How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen - By David Brooks
Date read: 2023-12-23How strongly I recommend it: 9/10
(See my list of 150+ books, for more.)
Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.
Goes beyond teaching you the importance of active listening and how to develop high EI (Emotional Intelligence). A different and more impactful way to truly see someone and to help them feel heard.
Contents:
- ILLUMINATORS
- ACCOMPANIMENT
- GOOD CONVERSATION
- HOW TO SHOW EMPATHY
- PUTTING INTO PRACTICE
- LIFE TASKS
- SELF-TALK
My Notes
Wise people don’t just possess information; they possess a compassionate understanding of other people. They know about life.
The real act of, say, building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete social actions well: disagreeing without poisoning the relationship; revealing vulnerability at the appropriate pace; being a good listener; knowing how to end a conversation gracefully; knowing how to ask for and offer forgiveness; knowing how to let someone down without breaking their heart; knowing how to sit with someone who is suffering; knowing how to host a gathering where everyone feels embraced; knowing how to see things from another’s point of view.
And all these different skills rest on one foundational skill: the ability to understand what another person is going through. There is one skill that lies at the heart of any healthy person, family, school, community organization, or society: the ability to see someone else deeply and make them feel seen—to accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard, and understood.
Artificial intelligence is going to do many things for us in the decades ahead, and replace humans at many tasks, but one thing it will never be able to do is to create person-to-person connections. If you want to thrive in the age of AI, you better become exceptionally good at connecting with others.
Illuminators, on the other hand, have a persistent curiosity about other people. They have been trained or have trained themselves in the craft of understanding others. They know what to look for and how to ask the right questions at the right time. They shine the brightness of their care on people and make them feel bigger, deeper, respected, lit up.
The quality of your life depends quite a bit on the quality of attention you project out onto the world. For example, how you project yourself when entering a room.
If you see the people you meet as precious souls, you’ll probably wind up treating them well.
You’ll be offering a gaze that says, “I’m going to trust you, before you trust me.”
Features of the Illuminator’s gaze:
When you’re accompanying someone, you’re in a state of relaxed awareness—attentive and sensitive and unhurried. You’re not leading or directing the other person. You’re just riding alongside as they experience the ebbs and flows of daily life.
The first quality I associate with accompaniment is patience. Trust is built slowly. The person who is good at accompaniment exercises what the philosopher Simone Weil called “negative effort.”
The person who is good at accompaniment is decelerating the pace of social life. I know a couple who treasure friends who are what they call “lingerable.” They are the sort of people you want to linger with at the table after a meal or in chairs outside by the pool, to let things flow, to let the relationship emerge.
The next quality of accompaniment is playfulness.
The third quality of accompaniment I should mention is the other-centeredness of it. Accompaniment is a humble way of being a helpful part of another’s journey, as they go about making their own kind of music.
Everything in nature is connected with everything else, and that you can understand this if you simply lie back and let that awareness wash over you. In social life, too, everybody is connected to everybody else by our shared common humanity. Sometimes we need to hitch a ride on someone else’s journey, and accompany them a part of the way.
The crucial question is not “What happened to this person?” or “What are the items on their résumé?” Instead, we should ask: “How does this person interpret what happened? How does this person see things? How do they construct their reality?” This is what we really want to know if we want to understand another person.
As we try to understand other people, we want to be constantly asking ourselves: How are they perceiving this situation? How are they experiencing this moment? How are they constructing their reality?
I want to receive you as an active creator. I want to understand how you construct your point of view. I want to ask you how you see things. I want you to teach me about the enduring energies of old events that shape how you see the world today.
We need to ask: How does this look to you? Do you see the same situation I see?
Then we need to ask: What are the experiences and beliefs that cause you to see it that way? For example, I might ask, What happened to you in childhood that makes you still see the world from the vantage point of an outsider? What was it about your home life that makes celebrating holidays and hosting dinner parties so important to you?
