Welcome to The Empathy Project.
Explore how history, courage, and resulting engagement identified empathy as the ‘missing link’ in professional and interpersonal communication—and how it can take your career and organization to new levels of success and enjoyment. Launched at the University of Richmond in 2016, The Empathy Project is helping professionals worldwide experience the power of ‘walking in the shoes of others’—and viewing the world as others view it. The resulting awareness and connections are magnificent.
Empathy is smart. Essential. And motivational. Uniting. Enlightening. And empowering. It is the great secret of true leaders, top sales professionals, and beloved physicians. Revealing an essential truth: If you are not sharing empathy, you are guessing about others. Empathy makes every business process better—from team unity to customer relations to crisis response. Join Frederick Talbott for a dynamic, fun, and moving workshop designed to help you launch this remarkable approach. The goal is to help you make every day—and every engagement with others—better.
FREDERICK TALBOTT is a visiting lecturer at the University of Richmond’s Robins
School of Business focusing on leadership communications. He is a pioneer in applying
the power of empathy, humor, honesty, storytelling, and visual thinking to inspire focus,
trust, engagement, teamwork, productivity, problem solving and opportunity finding, and
foresight. Fred is a veteran award-winning professor and journalist and a convention
speaker, trainer, consultant, writer, and coach. He is also an attorney focusing on
communications law, Constitutional law, and land use law; mediator; humorist; author;
waterman; and musician and songwriter.
Fred created The Talbott Method, named for his father, a process that helps participants
overcome speech anxiety (stage fright) and convert the resulting energy into dynamic
advocacy. Corporate, government, association, and educational clients have included The
White House, IBM, Goldman Sachs, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USF Holland,
Bank Administration Institute, Bristol-Myers Squibb, TAP Pharmaceuticals, New York
Life Insurance, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, the Tennessee Valley Authority, Broadcast
Music Incorporated (BMI), Bell Atlantic and BellSouth (now AT&T), the State
Government Affairs Council, and others.
Fred is the author of Shakespeare on Leadership, Churchill on Courage, JJ’s Business
Bullets (business parody), and Defeating Stage Fright-The Path to Speaking Freedom. He
is a veteran investigative journalist whose work was heralded as innovative, objective,
and often bold and courageous. As a humorist, he contributed material to NBC’s
Saturday Night Live (“Weekend Update”) and by request taught humor writing to the
President’s White House speechwriting team in the summer of 1991. From 1993-2009 he
designed, launched, and led one of the nation’s leading and most innovative MBA
leadership communications programs at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School
of Management, celebrating learning with more than 3,000 MBA students from 84
nations. He led the journalism sequence and management communications program at
Old Dominion University from 1983-1993. He is the first MBA professor in the nation to
require every student to perform a standup comedy routine—the most challenging
speech. Fred’s teaching has been featured in The New York Times, Training, Training &
Development, Entrepreneur, and on CNBC’s Power Lunch. His public relations advice
has been featured on page 1 of The Wall Street Journal. He was honored with major
Vanderbilt University awards for his promotion of opportunities for persons with
disabilities, affirmative action, and the advancement of diversity initiatives and was
named the university’s outstanding faculty member by the Vanderbilt football team in the
fall of 2007. In 2016 he and his University of Richmond students launched The Empathy
Project, identifying empathy as the ‘missing link’ in effective and meaningful
professional and interpersonal communication.
During 1998 and 1999 Fred helped more than 850 American and foreign banks eliminate
public fear of the Year 2000, or Y2K, challenge and turn the event into a positive
