Strong relationships are integral to professional growth, but it doesn’t always feel easy to establish and maintain them in our increasingly fragmented – and increasingly remote – workplaces. 

What if there was a simple way to turn your relationship-building skills into a career-boosting superpower?

The answer is empathy.

Empathy is the ability to see the world from another person’s perspective – it helps us understand why other people speak, act or think in the ways they do. 

While some people may naturally be more empathetic than others, it’s a skill that can be learned and developed with practice—and it must be practiced. 

Empathy, after all, is an extremely attractive personal brand attribute.

If you plan to advance your career, get a raise, move into leadership or start your own business, increasing your ability to empathize with others is non-negotiable.

Developing empathy isn’t always easy. It requires you to carefully consider ideas and worldviews that might be utterly alien to you – some that even go against your values and beliefs. 

But the more you practice, the more you’ll be able to establish common ground with the people around you. This, in turn, leads to more robust, more fulfilling relationships and endless opportunities for personal growth.

How to Improve Empathy in the Workplace

Ready to start increasing your empathy? Then start with these four approaches:

1. Practice Self-Empathy

Developing self-empathy is exceptionally challenging, especially for disciplined and driven individuals who hold themselves to high standards.

It requires you to evaluate your thoughts, feelings, and experiences objectively and non-judgmentally. 

The benefits of this are myriad, but the downside is that it can lead to lower self-esteem and unrealistic expectations.

You can combat the adverse effects of self-judgment by practicing mindfulness.

You’ve likely heard of mindfulness already, probably as yoga, meditation, or breathwork. But mindfulness is so much more than an exercise in sitting still.

It’s a mindset. While it generally does involve sitting still, it’s more about taking time each day to observe your thoughts and feelings without judgment. Seek to understand their origins, but don’t try to fight or change them.

Something else you can do to increase self-empathy is to avoid comparing yourself to others. 

While this is easier said than done, it pays dividends to compare yourself with who you were yesterday and the progress you’ve made. Since you are the only person you can change, it makes sense that only you should be the yardstick by which progress is measured.

An excellent way to reduce comparing yourself to others is to limit social media use, which can cause you to compare your current circumstances with an idealized version of someone else’s life, leading to harmful self-judgment, a skewed sense of reality, and general discontent. 

The more you can understand and perceive your thoughts and feelings objectively, the easier it becomes to focus on things you can control and ultimately make changes to achieve the life and career you want.

2. Consider Your Co-workers

Business is insanely competitive. The pressure to succeed can often lead to intense stress, and no one is spared from this.

When this happens, it’s easy to think only about your own needs and to forget that your co-workers may be in the same boat as you.

In an interview for an article in Harvard Business Review, Monica Worline, a research scientist at Stanford’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, says you can avoid this trap by being as generous as possible in how you interpret your co-workers’ behaviors. 

If your co-workers are late for a meeting or send you emails that feel rude, try to interpret both actions in the kindest possible light rather than reprimanding them for what you perceive to be tardy behavior or an insult.

By showing compassion to your teammates in all circumstances, you’ll find that their behavior will change – sometimes instantly, but sometimes over time. By doing so, you create a reputation of being someone who cares about others, which will compel colleagues to invest in your well-being and success.

3. Put Yourself in Your Boss’s Shoes

If you’re feeling stressed, remember that the person above you probably feels the same way. 

Leading a team requires making difficult decisions that have to be made alone.

If your manager gives you a demand that you feel is unreasonable or feels unfriendly, try to consider the pressure that they’re under.

While many companies offer plenty of resources for employees experiencing heavy stress or psychological trauma, those resources aren’t typically intended for leaders. If you’re in charge, you must deal with everyone else’s problems and try to ignore your own.

By considering your higher up’s tasks, feelings, and responsibilities, you can improve how to anticipate their demands and actions. You’ll also increase trust, which will pay dividends when asking for a raise.

Next time you have one-on-one time with your manager, either during casual conversations or performance reviews, ask them how they’re doing and if there are any tasks that you can help them with.

This simple action can give you helpful insight into their daily responsibilities, and it can also help you identify ways to make yourself more valuable to the business.

4. Understand Your Customers’ Experiences

For the many successful companies in the world, the customer comes first. This means being profoundly empathetic with customers and their experiences. 

Companies like Amazon, Google, LinkedIn, and Netflix put empathy at the forefront of their business models and, in doing so, can deliver products and services that meet the needs and expectations of their customers.

Vince Dawkins, CEO and president of Enertia Software, said that being empathetic with customers can have lasting implications for your business:

One way to connect with your customers is to show that you genuinely care about your partnership by offering leniency with invoices. Give customers struggling financially the option to pay in installments or extend deadlines, for example. By showing that you understand what your customers are going through, you will make them that much more likely to stick around now and in the future, despite economic uncertainty.”

Vince Dawkins, CEO and president of Enertia Software

Developing empathy is a deliberate process, one that takes consistent practice. And while it’s impossible to be empathetic at every waking moment, it pays to try and cultivate it whenever possible. Practicing empathy in your professional life will help you to create the career you want.

Develop Your Empathy and Other Personal Brand Traits

If you’d like to be more empathetic, it helps to understand your unique strengths (we call them superpowers) and uncover the other five drivers of your personal brand: your values, passions, differentiators, purpose, and goals.

You can do this effectively with the Personal Brand (PB) Power Audit. It’s a quick quiz that measures your power when it comes to knowing, showing, and growing your personal brand!

A version of this post was originally published in Forbes.