Within my family the conversations about President Trump never cease. Some think he’s the devil; others think he’s a savior. Such extreme views! But one thing that all agree is that he’s often a brutish jerk. That is, in most things that he does, whether perceived as right or wrong, he seems unnecessarily cruel and heartless. There’s no warmth emitted by the man. He hardly smiles and seldom laughs. It seems like every stand-up comedian has mastered the curmudgeonly “Trump face”.

A recent editorial by Gary Abernathy (Times-Gazette, Hillsboro, Ohio) concluded that Trump lacks empathy. For example, in dealing with Hurricane Harvey and the rollback of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, he did not display any visible sympathy, i.e., he didn’t show that he commiserated with the victims.

In today’s social media-charged world, how a president does something has become as important as what he’s doing. Abernathy notes that Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton understood this. They mastered the art of emoting for the cameras, actually staging poignant backdrops suited to each occasion.

It’s a bit of a conundrum. Should we celebrate that Trump is being his authentic self, which is rare for a politician, or would we be happier if he managed himself to the scripted emotions that appeal to news reporters and most Americans? I can’t answer that question.

With my leadership guru hat on, however, it’s clear to me that Trump’s empathy is an issue that will limit his effectiveness as a leader. Empathy is an element of Emotional Intelligence, and it’s essential in leadership. It drives behaviors in an organization that inspire trust and enable success.

In the Applied Leadership Development Program (ALDP), we learn that empathy occurs through the firing of mirror neurons in the brain. It requires social learning and develops in children as early as age 4 through what neuroscientists call an Attuned Relating Process.

We also learn in ALDP that we are a work in progress well into our 80’s. If we don’t have empathy, it can be acquired (provided a person has a functional pituitary gland) through what’s called Long-Term Potentiation, or “writing into the brain”. William James (in 1890) called this the “As If Principle” – the body shapes the mind which shapes the brain.

In ALDP we discover how to teach our brains by being intentional about the desired behavior (i.e. faking it). We must believe that we can do it, focus attention on it in every aspect of our lives, and veto unhelpful thoughts when they come into our consciousness. Through many intentional repetitions we can use our consciousness to “write into” our subconscious to the point that a desired behavior, in this case, empathy, becomes automatic.

In the ALDP training sessions, I joke about someday in the not-so-distant future we’ll be able to step into a booth at Walgreens, deposit $25 in a credit card reader, put an electronic hat on our head, and get zapped with an empathy charge that rewires the synapse in our brains.

Surprisingly, a nascent technology already exists called Optogenetics. A pioneering researcher at Stanford University, Kristina Shenoy, is inserting light-sensitive proteins into brain neurons using gene therapy. These neurons are activated using light patterns conveyed through implanted fiber optics. Currently, the research is focused on controlling prosthetic limbs, but …

There’s another related technology that’s more developed. It’s called Neurofeedback. It directly targets the brain’s emotional and cognitive processes. A person lies in a functional magnetic imaging scanner (fMRI), and they are told to think about the behavior they want to acquire. The person sees visual representations of their brain activity in real time – presented as either a thermometer or colored bar. Through visualization a person learns to regulate their brain. Although the fMRI technology is only a few years old, it’s simply a technological enhancement to William James’s 130-year old “As IF” principle.

So, back to President Trump’s leadership issue with empathy, he has up to four options as I see it: (1) do nothing and continue to be perceived as a brutish jerk whether he does good or bad things, (2) fake that he has empathy and eventually he’ll train his brain – Long-Term Potentiation, (3) visit Stanford University and get fitted with Optogenetic fiber optics, or (4) try some Neurofeedback Therapy.