Rekhi Centre of Excellence for the Science of Happiness
Feel First, then fix.
A training room for the six ways we respond to someone’s pain — and for the one move almost everybody gets wrong: answering a feeling with a reason before the feeling has been heard.
Affective empathy earns the right to speak. Cognitive empathy decides what to say. One without the other either drowns you or makes you sound like a machine.
Six responses, one situation
Read these once. You won’t be tested on the words — you’ll be tested on recognising them in the wild, where nobody announces which one they are doing.
The two that trip everyone
Altruism is a behaviour, not a feeling. You can act altruistically out of duty or habit and feel nothing at all. So the five are not one ladder.
Empathic distress looks like coldness but is too much feeling. Walking away, taking over, or getting angrier than the person themselves — all overwhelm, not indifference.
Sorting Room
Pick a situation. Six reactions to it, shuffled. Tap a reaction, then tap the box it belongs in. Same story, six different people — the contrast is the lesson.
Choose a situation — eight available
Situation
Reactions — tap one
Categories — tap to place
0 of 6 placed
0
Correct
0
Close miss
0
Big miss
0
Situations done
Feel First
Sixteen conversations where someone is speaking from emotion. Your job is not to be right. Your job is to be hearable.
How this works
They say something. Watch their posture and the bar at the top — that is how hot they are.
Pick one reply. Every reply moves the bar, and moves them.
Nothing is labelled in advance. Replies that reason, fix or advise cannot land above 40 — you find that out by trying one, which is the point.
A reply that does not land does not move the conversation. The same moment waits until you meet it.
Affective empathy
What it does
You feel what they feel.
Where you notice it
Chest, throat, stomach.
Alone, it fails by
Drowning. Now you need saving too.
Cognitive empathy
What it does
You understand what they feel, and why.
Where you notice it
In your head. It is a guess you check.
Alone, it fails by
Sounding correct and cold.
Choose a conversation — sixteen available
Conversation
Them
How hot they are88Flooded
Ready for reasonReadyStill hotHotFloodedFlooded
You
Four lines to remember
Everything in this app collapses into these. If a participant leaves with only these four, the session worked.
Emotion first, logic later. Never both in the same breath.
“But” cancels everything before it. “I understand, but…” is heard only from the but onward.
Anger is usually hurt or fear wearing a jacket. Answer the thing underneath.
Ask before advising. “Do you want my take, or not yet?” Every single time.
The three-step drill
Every reply, until it is automatic: Name it → Sit with it → Ask before advising.
“You sound really let down. That makes sense. Do you want my take, or not yet?”
Running it in a session
Put the Sorting Room on the projector and let the room vote out loud before anyone places a card — the disagreements are your discussion. Then run one Feel First conversation live and let them call out option numbers. The moment someone picks a locked reply and the bar goes up is the moment the session lands.
