How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen, David Brooks (100%)

When I was young, I wanted to be knowledgeable, but as I got older, I wanted to be wise. Wise people don’t just possess information; they possess a compassionate understanding of other people. They know about life.
I learned something profound along the way. Being open-hearted is a prerequisite for being a full, kind, and wise human being. But it is not enough. People need social skills.
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. That is at the heart of being a good person, the ultimate gift you can give to others and to yourself.
Our social skills are currently inadequate to the pluralistic societies
Later she dined with Gladstone’s great rival, Benjamin Disraeli, and left that dinner thinking she was the cleverest person in England. It’s nice to be like Gladstone, but it’s better to be like Disraeli.
Part of the reason the Gornicks can’t see each other is because they pay attention only to the effect the other has on them.
I’m haunted by a phrase Vivian uses in the book: “She doesn’t even know I’m there.” Her own mother doesn’t know she’s there. How many people suffer through this feeling?
Iain McGilchrist writes, “is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being.” The quality of your life depends quite a bit on the quality of attention you project out onto the world.
“The shape of our knowledge becomes the shape of our living; the relation of the knower to the known becomes the relation of the living self to the larger world.” Palmer is saying that the way we attend to others determines the kind of person we become. If we see people generously, we will become generous, or if we view them coldly, we will become cold. Palmer’s observation is essential, because he is pointing to a modern answer to an ancient question: How do I become a better person?
“Nothing in life is of any value except the attempt to be virtuous,”
Even when you know someone well, I find that if you don’t talk about the little things on a regular basis, it’s hard to talk about the big things.
Events happen in our lives, but each person processes and experiences any given event in their own unique way. Aldous Huxley captured the core reality: “Experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you.”
Or, as the writer Anaïs Nin put it, “We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.”
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?
Or as the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett notes, “Scientific evidence shows that what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are largely simulations of the world, not reactions to it.”
I will not reduce you to a type or restrict you to a label, like many of those human-typology systems do—Myers-Briggs, the Enneagram, the zodiac, and so on. Instead, 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.
As the Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan has observed, what the eye sees more deeply the heart tends to love more tenderly.
George Bernard Shaw got it right: “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” good conversationalist is capable of leading people on a mutual expedition toward understanding.
If you’re here in this conversation, you’re going to stop doing anything else and just pay attention to this. You’re going to apply what some experts call the SLANT method: sit up, lean forward, ask questions, nod your head, track the speaker.
When you search for the disagreement under the disagreement, you are looking for the moral, philosophical roots of why you each believe what you do. You’re engaged in a mutual exploration. Suddenly, instead of just repeating our arguments, we’re pulling stories out of each other.
In my case, he asked me about three topics: my ultimate goals (What do you want to offer the world?), my skills (What are you doing when you feel most alive?), and my schedule (How exactly do you fill your days?).
These are questions that begin with phrases like “How did you…,” “What’s it like…,” “Tell me about…,” and “In what ways…”
“What crossroads are you at?” At any moment, most of us are in the middle of some transition. The question helps people focus on theirs. “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” Most people know that fear plays some role in their life, but they haven’t clearly defined how fear is holding them back. “If you died tonight, what would you regret not doing?” “If we meet a year from now, what will we be celebrating?” “If the next five years is a chapter in your life, what is that chapter about?” “Can you be yourself where you are and still fit in?”
“Tell me about a time you adapted to change.” “What’s working really well in your life?” “What are you most self-confident about?” “Which of your five senses is strongest?” “Have you ever been solitary without feeling lonely?” or “What has become clearer to you as you have aged?” —
Loneliness thus leads to meanness. As the saying goes, pain that is not transformed gets transmitted.
I realize the phrase “moral formation” may sound stuffy and archaic, but moral formation is really about three simple, practical things. First, it is about helping people learn how to restrain their selfishness and incline their heart to care more about others. Second, it’s about helping people find a purpose, so their life has stability, direction, and meaning. Third, it’s about teaching the basic social and emotional skills so you can be kind and considerate to the people around you. read books on the subject, of which my favorites include High Conflict by Amanda Ripley, I Never Thought of It That Way by Mónica Guzmán, and, especially, Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler.
