Chade-Meng Tan's Search Inside Yourself and Sympathy (A6)

Chade-Meng Tan was one of Google's earliest engineers when he built an emotional-intelligence course inside the company that grew into Search Inside Yourself, a bestseller arguing that compassion can be trained like any other capacity. He is precise about what he means by the word, on a page of lines from the book: "Compassion is a mental state endowed with a sense of concern for the suffering of others and aspiration to see that suffering relieved." That responsiveness to what other people are going through is, in the Big Five, one facet.

Being moved by others' suffering is the Sympathy facet

That facet is Sympathy (A6), under Agreeableness, how readily you feel for others and are moved to want their pain eased. Tan's definition is almost a description of high A6: concern for the suffering of others plus the wish to see it relieved, held as a steady stance rather than a passing pang. A high scorer feels other people's difficulty quickly and finds it hard to look away. A lower scorer keeps more distance, staying level where others get pulled in, which can read as calm or as coolness depending on who is watching.

What makes the book unusual is its claim that this is trainable, not fixed. Tan treats compassion as a skill built through attention and practice, the same way you would build focus, which reframes A6 from a temperament you are stuck with into a capacity you can grow, and links it to the pull to actually help once you have felt for someone. For a lower-A6 reader the usable practice is small and deliberate, spending a moment genuinely imagining another person's situation before you respond to it. Feeling for others is not the same as being run by that feeling. Tan's point is that the concern can be cultivated on purpose, and that a mind trained toward it tends to build better relationships around it.

Read your A6 to know how Search Inside Yourself sits with you. If it runs high, Tan gives your natural concern a vocabulary and a set of practices to keep it from tipping into overwhelm. If it runs low, the book makes an unfamiliar case, that compassion is a skill with real payoffs rather than a soft extra, and one you can build even if it does not come easily. The feeling is either quick for you or it is not. Tan's contribution is the claim that either way, you can train it.

Read the book: Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace) by Chade-Meng Tan.

See Where You Fall

Where do you actually fall? The 30-facet OCEAN personality test takes about 15 minutes and scores all five domains and the facets underneath them. Take the test

Research Citations