I feel like I'm going to sound egotistical here, but I'm not: I feel like empathy is one of my "gifts" in a way.
As far back as I can remember, it has always been easy for my friends to confide their feelings in me. They would just spill everything onto me and I would either sit there and listen or try to offer some advice to help out. But I think, above all, one thing that stood out is that I can relate to a lot of what people are feeling, to a lot of the emotions that a lot of my friends were experiencing at the time, and things like that! Empathy is important because it helps people to understand that they're not alone in feeling how they feel, which improves relationship building skills as a result which is also a super important skill in itself. ^__^