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“David doesn’t always play with the other children. A lot of the time he stands off to the side and observes them.”
I felt most alive when I was engaged in the solitary business of writing.
If you had met me ten years out of college, I think you would have found me a pleasant enough guy, cheerful but a tad inhibited—not somebody who was easy to get to know or who found it easy to get to know you. In truth, I was a practiced escape artist. When other people revealed some vulnerable intimacy to me, I was good at making meaningful eye contact with their shoes and then excusing myself to keep a vitally important appointment with my dry cleaner. I had a sense that this wasn’t an ideal way of being. I felt painfully awkward during those moments when someone tried to connect with me. I
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Life has a way of tenderizing you, though.
Later, I absorbed my share of the blows that any adult suffers: broken relationships, public failures, the vulnerability that comes with getting older. The ensuing sense of my own frailty was good for me, introducing me to deeper, repressed parts of myself.
But over the years I came to realize that living in a detached way is, in fact, a withdrawal from life, an estrangement not just from other people but from yourself.
I had these novel experiences: “What are these tinglings in my chest? Oh, they’re feelings!” One day, I’m dancing at a concert: “Feelings are great!” Another day, I’m sad that my wife is away on a trip: “Feelings suck!” My life goals changed, too. 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.
After we were done taping the second interview, Oprah came up to me and said, “I’ve rarely seen someone change so much. You were so blocked before.” That was a proud moment for me. I mean, she should know—she’s Oprah.
Being open-hearted is a prerequisite for being a full, kind, and wise human being. But it is not enough. People need social skills. We talk about the importance of “relationships,” “community,” “friendship,” “social connection,” but these words are too abstract.
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;...
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These are some of the most important skills a human being can possess, and yet we don’t teach them in school. Some days it seems like we have intentionally built a society that gives people little guidance on how to perform the most important activities of ...
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Above almost any other need, human beings long to have another person look into their face with loving respect and acceptance. It’s that we lack practical knowledge about how to giv...
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The humanities, which teach us what goes on in the minds of other people, have become marginalized. And a life spent on social media is not exactly helping people learn these skills.
On social media you can have the illusion of social contact without having to perform the gestures that actually build trust, care, and affection. On social media, stimulation replaces intimacy. There is judgment everywhere and understanding nowhere.
On the other hand, there are few things as fulfilling as that sense of being seen and understood. I often ask people to tell me about times they’ve felt seen, and with glowing eyes they tell me stories about pivotal moments in their life. They talk about a time when someone perceived some talent in them that they themselves weren’t even able to see. They talk about a time when somebody understood exactly what they needed at some exhausted moment—and stepped in, in just the right way, to lighten the load.
Life goes a lot better if you can see things from other people’s points of view, as well as your own. “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.”
There is something in being seen that brings forth growth.
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.
A biographer of the novelist E. M. Forster wrote, “To speak to him was to be seduced by an inverse charisma, a sense of being listened to with such intensity that you had to be your most honest, sharpest, and best self.” Imagine how good it would be to be that guy.
You’re not as good as you think you are.
Intriguingly, Ickes finds that the longer many couples are married, the less accurate they are at reading each other.
Psychologists are trained to see the defenses people build up to protect themselves from their deepest fears.
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.
“A lot of brilliant writers and thinkers don’t have any sense for how people operate,” the therapist and author Mary Pipher once told me. “To be able to understand people and be present for them in their experience—that’s the most important thing in the world.”
the size-up.
The untrained eye is not enough. You’d never think of trying to fly a plane without going to flight school. Seeing another person well is even harder than that. If you and I are relying on our untrained ways of encountering others, we won’t be seeing each other as deeply as we should.
“She doesn’t even know I’m there.”
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 kind of community builders who knit towns and neighborhoods together, who drive civic life.
It’s not hard to find such people. You simply go to a place and ask residents, “Who is trusted around here? Who makes this place run?”
By projecting a different quality of attention, Jimmy called forth a different version of her. Jimmy is an Illuminator.
At that moment, I began to fully appreciate the power of attention. Each of us has a characteristic way of showing up in the world, a physical and mental presence that sets a tone for how people interact with us. Some people walk into a room with an expression that is warm and embracing; others walk in looking cool and closed up. Some people first encounter others with a gaze that is generous and loving; other people regard those they meet with a formal and aloof gaze. That gaze, that first sight, represents a posture toward the world. A person who is looking for beauty is likely to find
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If children can show themselves and the world that they are competent, they will develop a sense of self-confidence.
“Nature’s wants are small, while those of opinion are limitless.”
The psychologist Brian Little argues that people generally have on average fifteen “personal projects” going at any one time. These can be small, like learning to surf, or larger, like serving as an apprentice to a plumber.
People in the midst of career consolidation 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. During this phase, people can appear a bit selfish and egotistical, but as George Vaillant of the Grant Study argued, “only when developmental ‘self-ishness’ has been achieved are we reliably capable of giving the self away.”
“the world’s poor are the responsibility of the world’s rich.”
He had reinvented his own consciousness and reinvented his past to fit the person he now was.
A generative person gives others the gift of admiration—seeing them for the precious creatures they are. She gives the gift of patience—understanding that people are always developing. He gives them the gift of presence.
In the aftermath, one of his friends took him out to dinner every Sunday night for two years—the definition of a generative act.
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.
My hope is that this focus on life tasks can help remind that each person you meet is at one spot on their lifelong process of growth. We are often blind to how much we are changing.
As the saying goes, they are not going to solve their problem at the same level of consciousness at which they created it.
Apparently we live in a society in which people don’t get to tell their stories. We work and live around people for years without ever knowing their tales. How did it come to be this way?
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.
The psychologist Jerome Bruner distinguished between two different modes of thinking, which he called the paradigmatic mode and the narrative mode. The paradigmatic mode is analytical. It’s making an argument. It’s a mental state that involves amassing data, collecting evidence, and offering hypotheses.
The ability to craft an accurate and coherent life story is yet another vital skill we don’t teach people in school. But coming up with a personal story is centrally important to leading a meaningful life.
You can’t know who you are unless you know how to tell your story. You can’t have a stable identity unless you take the inchoate events of your life and give your life meaning by turning the events into a coherent story.
Thus I now work hard to push against the paradigmatic pressures of our culture, and to “storify” life. “This is what fools people,” the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once observed. “A man is always a teller of stories. He lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that
