My name is Kiran, 30 years old guy working the typical 9 to 6pm job in sunny Malaysia. I have a good friend - Rachel's her name. I love hanging out with her and we talk regularly on the phone. She' pretty but me and her - it's just good friendship, nothing more but a close but platonic relationship. Something clicked in our conversation one day - you might say I had an insight, or revelation...

It was an unexpected fall...Rachel knocked over the edge of a chair, tripped and fell forwards, banging her knee in the process. There was that feeling of extreme pain that shoots up the leg for a brief instant. Then the sensation subsided but one that wouldn't quite go away even after rubbing on the bruised area again and again. She went to the hospital later on and had an X-ray of her knee. When she was at the hospital, she told me how painful her knee felt. My reaction?

I was quite calm. I remembered thinking to myself, she was in pain and I didn't want her to focus on the pain. Instead I tried to ask her to focus on the bright side. I said "Try and relax Rachel... You're going to be ok soon. Think of me singing you a lullaby..." I hummed something... not exactly the best lullaby in the world so I make light of it, trying to make fun of it.

You know what? It worked! Rachel changed her mental state from fear to calmness and felt easy because of the humor. Later on I sent her some text messages and through humor, I lifted her spirits and managed to change her mental state.

When we talked today, she said if anything bad happened to her, she would be more calm about herself but if it happened to other people, she would be more "kan-chiong" (local Malaysian Chinese dialect for anxious) and worked up.

I said I was the opposite because of what I did (staying calm and trying to calm her when something bad happened to her). "Rachel, I'm calmer when it happens to other people, but when if something happened to me, I think I could be the opposite - very anxious and I'll fumble a lot..."

On reflection, I see that this is focus on self versus focus on others. I seem to orientate towards a focus on myself because I worry a lot if something of a negative nature happened to me (e.g. if I receive bad remarks, bad feedback, etc). However I feel less empathy towards others in general if something bad happened to them. Rachel is exactly the opposite. She has tremendous empathy - she really feels the pain of others as though it were her own.

The twist to this story is she tripped over the chair and fell down because she was so distraught when she heard about a dispatch rider's death from the nurse at the hospital the day before. She only knew the person as an acquaintance but felt he was a nice person and was really sad when she heard he had died in a road accident...

She has a very high focus on others compared to a focus on herself - that's what empathy is about. As a result of experience, I now resolve to exercise greater empathy and to see things and feel what others feel, or to focus on others' experiences; not to focus just on self, but also to focus on others.

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