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

by David Brooks

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 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.

The essence of evil is the tendency to obliterate the humanity of another.

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.

Ralph Ellison’s words at the start of Invisible Man still rank as one of the most profound expressions of what it is like to not feel seen, heard, or understood, in this case because of race. “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me,” the nameless narrator declares. “It is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me, they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.” Ellison writes that a person in this position wonders “whether you aren’t simply a phantom in other people’s minds.”

Remember that the person who is lower in any power structure than you are has a greater awareness of the situation than you do. A servant knows more about his master than the master knows about the servant. Someone who is being sat on knows a lot about the sitter—the way he shifts his weight and moves—whereas the sitter may not be aware that the sat-on person is even there.

Slapping a label on someone is a great way to render them invisible and destroy a hard conversation.

“We project our individual mental experience into the world, and thereby mistake our mental experience to be the physical world, oblivious to the shaping of perception by our sensory systems, personal histories, goals, and expectations,” Proffitt

I once toured a vineyard where the guy giving the tour explained that they don’t plant their vines in the kind of soil that is gentlest on the vines. They plant their vines in clay soil because clay resists the vines, and the vines grow strong by fighting against their environment. I feel like I know a lot of people like that, especially in politics. They’ve grown strong by resisting what is wrong with their environment.

In his 1949 book, Jesus and the Disinherited, the great Black theologian Howard Thurman, who had a lot to be angry about, wrote that “Jesus rejected hatred because he saw that hatred meant death to the mind, death to the spirit, and death to communion with his Father. He affirmed life; and hatred was the great denial.”

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. They need friends who can provide the outside view of them, the one they can’t see from within.

Decades later, Buechner came to the following realization: “The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and transformed by the holy power that life itself comes from.”

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.

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.

Grant, who writes about organizational psychology, once put it, the Myers-Briggs questionnaire is like asking someone, “What do you like more, shoelaces or earrings?” and expecting that question to produce a revealing answer.

The great journalist Nancy Dickerson once described John F. Kennedy in a way that makes me think he was high in openness: “To Jack, the cardinal sin was boredom; it was his biggest enemy, and he didn’t know how to handle it. When he was bored, a hood would come down over his eyes and his nervous system would start churning. You could do anything to him—steal his wallet, insult him, argue with him—but to bore him was unpardonable.”

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, and Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, the narrators have a world-weary tone. It’s like they’re looking back on glorious past events when dreams were fresh and the world seemed new and the disappointments of life had not yet settled in. That voice sounds to me like writing done in the minor key, and I find it tremendously moving.

in her voice, laughter is never very far away.

François de La Rochefoucauld issued the crucial warning here: “We are so used to disguising ourselves from others that we often end up by disguising ourselves from ourselves.”

He eventually wrote a book about Deo, called Strength in What Remains.

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.

following the advice in that sage W. H. Auden poem: “If equal affection cannot be / Let the more loving one be me.”