A good conversation is an act of joint exploration. Somebody floats a half-formed idea. Somebody else seizes on the nub of the idea, plays with it, offers her own perspective based on her own memories, and floats it back so the other person can respond. A good conversation sparks you to have thoughts you never had before. A good conversation starts in one place and ends up in another.
You’re going to apply what some experts call the SLANT method: sit up, lean forward, ask questions, nod your head, track the speaker. Listen with your eyes. That’s paying attention 100 percent.
One way to think of it is through the metaphor of hospitality. When you are listening, you are like the host of a dinner party. You have set the scene. You’re exuding warmth toward your guests, showing how happy you are to be with them, drawing them closer to where they want to go. When you are speaking, you are like a guest at a dinner party. You are bringing gifts.
To get a conversation rolling, find the thing the other person is most attached to. If they’re wearing a T-shirt from their kid’s sports team, ask about that. If they’ve got a nice motorcycle, lead with a question about it.
Good conversationalists ask for stories about specific events or experiences, and then they go even further. They don’t only want to talk about what happened, they want to know how you experienced what happened.
Then a good conversationalist will ask how you’re experiencing now what you experienced then. In retrospect, was getting laid off a complete disaster, or did it send you off on a new path that you’re now grateful for? Sometimes things that are hard to live through are very satisfying to remember. It’s your job to draw out what lessons they learned and how they changed as a result of what happened.
Try to find the truth underneath the disagreement, something you both agree on: “Even when we can’t agree on Dad’s medical care, I’ve never doubted your good intentions. I know we both want the best for him.” If you can both return to the gem statement during a conflict, you can keep the relationship between you strong.
Humble questions are open-ended. They’re encouraging the other person to take control and take the conversation where they want it to go. These are questions that begin with phrases like “How did you…,” “What’s it like…,” “Tell me about…,” and “In what ways…”
Other easy introductory questions are things like “That’s a lovely name. How did your parents choose it?”
As soon as somebody starts talking about times when they felt excluded, betrayed, or wronged, stop and listen. When somebody is talking to you about pain in their life, even in those cases when you may think their pain is performative or exaggerated, it’s best not to try to yank the conversations back to your frame. Your first job is to stay within the other person’s standpoint to more fully understand how the world looks to them. Your next job is to encourage them to go into more depth about what they have just said. “I want to understand your point of view as much as possible. What am I missing here?” Curiosity is the ability to explore something even in stressful and difficult circumstances.
“A great conversation is between two people who think the other is wrong. A bad conversation is between those who think something is wrong with you.”
Splitting is when you clarify your own motives by first saying what they are not and then saying what they are. You say something like “I certainly wasn’t trying to silence your voice. I was trying to include your point of view with the many other points of view on this topic. But I went too fast. I should have paused to try to hear your voice fully, so we could build from that reality. That was not respectful to you.”
Then you try to reidentify the mutual purpose of the conversation. That’s done by enlarging the purpose so that both people are encompassed by it. “You and I have very different ideas of what marketing plan this company should pursue. But we both believe in the product we are selling. We both want to get it before as many people as possible. I think we are both trying to take this company to the next level.”
Finally, you can take advantage of the fact that a rupture is sometimes an opportunity to forge a deeper bond. You might say, “You and I have just expressed some strong emotions. Unfortunately, against each other. But at least our hearts are out on the table and we’ve both been exposed. Weirdly, we have a chance to understand each other better because of the mistakes we’ve made, the emotions we’ve aroused.”
It was only later that I read that when you give a depressed person advice on how they can get better, there’s a good chance all you are doing is telling the person that you just don’t get it.
I learned, very gradually, that a friend’s job in these circumstances is not to cheer the person up. It’s to acknowledge the reality of the situation; it’s to hear, respect, and love them; it’s to show them you haven’t given up on them, you haven’t walked away.
