Empathy, namely the ability to understand another person's feelings, is probably one of the most important skills a person might have. Empathy is not just for building and maintaining strong and healthy relationships, but to work more effectively and achieve greater success in life.

Empathy is often acquired beyond verbal language. You can experience empathy by noticing a person's facial expressions and voice. You try to tell when he needs attention, acknowledgement, or an offer of help. You grasp when he wants you to leave and give him space or when he wants you to quietly stand by. Empathy demonstrates you care.

However, having an endless capacity for empathy is dangerous. With empathy, you will feel others^’ stress, anxiety, and anger. If you let these emotions sit in your body, your mind can be emotionally controlled. Absorbing other people's feelings can make you easily affected by feelings of depression and hopelessness.

In fact, extreme empathy can break the bond of trust that you were hoping to strengthen. When you take on other people's emotions, you may feel responsible for easing their pain. You are driven by a strong desire to fix their problems and interrupt to offer aid. However, your intrusive reaction will make them feel disrespected and less understood.

Non-reactive empathy is especially useful when you feel the desire to jump in and fix people. To acquire non-reactive empathy, you should receive whatever might pass into your mind in a calm way. Notice when emotions begin to arise in your body. Name the emotion and offer what you sense to the person to help him or her better understand the experience. Then you can relax your body and let the emotion fade away.

Too many people want others to be their friends, but they don’t give friendship back. That is why some friendships don’t last long. To have a friend, you must learn to be one. You must learn to treat your friend the way you want your friend to treat you. Learning to be a good friend means learning three rules: be honest; be generous (慷慨的); be understanding.

Honesty is where a good friendship starts. Friends must be able to trust one another. If you do not tell the truth, people usually find out. If a friend finds out that you haven’t been honest, you may lose your friend’s trust. Good friends always rely on one another to speak and act honestly.

Generosity means sharing and sharing makes a friendship grow. You do not have to give your lunch money or your clothes. Naturally you will want to share your ideas and feelings. These can be very valuable to a friend. They tell your friend what is important to you. By sharing them, you help your friend know better.

Sooner or later everyone needs understanding and help with each other. Something may go wrong at school. Talking about the problem can make it easier to solve. Turning to a friend can be a first step in solving the problem. So to be a friend you must listen and understand. You must try to put yourself in your friend’s shoes so that you can understand the problem better.

No two friendships are exactly alike. But all true friendships have three things in common. If you plan to keep your friends, you must practice honesty, generosity and understanding.

Do you struggle to say no? If you can’t ever say no to anybody, then your relationships are not healthy.

【小题1】. Imagine that you are a confident person who marries a very aggressive person. You love your partner very much, so when he or she suggests that you both move to an isolated (偏远的) island, you say yes.

Then you spend ten years on the island with your partner and you don’t see anybody else. 【小题2】, shouting at you and calling you stupid. You try to change your behaviour to avoid getting shouted at, so after a while you never do anything that you want to do. 【小题3】. After ten years you return to the mainland. You are no longer a confident person because you have forgotten how to be yourself.

That is how our relationships with others can shape who we are in a bad way. Does this sound like you?

【小题4】. An aggressive person uses dominating(专横的) behaviour to get what he or she wants without thinking of others. An assertive person is someone who is able to say what they want but also respect what others want. You could say that being assertive is about being true to yourself and who you are.

But being assertive doesn’t mean that you have to say what you want all the time. 【小题5】, you don’t have to stop in order to be true to yourself. Maybe your truth is that you are happy to sometimes do things you dislike if doing them helps other people.