Put yourself in their shoes is where most people's empathy training both starts and stops. It is the first of three levels, and it is the only one that costs you nothing, which is a large part of the reason it is the one that stuck.
The first level keeps you as the subject
What you are actually doing at the first level is running a simulation of yourself in somebody else's circumstances. It is quick, it is genuinely useful, and the person at the centre of it is still you. The cheat sheet calls this safe, analytical distance, which is accurate in both directions: it really is safe, and the distance really is there.
It is also where the most common failure in the whole discipline comes from. The moment you reach for your own version of what somebody is describing, you have left the conversation, and most of us do it hardest with the people we are closest to. That one has its own field report.
The second level is where it starts to cost something
At the second level you stop simulating and choose to believe their account, including the parts that do not match what you are fairly sure you would have felt in their place. You will feel resistance when you do that, and the resistance is the signal rather than an objection to be argued with.
It is worth being precise about why that works. Resistance shows up exactly where your model of the situation disagrees with theirs, which makes it the one place where their experience holds information that yours does not. Treating it as a prompt to look harder is a decision rather than a feeling, and decisions can be practised.
The third level is the top of the ladder
The third level is the unsaid, where you hear what somebody is not saying. Sensing lives up here, and this is the part people get wrong about the sequence: it is the top of the ladder, not the way in. You do not arrive at the third level by trying harder at it, you arrive by having done the first two.
If you want the long version of what sits at that level, it is the Unsaid Protocol, which is the same move run across a room rather than across a conversation.
Why the ladder runs through you first
The drill we ran on 17 September put some numbers beside this. The lowest score in the room was how well did I sense myself, at 3.0 out of 5, and three of five people took it as their ninety-day focus. That is one small room and it is self-reported, so it describes that session rather than proving anything general.
The reading we take from it is that the ladder runs through your own state before it runs through anybody else's. Choosing to believe somebody is hard to do while you are unclear about what you are carrying yourself, because you cannot easily tell your resistance apart from your mood. The full numbers, including the one we withdrew, are published.
The part that surprises people
Sensing somebody else and sensing yourself are not two claims on the same finite attention. When you are genuinely attuned you get both at once, and the moment you drop out to check your own story, you lose both together.
That is the whole reason the first level is so comfortable and so limited. It lets you keep checking your own story the entire time.