There is an old adage which says that we don't really know how someone feels until we have walked in their shoes. Empathy is not only seeing things from someone else's perspective, it is also recognising, identifying and taking into consideration their feelings.

It is being attuned to another person's emotional state. Empathy is vibrant, engaging rapport with other people.

Why is it that some people are more empathetic than others? What is it that produces real empathy and how important is empathy in our relationships? Some people seem to have no empathy (understanding) of how other people feel. They have been described as "emotionally tone-deaf". They simply have no idea how other people feel.

Usually such people have difficulty knowing their own feelings let alone any body else's. In fact they consider feelings to be weakness and emotions as annoying intrusions and unnecessary.

But the reality is that in any exchange between people, whether in business, in conversation, in selling, in romance, in love-making, in anything, people's emotions no matter how hidden, are having a direct bearing on these exchanges. The impact of such moments will be determined more by "the tone of the tune then the words in the score!"

We very seldom put our emotions into words. However they are never absent. Empathy is about picking up the cues sent out by others and responding to them intelligently, wisely and sympathetically. This is known as intuition. The ability to "read a situation" below the verbal level and then respond to it with discernment, knowledge and insight.

The key to being empathetic or intuitive is the ability to being able to pick up and read what are called the "nonverbals".

These nonverbals come as facial expressions, gestures, voice tones, and so on. For those of us brought up in difficult childhoods, the nonverbals were our primary way of working out the threats and dangers in our lives.

We had to quickly learn "to read" any situation, pick up the signals and then take evasive action when we could. In less threatening situations the nonverbals although present often required less attention.

Empathy picks up on 'how' something is conveyed rather than 'what' is conveyed. It has been suggested that that some 90% of emotional messages are nonverbal and the deeper the feeling the more likely words are used less to convey the real meanings in the exchange.

The danger is that emotional/feeling exchanges can be seen as inferior and less accurate than verbal exchanges. It can be sometimes said that our emotional outbursts should not be listened to and that such exchanges are unhelpful and inappropriate.

The real issue here is our inability to handle another person's emotions, and so we ridicule their behaviour as a way of not having to confront their feelings and our own.

Empathy doesn't fear feelings but accepts emotions. It reads and knows what is happening and responds appropriately.

When our nonverbals are really understood and our true feelings acknowledged, we then know we are being heard even if our words don't make too much sense, even to ourselves.