If I’m ever in a similar situation again, I’ll understand that you don’t have to try to coax somebody out of depression. It’s enough to show that you have some understanding of what they are enduring. It’s enough to create an atmosphere in which they can share their experience. It’s enough to offer them the comfort of being seen.
Empathy consists of at least three related skills. First, there is the skill of mirroring. This is the act of accurately catching the emotion of the person in front of you.
A person who is good at mirroring smiles at smiles, yawns at yawns, and frowns at frowns. He unconsciously attunes his breathing patterns, heart rate, speaking speed, posture, and gestures and even his vocabulary levels. He does this because a good way to understand what another person is feeling in their body is to live it out yourself in your own body, at least to some extent.
People who are good at mirroring, by contrast, have high emotional granularity and experience the world in rich, supple ways. They can distinguish between similar emotions, such as anger, frustration, pressure, stress, anxiety, angst, and irritation.
The second empathy skill is not mirroring but mentalizing. As with all modes of perception, we ask, “What is this similar to?” When I see what a friend is experiencing, I go back to a time in my life when I experienced something like that. I make predictions about what my friend is going through based on what I had to go through.
The third empathy skill is caring. Caring involves getting out of my experiences and understanding that what you need may be very different from what I would need in that situation.
Caring involves getting out of my experiences and understanding that what you need may be very different from what I would need in that situation. This is hard. The world is full of people who are nice; there are many fewer who are effectively kind.
When you meet someone with cancer, it feels empathetic to tell the person how sorry you are, but my friend Kate Bowler, who actually has cancer, says that the people who show empathy best are those “who hug you and give you impressive compliments that don’t feel like a eulogy. People who give you non-cancer-thematic gifts. People who just want to delight you, not try to fix you, and who make you realize that it is just another beautiful day and there is usually something fun to do.” That is what caring looks like.
Here are some practices that can help you develop your empathy skills:
How do we help each other go back into the past and reinvent the story of our lives?
First, friends can ask each other the kinds of questions that help people see more deeply into their own childhoods. Psychologists recommend that you ask your friend to fill in the blanks to these two statements: “In our family, the one thing you must never do is _____” and “In our family, the one thing you must do above all else is ________.” That’s a way to help a person see more clearly the deep values that were embedded in the way they were raised.
“This Is Your Life.” This is a game some couples play at the end of each year. They write out a summary of the year from their partner’s point of view. That is, they write, in the first person, about what challenges their partner faced and how he or she overcame them. Reading over these first-person accounts of your life can be an exhilarating experience. You see yourself through the eyes of one who loves you. People who have been hurt need somebody they trust to narrate their life, stand up to their own self-contempt, and believe the best of them.
“Filling in the Calendar.” This involves walking through periods of the other person’s life, year by year. What was your life like in second grade? In third grade?
Open your notebook. Set a timer for twenty minutes. Write about your emotional experiences. Don’t worry about punctuation or sloppiness. Go wherever your mind takes you. Write just for yourself. Throw it out at the end.
Put aside all the self-conscious exercises and just have serious conversations with friends. If you’ve lost someone dear to you, tell each other stories about that person. Reflect on the strange journey that is grief; tell new stories about what life will look like in the years ahead.
The Big Five traits are extroversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness. To be used to study personality traits instead of Myers-Briggs:
Extroverts don’t have to be out with people all the time. They just are driven to powerfully pursue some sort of pleasure, some sort of positive reward.
People who score high in extroversion can be quick to anger. They take more risks and are more likely to die in traffic accidents. They are more likely to abuse alcohol in adolescence and less likely to save for retirement. Extroverts live their lives as a high-reward/high-risk exercise.
People who score low on extroversion just seem more chill. Such people have slower and less volatile emotional responses to things. They are often creative, thoughtful, and intentional. They like having deeper relationships with fewer people. Their way of experiencing the world is not lesser than that of high-extroversion people, just different.
People high in conscientiousness experience more guilt. They are well suited to predictable environments but less well suited to unpredictable situations that require fluid adaptation. They are sometimes workaholics. There can be an obsessive or compulsive quality to them.
