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I'm talking about empathy as a means of understanding your workforce so you can help them, not only motivate them, but help them become self-propelled.  Empathy ultimately drives performance.  It's not about lesser performances or about greater performances, it's also about greater balance.  Because what's really happened during the pandemic, and I think people get all caught up on where work takes place, you know, home, hybrid office, I really have no opinion on that.  What I think has happened is, and everything's pictures, it means I have to draw, is we had a smaller circle in 2019, that was called our personal life.  And we had agency over our personal life.  And we had a bigger circle that cast a shadow on that smaller circle, and that was our professional life.

— Heather McGowan

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "I'm talking about empathy as a means of understanding your workforce so you can help them, not only motivate them, but help them become self-propelled.  Empathy ultimately drives performance.  It's not about lesser performances or about greater performances, it's also about greater balance.  Because what's really happened during the pandemic, and I think people get all caught up on where work takes place, you know, home, hybrid office, I really have no opinion on that.  What I think has happened is, and everything's pictures, it means I have to draw, is we had a smaller circle in 2019, that was called our personal life.  And we had agency over our personal life.  And we had a bigger circle that cast a shadow on that smaller circle, and that was our professional life." in the context of "" to mean that wisdom is timeless.

Quote Image
Source: The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 19, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app
Heather McGowan

About Heather McGowan

Heather McGowan is an American writer. She is the author of the novels Schooling and Duchess of Nothing Schooling was named a Best Book of the Year by Newsweek, The Detroit Free Press and The Hartford Courant. McGowan has a master in fine arts from Brown University.