I’ve seen all the Star Trek series (except Enterprise) at least once. Next Gen I’ve watched 3x. But I feel I can’t say I’m a fan. I have a memory disorder that makes it near impossible to recall details, which are the currency in geek culture. But I love it all the same.

6. I’m SO excited to see Michelle Yeoh in the upcoming Star Trek: Section 31. It’s sobering to see how the Star Trek universe isn’t always a utopia. Her role on Discovery was masterful.

5. I find myself coming back to Star Trek because it gives me hope for the future. I just hope we don’t have to live through WWIII to get to a place where we achieve better equality.

4. I still yearn to live in a universe where we’ve transcended the idea of profit and currency. One day. Sigh. One day.

3. I’d always dismissed Jeri Ryan’s role as Seven of Nine trivial because she’s so incredibly gorgeous and her costume was hyper sexualized. But WOAH. Her acting is amazing. I feel bad I dismissed her before for being so beautiful.

2. Season 5 does an amazing job of treating mental health as health. They take on some weighty topics and the way the crew responds is incredibly affirming. Considering this was produced in the mid 90s, I’m insanely grateful and impressed.

When our #empathy capacity is restored, we can look outside of ourselves and imagine improvements to how we work. We can see how our work impacts other people and how systems and processes are interconnected. We can leverage empathy by embracing technical nuance for collaboration and innovation.

If our environment is constantly working against us, our capacity for #empathy plummets. Situations that keep us stuck in survival mode prevent us from collaborating. As W. Edwards Deming once said, “A bad system will beat a good person every time.”

The longer we can engage in collaborative activities, the more problems we can solve. When we’re in groups of people who also have a high empathic capacity, that’s where the magic happens and the highest-performing teams emerge. #empathy

#empathy is the capacity to be present, connected, curious, and moved to reduce suffering, typically with others but with ourselves, too. The longer we are able to hold this state, the longer we can engage in collaborative activities without collapsing into a defensive, self-focused state.

#empathy helps humans parse massive quantities of information and quickly mobilize ourselves into collective action. Other social species have these types of mobilization mechanisms, too. Ants emit chemical signals. Bees waggle their bodies. Many mammals make distinct sounds. Humans use empathy.

As a species, social systems are our survival mechanism. We work together to adapt to change. We modify our environment, create technology, and pass down information to future generations. The faster diverse groups of people can understand each other, the faster we can innovate and implement ideas.

Let’s talk about what empathy is. It’s not a psychic ability. It’s a functional system with four components:

1) regulation
2) emotion
3) cognition
4) motivation

Humans evolved empathy as a mechanism to efficiently communicate, collaborate, and solve complex problems for species survival.