Consulting with Integrative Empathy
Designing empathy skills for your professional setting
Consulting with Integrative Empathy tunes your empathy skills to provide expert advice in the language and customs of your setting. After getting hands on practice with the five skills in Practising Integrative Empathy, you will learn how to intervene with them in your context.
Having the ability to understand the situation and needs of customers, employees and other stakeholders enables you to offer adapted solutions. But there is more. What if you are able to tap into existing empathy in organisations? What if you can apply your own empathic capacities to uncover, highlight and work with the empathic abilities of your organisation/client?
In Consulting with Integrative Empathy you will consult in your professional setting on an empathy-related issue. You will use qualitative research to map empathy-related attitudes, thoughts and behaviours. In so doing you will adapt your language to the organisational culture you work in. Thereafter, you will design your own research project, then devise an integrative empathy intervention and trial it in the same setting.
To round the course off, you’ll evaluate your intervention, all the while adapting your skills to diverse settings.
Course Characteristics
- Date: September 2025
- Durations: 12 weeks
- Format: 3-4 hours a week of research and practice and 3 hours bi-weekly of online training and coaching on Zoom
- Group size: 4 to 8 participants
- Fee: EUR1250 for individuals
Course Prerequisites
- You have completed the Practising Empathy Course within the past two years
- You have a professional setting in which you can carry out your project. The group/organisation needs to be on board and willing to let you interview, try out your intervention and present your results to them.
- You need to have a global idea of the issue you will be consulting on in your setting. Your course facilitators will help you to narrow this down to ensure it is feasible and adapted to the course.
Course Content
The self-paced bi-weekly modules guide you through a project within your organisation. The online training is dedicated to practice, co-creation with your fellow students, group discussion, coaching and reflection.
Module 1: How to recognize and gather empathy indicators
If we want to promote empathic processes at work, we need to know what we’re looking for. In this first module you will design your research (qualitative), find your population and learn how to conduct phenomenological interviews to map empathy indicators in your context.
Module 2: Empathic interviews
This second module is a foundation for the rest of your project. You will carry out the research and have a first exploration of the outcomes. You will present these outcomes for feedback to your fellow course participants and teachers.
Module 3: Making sense of empathy in your own work setting
You will now deep dive into your data and analyse your outcomes. This leads you to conclusions about what is already commonplace and what is missing. You’ll compare your conclusions with your fellow course participants and see if there is any overlap with others which offers the opportunity to design the next phase together.
Module 4: Adapting empathy skills and designing your intervention
Coming back to the five integrative empathy skills you are familiar with, you will now have to design your intervention. The intervention needs to be adapted to the context and therefore, questions around needs, possibilities, feasibility and acceptability will be answered here. You get to bring all your creativity to adapt the skills to your setting.
Module 5: Prototyping and fine tuning adapted skills
Time to try and see! In this module you will try out your intervention and evaluate it with your participants, your fellow students and your course teachers. What worked as it is? What was not acceptable? What needs finetuning? These are the types of questions you will ask yourself.
Module 6: Integrating and looking back
So you did your research, you designed your intervention, you carried it out and evaluated it. Now what? In this last module we’ll reflect on the past five modules and look ahead to how you can work with your results in the future.
Target Audience
- Consultants
- Organisational Change Practitioners
- Organisational Development Managers
- Professional Facilitators
- Community Leaders
- NGO Advisors
- Communication Professionals
Join the next Consulting with Integrative Empathy Course
Twelve week course with 3 hours bi-weekly online training through Zoom and 3-4 hours a week of research and practice.
Price: EUR 1250
Starting date: September 2025
This program can also be completed on an individual basis with flexible start dates. Please contact us for more information.
