Handle with CARE

Step aside, gratitude, there’s a new wellness buzzword in town: empathy. Research into empathy has increased in recent years, and some workplaces are starting to incorporate it into team-building programmes.

But there’s also concern in certain quarters that empathy may be declining, thanks to – as Barack Obama put it in a 2006 speech – America’s empathy deficit, which “tells us our principal goal in life is to be rich, thin, young, famous, safe and entertained”.

Put simply, empathy is the ability to step into another person’s.