Why You Need an Empathy Practice

In 2019, Michael Tennant was at the lowest point in his life. 

Two years prior — and after a successful, 10-plus year career in media — Tennant had left his full-time executive position to launch the purpose-driven company Curiosity Lab. In 2018, he debuted the empathy-building conversation card game Actually Curious “out of this ambitious mission to help fight divisiveness in this country” leading into the midterm elections, says Tennant. The game was immediately popular, but by the following year, Curiosity Lab was failing and Tennant’s relationship with his former business and romantic partner had ended. 

Then, tragedy hit. 

Two of Tennant’s three older brothers passed away in close succession in 2019, hardships that took place only months after Tennant had lost an uncle and, soon after, an aunt. The trauma from these losses revealed the fragility of Tennant’s mental health — and his lack of understanding surrounding his own emotions. “I had a really shallow sense of how to cope with difficulty,” says Tennant, who grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn with his brothers and Jamaican immigrant parents before going to boarding school in Pennsylvania at the age of 12. 

“For years, I excelled as a bit of a workaholic, which I had come to learn was one of my coping mechanisms,” he adds. “I’d struggled with substance use, and even though it was pretty benign — until it got worse and it actually affected my ability to engage with people in public — it made me even more introverted and withdrawn than was natural to me.” 

Tennant realized his survival was dependent on confronting his emotions and learning to cope in a healthy manner. So he turned to Actually Curious — and to his values that led him to create the game to begin with. Tennant took the cards on the road, traveling around the country, having conversations with strangers, and developing his Five Phases of Empathy model.

“[I was] exploring both how to heal from really big losses but also how to disentangle from toxic coping mechanisms,” he says, adding that this experience “really helped me to channel my grief and difficult emotions into my purpose. … When you’re experiencing really difficult emotions, that energy can be channeled into something really meaningful.”