Happy August! During the summer months I try to take off a few weeks to get out of the office and reflect on successes and failures. I have had my fair share of both. My personality is one that tends to think more about the failures than the successes but it is not because I belabor my imperfections but rather that I want to always be improving. I had an “Ah ha” moment about being a leader that sympathizes versus empathizes and how one over the other can destroy a culture. A longtime family friend of mine who has known me my entire life shared the simplest but the most impactful video on the difference between sympathy and empathy. By definition, sympathy is a social affinity in which one person stands with another person and closely understands his or her feelings. Empathy is the capacity to recognize and, to some extent, share feelings that are being experienced by another person. When you read the definitions they are quite similar and tend to overlap so