However hard it might be, working on your ability to feel empathy for others will reward you big time in your career as a writer.

Here are three ways empathy will help you…

Use empathy to differentiate your writing from AI-generated outputs.

There are many things that ChatGPT and other AI writing tools can do really well.

But empathy isn’t one of them.

An AI can’t experience emotion first-hand. It just learns about it from data. It reads love poems and tags them as being an expression of love. But it can’t feel love, or be in love.

Empathy is a human attribute.

As a result, when we infuse our copy and content with empathy, we immediately separate our writing from anything that can be done by AI.

This is allows us, as human writers, to differentiate ourselves, and our work.

In the future, both near and far, this unique difference will set us apart from the machines, and enable us to present ourselves as being a lot more valuable.

Use empathy to improve your copy by almost every metric.

Writing with empathy isn’t just about being warm and cuddly.

It’s about dramatically improving the performance of your copy and content.

Ask any experienced copywriter and she’ll tell you that emotion is the principal driver of sales copy.  The facts are fine, but its emotion that makes people reach for their credit cards.

And writing with a high level of emotional intelligence achieves more than just closing more sales in the short term. It also connects more deeply with readers, builds trust, and secures long-term relationships with customers who become fans and advocates.

Put simply, being an emotional intelligent writer makes you a much better writer. And your clients will notice.

More specifically, your clients will notice that your work outperforms the output from tools like ChatGPT.

Use empathy to deepen relationships with your clients and network.

A valuable side-benefit of increasing your emotional intelligence is that it helps you build much deeper and long-lasting relationships with your clients.

When you empathize with your clients, and see things through their eyes, you’ll become a favored supplier.

When you feel no empathy, miss the signals, and think a client is just being a pain when they ask for some revisions, maybe you should pause.

If you listen and watch for the right clues, you might realize that your contact person is being given a hard time by her own boss. She’s not being a pain, she’s simply feeling frustrated by her own situation.

Show here a little empathy and you’ll make a friend for life. When other writers are let go, passed over, or replaced by AI, she’ll always come back to you… because you showed empathy at a time that really mattered.

It’s the same when building your professional network through platforms like LinkedIn. Listen carefully, show empathy and be there for people. The result will be a much larger and more robust network.

Summing up…

The secret here isn’t to ignore tools like ChatGPT. In fact, you ignore them at your peril.

What you want to do is integrate the productivity advantages of using AI with the deep engagement advantages of being more empathetic.

Increased empathy will help you in how you write, and in how you interact with your clients, prospects, and other people in your network.

The future belongs to writers and copywriters who combine AI and Emotional Intelligence.

This is the topic and promise of my new course, Futureproof Copywriting.