Apathy vs Empathy - Benny Hanaphy

we're going to talk about apathy, I have to really focus on that word because we don't pronounce our TH is very well, right, Eva. If we were back home, we would say apathetic, which is good because we don't teach maths, so we like, one half, one third, oh wait, we can't do that right. We have to be careful on spelling apathetic, okay? Anybody know what apathetic means? Silence like my English comp one class. I don't care what it means, there we go, we'll go at that one. Okay, but spelling is really important, right? And I do tell this to my English comp class, it is important because one letter can change the context of everything that you're talking about, right? This is Songfest 2006. This is the picture that didn't show up, it's just a cover here. The one time I get to embarrass him, look how jack the is, and then you got the big pastey ganglige, I would say, I'm in a cowboy hat. So be careful with your spelling. As a coach, I receive a lot of emails from potential recruits, and we rely too much on spell check, but spell check will not tell you that a word is spelled incorrectly, even if it's our context, so a lot of times I receive, hey, cow chanifi, right? There's a big difference between a couch and a coach, so please be careful with that. All right, how do we become apathetic? So what I want to talk about today, I'm not necessarily trying to be fully qualified for, and a lot of things that we do talk about could range from different issues that we're all facing. Everybody's facing different challenges, so when it says that we don't care, that's what apathy means, that we don't care, we actually do care, but we're not willing to show it, because we've been hurt in some way, whether it's fear, rejection, some of those things, so let's go through a few of those briefly. So apathy means not caring or dissociating from like, so you separate, you disconnect, okay, from problems, loved ones, et cetera, so a lot of times we encounter problems, and there's different ways to handle conflict, and when you don't want to handle them a lot of times, we avoid, we run away, pretend like they're not there, so fear, so it's either being rejected or the fear of it, no human being likes to be rejected, right? Ask any fellow on Valentine's Day, you know that, right? But even the fear of being rejected, you don't want to look weak to your peers or to your friends, failure, so a lot of times when we encounter failure, we have two choices, right? We learn from it, we reapply ourselves, but a lot of times we try to run away from it, because we don't want to fail again, we don't want to endure that feeling again, so we dissociate, and we don't try again. Escaping from conflict, so a lot of times there is a conflict, and a lot of us, we don't feel equipped to deal with that conflict, but we don't have the correct relationship with somebody, and we feel like, I don't know how to adjust this, or to deal with it, and so we run away from it, we pretend like it doesn't exist. This one's a big thing for us over stimulation, and this is young people and grown-ups, I like, so lack of time to process, we're always listening to music, we're always scrolling, we're always playing video games, watching TV, there's a million things going on, our brain struggles to catch up, because we don't like quiet time, because quiet time means that we have to connect with our brain and our thoughts, and so we don't like to do that. And then, again, I'm not qualified to talk about some of these things, but life happens, things are tough, we have endured some sort of a trauma, which causes dissociation and understandably so. So, science and symptoms, or endless scrolling, you see us doing it all the time, and people do it because they get overwhelmed, they get busy, again, there's some sort of fear, rejection, failure, whatever it is, and so I want to zone out, I want to escape from reality, so I keep scrolling. Well, I can guarantee you everyone that scrolls for an hour or two and you realize what time it is, and you're like, "Wow, I don't feel any better, I got my dopamine cakes, but it didn't actually do anything for me, and now I'm not productive, and I'm too old behind what I should have done." So, disconnection with friends and family, so if we don't feel like we're being productive, or something like that, we will disconnect, because we want to have this perfect image, if you look at stuff that's posted on social media, logically we know that what's on social media is not real, but we have this thing in our brain of like, "Oh wow, their life is perfect," so I don't want to look imperfect to them, so we tend to disconnect when we don't feel like we can measure up. The feeling of napping fully here, okay, those of you that are professors, when you talk more than 20 minutes in your lecture, after that, they're physically there, they're not there, right? The human brain can only focus for so long, but sometimes when life is hard, you're physically here, but you're mentally somewhere else, you're in the future, you're in the past, which you're not here in the present. And then, feeling the need to avoid conflict, okay, this is something that we're all guilty of, sometimes we don't want to deal with it, so we