The second crucial thing I learned, especially from the authors of Crucial Conversations, is that every conversation takes place on two levels: the official conversation and the actual conversation. The official conversation is represented by the words we say about whatever topic we are nominally discussing: politics, economics, workplace issues—whatever. The actual conversation occurs in the ebb and flow of underlying emotions that get transmitted as we talk. With every comment you are either making me feel a little more safe or a little more threatened. With every comment I am showing you either respect or disrespect. With every comment we are each revealing something about our intentions:
The authors of Crucial Conversations also remind us that every conversation exists within a frame: What is the purpose here? What are our goals?
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.
First, you step back from the conflict, and you try to figure out together what’s gone wrong. You break the momentum by asking the other person, “How did we get to this tense place?” Then you do something the experts call “splitting.” Splitting is when you clarify your own motives by first saying what they are not and then saying what they are.
I’ve learned over these years that hard conversations are hard because people in different life circumstances construct very different realities. It’s not only that they have different opinions about the same world; they literally see different worlds.
Proffitt and Baer hammer home the point: “We perceive the world, not as it is but as it is for us.”
Roman dramatist Terence: “I am human, and nothing human is alien to me.” 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.
Introspection isn’t the best way to repair your models; communication is. People trying to grapple with the adult legacies of their childhood wounds need friends who will prod them to see their situation accurately.
Children are very good at empathetic distress—feeling what you are feeling—but are not as good at empathetic concern: knowing what to do about it.
As Montaigne once observed, you can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but you can’t be wise with other men’s wisdom.
“What we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else,”
By sharing their stories and reinterpreting what they mean, people create new mental models they can use to construct a new reality and a new future. They are able to stand in the rubble of the life they thought they would live and construct from those stones a radically different life.
What matters most is not the strength of an individual’s willpower, but how skillfull she is in her social interactions. In the Illuminator model, we develop good character as we get more experienced in being present with others, as we learn to get outside our self-serving ways of perceiving. people who score high in extroversion are highly drawn to all positive emotions. They are excited by any chance to experience pleasure, to seek thrills, to win social approval. They are motivated more by the lure of rewards than the fear of punishment.
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.
They are quick to see threats and negative emotions; they interpret ambiguous events more negatively; they are therefore exposed to more negative experiences;
They often feel uncomfortable with uncertainty; they prefer the devil they know to the devil they don’t know.
I’ve adapted from the developmental psychologists, especially from scholars like Erik Erikson, the author of “Life Cycle Completed,” and Robert Kegan, author of “The Evolving Self.”
Integrity is the ability to come to terms with your life in the face of death. It’s a feeling of peace that you have used and are using your time well. You have a sense of accomplishment and acceptance. Despair, by contrast, is marked by a sense of regret. You didn’t lead your life as you believe you should have. Despair involves bitterness, ruminating over past mistakes, feeling unproductive.
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.
“Health is the ability to stand in the spaces between realities without losing any of them. This is what I believe self-acceptance means and what creativity is really all about—the capacity to feel like one self while being many.”
Daniel Gilbert has a famous saying about this: “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they are finished.”
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.
First, I’m listening for the person’s characteristic tone of voice. Just as every piece of writing has an implied narrator—the person the writer wants you to think he is—every person has a characteristic narrative tone: sassy or sarcastic, ironic or earnest, cheerful or grave. The narrative tone reflects the person’s basic attitude toward the world—is it safe or threatening, welcoming, disappointing, or absurd? A person’s narrative tone often reveals their sense of “self-efficacy,” their overall confidence in their own abilities.
She found that 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? By our late twenties or early thirties, most of us have what McAdams calls an imago, an archetype or idealized image of oneself that captures the role that person hopes to play in society.
The next question I ask myself when hearing stories is: How reliable is this narrator? I guess all of our stories are false and self-flattering to some degree.
Finally, when I’m hearing life stories, I’m looking for narrative flexibility. Life is a constant struggle to refine and update our stories.
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.
What you are is an expression of History.”
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.
Their essential gift is receptivity, the capacity to receive what you are sending. This is not a passive skill. The wise person is not just keeping her ears open. She is creating an atmosphere of hospitality, an atmosphere in which people are encouraged to set aside their fear of showing weakness, their fear of confronting themselves.
Henri Nouwen wrote. “Confrontation without receptivity leads to an oppressive aggression which hurts everybody.” brains. Our minds are intermingling. The cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter calls these circuits loops. He argues that when we communicate, and loops are flowing through different brains, we are thinking as one shared organism, anticipating each other, finishing each other’s sentences.
I realized that I have to work on my ability to spot the crucial conservational moments in real time. I have to learn how to ask the questions that will keep us in them, probing for understanding.

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How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen, David Brooks (100%) #74