Caring for your people doesn’t mean carrying their emotions.

The difference between empathy and taking on emotional responsibility — and why leaders burn out when the two blur.

I want to talk about a misconception a lot of people carry, in all kinds of relationships. In intimate ones, and in the workplace too. What I’m talking about is validating other people’s emotions.

There’s so much misinformation about validation, and it doesn’t stop at what the word means. It extends to how it’s supposed to feel. Think about how often you hear someone say, I’m so exhausted from dealing with everybody else’s emotions. If you’re a leader, this is something you probably feel often, this sense that you’re the one who has to carry everyone else’s feelings. Even when it’s never said out loud, at a nervous system level, that’s what’s happening.

There’s an expectation that leaders have to take care of everyone. And let me tell you, the greatest leaders genuinely care for the people they lead. But caring is not the same as being responsible for them.

Validating someone’s emotions does not mean taking responsibility for those emotions too.

What validating really is

Validating is acknowledging that the other person is experiencing what they’re experiencing. That’s it. It doesn’t mean the person doing the acknowledging has to share those emotions, or take them on as their own.

That’s the difference between empathy and sympathy. Brené Brown has talked about how these two get confused, because sympathy isn’t empathy.

Empathy is recognizing that the person in front of you is moving through some distress. Even if you’ve never felt that particular thing yourself, you can see it in them. I can see you’re struggling. I can see this is hard for you. That acknowledgment is what true connection needs.

Sympathy is different. Sympathy is wanting to feel what the other person feels. That’s where you hear people say, I’m an empath, I feel what everyone around me feels, and sometimes it leaves me overwhelmed and carrying too much. What that really means is there’s no boundary between what’s yours and what belongs to the other person.

So if you’re a leader who ends the day exhausted from carrying everyone’s emotions, that’s not validation, and it’s not empathy. It’s a blurred version of both. It isn’t caring for others in a clean way. And what it quietly builds is resentment. Disconnection. That feeling of, I can’t deal with this today.

The question underneath the exhaustion

I remember working with a client who felt this constantly. She’d come into session and ask me, how do you do your work? How do you do it? Because it’s exhausting, always taking everyone’s emotions into account, not offending anyone, making sure nothing you say or do gets taken the wrong way.

Those were the words. But underneath them, the real question was: how do I control what other people feel or think so that I can be okay?

And here’s the truth. No human being has that kind of power over another person. And you don’t need it. You don’t need to carry anyone else’s emotions. All true connection asks of you is the recognition. The acknowledgment. Seeing that there’s a human being in front of you moving through something internal, and asking, how can I be there for them, genuinely, without crossing the line into I don’t want you to feel this way?

Because that’s where the problem lives. Not wanting people to feel distressed. Not wanting them to complain, or gossip, or struggle to collaborate. As leaders, all we can do is lead, including emotionally, including in how we connect with each other. We were never meant to manage what everyone else feels.

The practice that gives you clarity

A few things help here, and it starts with awareness. Before you meet with anyone, before you walk into a conversation, check in: how am I feeling today?

Make it a regular practice. I suggest my clients do this at least four times a day. How am I feeling? What am I thinking? What am I doing? What’s happening in my body? Do a quick scan from head to toe. Any tingling? Any discomfort? Is my heart beating fast?

Connecting with yourself at that level gives you the clarity to recognize which emotions are actually yours, and which belong to someone else. Because we do have the ability to feel other people’s emotions. Some people are more tuned to it than others, but we’re all connected that way. That’s the role of mirror neurons, and it’s a beautiful thing. It only gets uncomfortable when we haven’t practiced the muscle of discerning what belongs to me and what belongs to you.

When you nourish that clarity, you get better at truly connecting with the human in front of you, and at leading without becoming enmeshed in their emotions. Because that enmeshment is exactly where the end-of-day exhaustion comes from.

What really shifts your interactions is how present you get to be, with yourself and with the other person. Paying attention to what they’re saying, and not only the words. When they say something, notice how you’re receiving it. Is it triggering something in you? An urge to fix their emotion and keep them from feeling it? Or an urge to pull away, to dismiss it, to make it go away?

From that awareness, the ability to lead from genuine care rises on its own. It feels natural, instead of the forced version, I’m the leader, I have to stay composed and take care of everyone and everything. Because when we take that stance, we neglect ourselves. We tell ourselves we don’t get to feel what we’re feeling, because we have to take care of everyone else first. No wonder so many of us are drowning in burnout and disconnection.

Validation isn’t the same as responsibility

I chose the word validating on purpose, because I hear it everywhere. Who validates me? I want to feel validated. But in a world where everyone wants to feel validated, no one feels seen.

Validating an emotion and taking responsibility for it are not the same thing. And knowing the difference changes everything about how sustainable your compassion is, with yourself and with others. Because compassion is always the place we want to come from. From there, the boundaries come. The discernment comes. The clarity about what’s mine and what’s yours comes.

So I’ll leave you with this. Where have you been taking responsibility for someone else’s emotion that was never yours to carry?

Sit with that. Because from that question, you give yourself the chance to listen, and to make a different choice.

— Roselyn Pérez Casiano