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Most empath-leaders aren't suffering from a lack of empathy. They're suffering from too much of it, deployed without a dial (an empathostat?).

If you've ever come home from work still awashed in a feeling that didn't belong to you (a patient's grief, a colleague's fear, a team's anxiety), you already know what I'm talking about. The feeling isn't yours. (I mean... it is, but it isn't) You imported it. And the import was costly enough that, by the time you sat down on the couch, you didn't have much left for the people who actually live in your house.

This isn't a soft problem. It's an operational one. And, as such, it has an operational fix.

Empathy as a dial, not a switch

For years, I thought my options were two: (1) feel everything, or (2) close down. Caring all the way, or going cold. Both failure modes, imo. There's a third option, though.

That third option is standby.

Empathy isn't a binary. It's not on or off. It's more like a dial. 

And off is its own kind of failure. Whe...

When I walk on stage and the room is flat (especially after lunch or after a dense technical session) I run a quick exercise before I begin.

It takes thirty seconds. Afterwards, people approach me about it almost as much as they approach me about something in the keynote itself.

Here's the exercise.

I ask the audience to first notice how they feel right now. Their mood. Their energy. Just take note of where they are.

Then:

Shoulders back. Deep breath in. Let it out. Smile - not like you have gas, a real one. Now turn to the person next to you and say, out loud: "I'm glad you're here."

Within seconds, the room is laughing, talking, alive. I then ask, "How do you feel now?"

They feel it. Energy, mood, engagement... all of it has moved in under a minute. Not because of me. Because of what they just did to themselves.

This is one example of what state management can look like in practice. It's small. It's repeatable. It's accessible wherever you are.

There are at least five things...

Most of the people I coach who feel like they're falling behind at work are not falling behind. They're being responsive to the wrong thing.

They are deeply, admirably, exhaustingly responsive to their inbox. They are intermittently responsive to their calendar. They are barely responsive to the actual people on the other end of all of it.

This is one of the more painful diagnoses to deliver, because the person doing it feels like they're working harder than anyone else they know. And they are. They're just working in the wrong dimension.

Here is the distinction that, in my experience, untangles most of it.

Responding and being responsive are not the same thing.

Responding is the act of getting an answer back to someone. Responsive is the quality of having actually received what they sent.

A colleague sends you a question. You fire back a one-word answer in ninety seconds. You responded. Whether or not you were responsive is a separate question... and the honest answer is usually...

Have you ever worked for someone who always took the credit?

You remember how it felt.

You probably remember how long you stayed.

Now think about the opposite — a boss, a colleague, a teacher, a coach who acknowledged you specifically, in front of people who mattered, when you weren't even in the room. That memory is sharper, isn't it? More durable. You can probably name the person. You can probably name the project.

Credit is one of the most underrated forces in leadership, and almost no one teaches it well.

So let's teach it well.

The principle: credit is infinitely divisible

Most leaders treat credit like money. There's a fixed amount of it. If I give you some, mine decreases. If I lift you up in front of the room, my standing diminishes.

That model is wrong.

Credit is non-rivalrous. You can give it to ten people who genuinely contributed and your share doesn't shrink by a single ounce — assuming, and this is the load-bearing assumption, that the credit you give is sincere....

In 1987, Van den Berghe and Mace ran a study most people have never heard of. Two hundred women rated two hundred men on attractiveness... on video. The video recordings were made in advance. There was no scent transfer possible. No shared room. No live contact.

Half the men were wearing cologne when the recording was made.

Half were not.

The ones wearing cologne were rated more attractive.

The cologne never reached the women. So what happened?

The cologne worked on the men.

Their bodies registered the scent. Posture shifted. Voice settled. Face softened. The camera picked up the difference and carried it through to the screen the rater was watching, days or weeks later.

Your state shows up on camera before you do.

That is the lesson, and it is bigger than cologne.

Why state matters more than appearance on camera

We tend to think of "looking good on video" as a problem of lighting, framing, wardrobe, and posture. Those things matter, but they are downstream variables. The ups...