avoid, and sometimes when you avoid, it's the right thing to do, and sometimes when you avoid, it's the worst thing to do. And this one goes along with that, right, you know, when there's something wrong with your car, and you don't have any money, you put a little sticker over the check engine light, you hear that ticking noise, you turn up the music, it's not there anymore, right, so we turn up the volume on our distractions to avoid processing information, so music, TV, games, social media, anything we can do to not process that, to deal with the difficult situation. So essentially, we become a passenger in our own lives, and that's really tough, you know, because we only get so many days on this, on this Earth, so let's not waste them, but it can be really difficult sometimes to feel like you're in control of the direction of your own life. So how do we combat this? So the first thing you're going to need to do, it's very hard to connect to other people if you can't connect with yourself. If you can't process your own thoughts, your own emotions, your own feelings, it's very difficult to connect with other people, so however you want to do it, everybody's slightly different, some people like to journal, some people like to do yoga, I have to do yoga now, I sound like a ball of rice crispy is going to wake up in the morning, so exercise, meditation, prayer, whatever you need to do, this sounds easy, but 10 to 15 minutes of quiet time is a real challenge for people, right? We don't like to be quiet anymore, we have to have something going on because we don't like to process those thoughts, and if you have tenetists, I don't know what that is, I hate quiet time because if it's really quiet, I just hear in my ear all the time, yeah, it's genetic, thanks dad. Reconnect with friends and family, so reach now for help, have a meaning for conversations, I talked to you last semester about quality time, those quality conversations, you can't fake those, you either have it or you don't have it, and people know when you're fully present in that conversation and you're really listening, active listening, and when you're not, so if you're with somebody, have that meaning for conversation, put the devices down, actually hear each other and be there for each other, that can really, really help. Different ways to approach conflicts, so there's way more ways to approach conflicts than avoid, and they're all going to work in different ways, so you've got compromise where we both kind of give a little bit and we both kind of win, we have the mutual solutions where it's going to be perfect for both of us, which doesn't always happen, then you've got my way, I'm going to sort it out for me, but I don't care about this relationship, and then you've got their way, I'm going to give in to you and you're going to get your way, I'm not saying all of those are correct in every situation, but there are different ways to solve a conflict rather than just avoid. And then don't let others dictate our self-worth and happiness, so easy to read and so hard to do, especially online. A lot of times we're putting stuff up there, pictures and stuff, and all of a sudden I didn't get enough likes, I didn't get enough shares, I'm going to take it down. We shouldn't let people determine our self-esteem and our self-worth, but we do it on a daily basis, and it's tough, when we're so accessible 24/7. And then adding empathy, so empathy is the opposite of empathy, empathy is when you can put yourself in somebody's shoes, feel how they feel. Okay, so a couple of the quotes about that, you know, empathy, again, is the ability to share feelings of others and understand their point of view. The highest expression of empathy is accepting and nonjudgmental, so we don't have to share it to those beliefs, but we can definitely empathize with them, we don't have to agree, but you can definitely hear them, you can definitely listen. Again, can you feel how they feel? So here at York, when I was a player, this felt like a place where you're going to succeed as a human being, you're not just a player or a student or a performer, they want you to succeed as a human, and that's really good because we have great days and we have terrible days, and you want someone to be there for you regardless, whether you had the best game of your life or you didn't. So play an active role in it, you have to get involved. If you're sitting in your room, playing video games, scrolling on your phone, it's very hard for people to reach you, it has to be, you know, 50/50 there. Don't be a passenger, but you have to also, you know, don't be passive here on campus. You'll have the best time here by being engaged, by getting out to different sporting events, different performances, getting involved in different clubs and events on campus, that's going to help out a lot. And then be a voice for goodness, like life is tough, regardless of how old you are, life is tough, everybody's fighting a buckle that you can see. So it costs nothing to be nice, maybe we should be kind, people are going to different struggles, so let's offer sincere, authentic, you know, advice, support. That's going to go a long way to making their experience a really valuable one. Thanks so much for your time.