00:00:00 – 00:00:04
Host: What's your favorite story from your career?

00:00:04 – 00:00:25
Rob Volpe: Favorite story from my career that I wrote about in my book. It's actually in chapter three. Actually happened in suburban Philadelphia. We were doing a project on aging boomers, and we were meeting with a woman by the name of Amelia, a Black woman, 56 years old at the time, and she was telling us about the hardships and the resiliency in her life.

00:00:25 – 00:00:40
Rob Volpe: And while she was doing that, I noticed she kept making this gesture with her hands, like she'd hold her hands and turn them over, back and forth, as though she was holding a ball. So and then while she was doing that, she would say, “Oh, you've got to turn things around. You've got to look at things from a different perspective.”

00:00:40 – 00:00:59
Rob Volpe: So I got curious and I asked her about that and the connection between the movement and the phrase, and she told me that it was actually a Tai Chi movement, that she had learned taking Tai Chi as part of her recovery from carpal tunnel surgery. In fact, she got so inspired through that, that she started teaching Tai Chi to inner city youth in Philadelphia.

00:00:59 – 00:01:18
Rob Volpe: So I asked her, “Hey, can you give us a Tai Chi lesson?” And no sooner did I ask that question than the furniture in her living room was pushed aside. She was giving myself and two clients a lesson in Tai Chi, and that was such a powerful moment and a reminder to me to always look at things from a different perspective, to turn things around.

00:01:19 – 00:01:21
Rob Volpe: And that is a foundation of empathy.