For nine years, I ran a cardiac surgery unit. Before and after surgery, I cared for hundreds of patients facing the most consequential moments of their lives. All of them were confronting their mortality in one way or another.

They taught me something I didn't expect.

In the night before surgery - alone in the hospital room, or alone at home with their thoughts - people stripped away everything inessential. No performance. No professional self-presentation. Just what was actually on their mind.

And what was on their mind was almost identical, across every demographic.

Age, gender, race, religion, education, income — none of it predicted the content.

Every patient was thinking about the same three things:

God. Family. How they treated other people.

It is that third one that became, eventually, the reason I do the work I now do.

People at the edge of their lives reflect on their interactions. The small ones, often more than the big ones. The cashier they were short with. The coll...

We carry two proverbs that contradict each other.

Out of sight, out of mind.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Most of the time, we just pick the one that's useful in the moment. The truth is, both are real... and which one applies to you, when you leave a room or a job or a life chapter, isn't decided by time. It's decided by how you showed up while you were there.

I learned this twice in a month.

The first lesson came in an email. The subject line was nothing memorable. The first line stopped me in my chair.

"Dear Dr. Tori, you don't know who I am. Eight years ago, I was sitting in the corner of a room when you gave a talk at a lunch and learn."

She went on to tell me, in specific detail, what that talk had meant to her in the eight years since. Every few weeks, she said, something from it surfaces.

I remembered the talk. Forty people, fluorescent lighting, the kind of midday session you do without expecting much.

I had no idea she was in the room.

The second lesson came...

Most behavior change advice gives you a system. A morning routine. A 30-day challenge. An app. A tracker. A coach.

I'm going to tell you something smaller... and far more useful.

Almost every behavior change failure I've had in my life started in exactly the same place.

Not with a giving-up moment.

With a deal.

"I'll skip just this one walk."

"I'll start the diet after the trip."

"I had a long day. I deserve this."

The deal sounds reasonable. It sounds generous. It sounds like something a balanced, non-rigid person would say to themselves.

It is none of those things.

It is a concession. And the moment you make one, your resistance to the next one drops.

There's a phrase from logic called the slippery slope fallacy - the idea that one small thing will inevitably lead to a much bigger thing, used to dismiss any argument someone doesn't like. Skeptics throw it around constantly.

With behaviors, the slope is not a fallacy. It is documented in the literature. Small concessions s...

There's a board game called Snake Oil.

You get a hand of cards with random nouns on them. Friend. Blanket. Hammer. Telescope. Pillow. Mirror.

Each round, one person becomes the buyer — they get a character card. A diva. A zombie. A kindergartner. A pregnant woman. A ninja. A samurai.

Everyone else combines two of their nouns into a product and pitches it to the buyer. The best pitch wins.

My kids won't play it with me anymore. They said it wasn't fair. I do this for a living.

So I made a deal: I'd teach them one persuasion pattern before each round, then we'd play. Then I'd teach another. Then we'd play again.

That's how the Snake Oil workshop was born.

I now run it for organizations. Hospitals, law firms, leadership cohorts, risk management teams. It is one of the funniest two hours I get to spend in my work. But the laughter is not the point.

The point is this.

The First Round Is Already Astonishing

The first time I ran Snake Oil with adults - before I taught them a single ...

"You're a phenomenal public speaker. But you're even better at the Q&A afterwards." (Because I spend more time on preparing for the audience than I do on preparing the talk)

I'm a physician and a hypnotherapist. I teach at Georgetown. I run a company called Influence Everywhere. Most of what I do for a living is help people who do good in the world get better at moving others... through influence, communication and connection.

I do a ton of public speaking. And before I get in front of those rooms, I run five AI prompts.

Here they are:

1. Build me a glossary of the language this audience uses.

I ask a generative AI tool for 70 to 75 terms - words, phrases, and acronyms - with brief definitions. Even when I think I know an audience, I find distinctions I would have missed. (I went into a talk for palliative care providers thinking I understood the spectrum of palliative care. I did not.) Misusing a word an audience uses costs more rapport than not using it at all.

2. List the curr...