If there’s a need for social change, it’s useful to have indignant people who are calling for it. In a world in which most people are overconfident about their abilities and overly optimistic about the outcomes of their behavior, there’s a benefit in having some people who lean the other way.
In the workplace, agreeableness is a mixed trait. Those high in agreeableness do not always get the big promotions or earn the most money. People sometimes think, rightly or wrongly, that high agreeables are not tough enough, that they won’t make the unpopular decisions. Often it’s the people who score lower on agreeableness who get appointed to CEO jobs and make the big bucks.
A person with this consciousness has a greater capacity to experience another person’s experience.
People are quick to form cliques and think a lot about social status. The interpersonal person’s ultimate question is: Do you like me?
Often develop a more individualistic mindset: I am the captain of my own ship, the master of my own destiny. They become better at self-control, at governing their emotions. They possess a greater ability to go against the crowd. They are able to say no to things that might distract them from their core mission.
Many people adopt the generative mindset when they get promoted to a leadership position.
A generative leader serves the people under him, lifts other people’s vision to higher sights, and helps other people become better versions of themselves.
Integrity vs. Despair: Integrity is the ability to come to terms with your life in the face of death.
Despair, by contrast, is marked by a sense of regret.
People in this stage often have a strong desire to learn.
Wisdom at this phase of life is the ability to see the connections between things. It’s the ability to hold opposite truths—contradictions and paradoxes—in the mind at the same time, without wrestling to impose some linear order. It’s the ability to see things from multiple perspectives.
“Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they are finished.”
We don’t start conversations because we’re bad at predicting how much we’ll enjoy them. We underestimate how much others want to talk; we underestimate how much we will learn; we underestimate how quickly other people will want to go deep and get personal.
People are eager, often desperate, to be seen, heard, and understood. And yet we have built a culture, and a set of manners, in which that doesn’t happen. The way you fix that is simple, easy, and fun: Ask people to tell you their stories.
I’m no longer content to ask, “What do you think about X?” Instead, I ask, “How did you come to believe X?” This is a framing that invites people to tell a story about what events led them to think the way they do.
Similarly, I don’t ask people to tell me about their values; I say, “Tell me about the person who shaped your values most.” That prompts a story.
Where’d you grow up? When did you know that you wanted to spend your life this way?
What did you want to be when you were a kid? What did your parents want you to be?
The people who address themselves in the second or even the third person have less anxiety, give better speeches, complete tasks more efficiently, and communicate more effectively. If you’re able to self-distance in this way, you should.
People commonly named four types of inner voices: the Faithful Friend (who tells you about your personal strengths), the Ambivalent Parent (who offers caring criticism), the Proud Rival (who badgers you to be more successful), and the Helpless Child (who has a lot of self-pity).
So when I’m listening to someone tell their story, I’m also asking myself, What characters does this person have in his head? Is this a confident voice or a tired voice, a regretful voice or an anticipating voice?
The next question I’m asking myself as people tell me their stories is: Who is the hero here?
We live our childhoods at least twice. First, we live through them with eyes of wonderment, and then later in life we have to revisit them to understand what it all meant.
When I’m looking at you, and trying to know you, I’m going to want to ask you how your ancestors show up in your life. And if you are looking at me, you’ll want to ask how the past lives in me.
I’ve come to believe that wise people don’t tell us what to do; they start by witnessing our story. They take the anecdotes, rationalizations, and episodes we tell, and see us in a noble struggle. They see the way we’re navigating the dialectics of life—intimacy versus independence, control versus uncertainty—and understand that our current self is just where we are right now, part of a long continuum of growth.
Wise people don’t tell you what to do; they help you process your own thoughts and emotions.
She who only looks inward will find only chaos, and she who looks outward with the eyes of critical judgment will find only flaws. But she who looks with the eyes of compassion and understanding will see complex souls, suffering and soaring, navigating life as best they can.