Empathy you can see train your eyes and your team’s habits

You’re in a meeting and something feels off. The words are polite, yet two people keep tightening their eyes during status updates. No one mentions risk, but shoulders creep upward when timelines appear on a slide. Your phone buzzes, you ignore it, and you start watching the faces instead of the deck. The room gets quieter, which makes the smallest cues louder.

Afterward, you test a simple move. You ask one partner for a 20‑minute walk. Without slides. “What’s the part of this plan you’d be happy to cut?” you ask. A fast, genuine smile reaches her eyes. “Those two middle milestones,” she says, and then confesses she didn’t know how to raise it without sounding negative. The next day the team agrees to streamline, and the tension that kept leaking into the room eases.

Small, trainable habits like reading eye involvement in a smile or watching for micro‑expressions of doubt can unlock safer conversations. Games like “Whose Life?” are playful, but they also reveal how quickly we leap to assumptions. Shadowing a day‑in‑the‑life replaces stories we tell ourselves with what people actually do.

Neuroscience points to why this works. Emotion is largely communicated nonverbally and read by networks that favor context and synthesis. The so‑called Duchenne smile recruits eye muscles you can’t easily fake. Micro‑expressions can flash in under a fifth of a second when someone tries to hide or is just starting to feel something. Training attention to these signals, paired with kind questions, builds trust and better decisions.

Start by learning the eye crinkle of a real smile, then try a quick ‘Whose Life?’ session with your team to surface assumptions. Schedule one one‑hour shadow with a colleague or customer, listen for their words and watch their expressions, and ask them to narrate tricky moments. Use what you learn to adjust one plan this week. Keep it small and specific so people feel the difference right away.