How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

by David Brooks

My favorite saying about Chicago is this one: It’s a Baptist school where atheist professors teach Jewish students Saint Thomas Aquinas. The students there still wear T-shirts that read, “Sure it works in practice, but does it work in theory?”

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.

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.

“The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them,” George Bernard Shaw wrote, “but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.” To do that is to say: You don’t matter. You don’t exist.

If you’re going to retain someone in your company, you have to know how to make them feel appreciated. In a 2021 study, McKinsey asked managers why their employees were quitting their firms. Most of the managers believed that people were leaving to get more pay. But when the McKinsey researchers asked the employees themselves why they’d left, the top reasons were relational. They didn’t feel recognized and valued by their managers and organizations. They didn’t feel seen.

“The roots of resilience,” the psychologist Diana Fosha writes, “are to be found in the sense of being understood by and existing in the mind and heart of a loving, attuned, and self-possessed other.” In how you see me, I will learn to see myself.

Intriguingly, Ickes finds that the longer many couples are married, the less accurate they are at reading each other. They lock in some early version of who their spouse is, and over the years, as the other person changes, that version stays fixed—and they know less and less about what’s actually going on in the other’s heart and mind.

Willian Ickes

The only word I can think of in the English language that captures my mental processes at that instant is “beholding.” She was at the door, the light blazing in behind her, and I was beholding her. They say there is no such thing as an ordinary person. When you’re beholding someone, you’re seeing the richness of this particular human consciousness, the full symphony—how they perceive and create their life.

Being an Illuminator, seeing other people in all their fullness, doesn’t just happen. It’s a craft, a set of skills, a way of life. Other cultures have words for this way of being. The Koreans call it nunchi, the ability to be sensitive to other people’s moods and thoughts. The Germans (of course) have a word for it: herzensbildung, training one’s heart to see the full humanity in another.

“Tenderness is deep emotional concern about another being,” the novelist Olga Tokarczuk declared in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “Tenderness perceives the bonds that connect us, the similarities and the sameness between us.” Literature, she argued, “is built on tenderness toward any being other than ourselves.”

Trust is built slowly. The person who is good at accompaniment exercises what the philosopher Simone Weil called “negative effort.” This is the ability to hold back and be aware of the other person’s timetable. “We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them,” Weil wrote.

As D. H. Lawrence put it: Whoever wants life must go softly towards life, softly as one would go towards a deer and fawn that are nestling under a tree. One gesture of violence, one violent assertion of self-will and life is gone….But with quietness, with an abandon of self-assertion and a fullness of the deep true self one can approach another human being, and know the delicate best of life, the touch.

I wish I had followed some advice that is rapidly becoming an adage: Let others voluntarily evolve.

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.”

There is the objective reality of what happens, and there is the subjective reality of how what happened is seen, interpreted, made meaningful. That second subjective layer can sometimes be the more important layer.

As the Yale psychologist Marc Brackett puts it, “Well-being depends less on objective events than on how those events are perceived, dealt with, and shared with others.”

In other words, we may be at the same event together, but we’re each having our own experience of it. Or, as the writer Anaïs Nin put it, “We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.”

vice versa

A person is a point of view. Every person you meet is a creative artist who takes the events of life and, over time, creates a very personal way of seeing the world.

Like any artist, each person takes the experiences of a lifetime and integrates them into a complex representation of the world. That representation, the subjective consciousness that makes you you, integrates your memories, attitudes, beliefs, convictions, traumas, loves, fears, desires, and goals into your own distinct way of seeing.

If I want to see you, I want to see, at least a little bit, how you see the world. I want to see how you construct your reality, how you make meaning. I want to step, at least a bit, out of my point of view and into your point of view.

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.”

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.

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.

As the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett puts it, “Being curious about your friend’s experience is more important than being right.”

Big questions interrupt the daily routines people fall into and prompt them to step back and see their life from a distance. Here are some of my favorite questions that do that: “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?”

Politics doesn’t make you a better person; it’s about outer agitation, not inner formation. Politics doesn’t humanize. If you attempt to assuage your sadness, loneliness, or anomie through politics, it will do nothing more than land you in a world marked by a sadistic striving for domination.

When those of us in positions of power in the establishment media and the larger cultural institutions of society tell stories that don’t include you, it is disorienting and disenfranchising. It is as if you look into society’s mirror and find that you are not there. People rightly get furious when that happens.

Our encounters are shaped by our historical inheritances—the legacies of slavery, elitism, sexism, prejudice, bigotry, and economic and social domination. You can’t get to know another person while pretending not to see ideology, class, race, faith, identity, or any of the other fraught social categories.

I’ve talked to experts and 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.

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.

If you’re going to have a good hard conversation with someone, you have to step into their ken. If you step into someone’s ken, it shows that you at least want to understand. That’s a powerful way to show respect.

Micah Goodman, who teaches at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, once told me, “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.”

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.

How you see a situation depends on what you are capable of doing in a situation.

Gibson’s insight was that as we enter a scene, we’re looking for opportunities for action. How do I fit into this situation? What can I do here? What possibilities does this situation afford? In Gibson’s language, we see “affordances.”

Proffitt and Baer hammer home the point: “We perceive the world, not as it is but as it is for us.”

Dennis Proffitt

the great humanistic declaration made by the Roman dramatist Terence: “I am human, and nothing human is alien to me.”

The famous Grant Study followed 268 Harvard men from their days as college students in the 1940s until their deaths many decades later, in an attempt to discover the patterns of human development and achievement. The study found—and this was a surprise decades ago—that the quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life.

As the study’s longtime director George Vaillant put it, “Whereas a warm childhood, like a rich father, tends to inoculate a man against future pain, a bleak childhood is like poverty; it cannot cushion the difficulties of life. Yes, difficulties may sometimes lead to post-traumatic growth, and some men’s lives did improve over time. But there is always a high cost in pain and lost opportunities, and for many men with bleak childhoods the outlook remained bleak until they died, sometimes young and sometimes by their own hands.”

People who are good at mirroring also have what the Northeastern University neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett calls high “emotional granularity,” the ability to finely distinguish between different emotional states.

The world is full of people who are nice; there are many fewer who are effectively kind.

C. S. Lewis once observed that grief is not a state but a process. It’s a river that runs through a long valley, and at every turn a new landscape is revealed, and yet somehow it repeats and repeats.

The writer David Lodge once noted that 90 percent of what we call writing is actually reading. It’s going back over your work so you can change and improve it. The excavation task is like that. It’s going back and back over events. The goal is to try to create mental flexibility, the ability to have multiple perspectives on a single event. To find other ways to see what happened. To put the tragedy in the context of a larger story. As Maya Angelou once put it, “The more you know of your history, the more liberated you are.”

“I write,” Susan Sontag once remarked, “to define myself—an act of self-creation—part of the process of becoming.”

Personality traits are dispositional signatures. A personality trait is a habitual way of seeing, interpreting, and reacting to a situation. Every personality trait is a gift—it enables its bearer to serve the community in some valuable way.

As Brent Roberts and Hee J. Yoon wrote in a 2022 review on personality psychology, “Although it is still widely thought that personality is not changeable, recent research has roundly contradicted that notion. In a review of over 200 intervention studies, personality traits, and especially neuroticism, were found to be modifiable through clinical intervention, with changes being on average half of a standard deviation over periods as short as 6 weeks.”

if you want to understand someone well, you have to understand what life task they are in the middle of and how their mind has evolved to complete this task.

George Vaillant of the Grant Study argued, “only when developmental ‘self-ishness’ has been achieved are we reliably capable of giving the self away.”