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

by David Brooks

I’m not an exceptional person, but I am a grower. I do have the ability to look at my shortcomings, then try to prod myself into becoming a more fully developed human being.

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 are going to marry someone, you have to know not just about that person’s looks, interests, and career prospects but how the pains of their childhood show up in their adulthood, whether their deepest longings align with your own.

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.

No one can fully appreciate their own beauty and strengths unless those things are mirrored back to them in the mind of another.

“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.

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.

Perhaps you know the story that is sometimes told of Jennie Jerome, who later became Winston Churchill’s mother. It’s said that when she was young, she dined with the British statesman William Gladstone and left thinking he was the cleverest person in England. 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.

(The problem is that people who are terrible at reading others think they are just as good as those who are pretty accurate.)

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.

How often in your life have you felt stereotyped and categorized? How often have you felt prejudged, invisible, misheard, or misunderstood? Do you really think you don’t do this to others on a daily basis?

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.

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.”

But most of us have all sorts of inborn proclivities that prevent us from perceiving others accurately.

NAÏVE REALISM. This is the assumption that the way the world appears to you is the objective view, and therefore everyone else must see the same reality you do.

It’s disturbingly easy to be ignorant of the person right next to you.

Gornick’s book is so good because it illustrates that even in cases where we’re devoted to a person, and know a lot about them, it’s still possible to not see them. You can be loved by a person yet not be known by them.

The Germans (of course) have a word for it: herzensbildung, training one’s heart to see the full humanity in another.

A person who is looking for beauty is likely to find wonders, while a person looking for threats will find danger.

“Attention,” the psychiatrist 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.

Human beings are like rivers; the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within him the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently he is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.

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.

Sometimes you can learn more about a person by watching how they talk to a waiter than by asking some profound question about their philosophy of life.

“We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them,” Weil wrote.

Laughter is not just what comes after jokes. Laughter happens when our minds come together and something unexpected happens: We feel the ping of common recognition. We laugh to celebrate our shared understanding. We see each other.

Let others voluntarily evolve.

A writer could blast out her opinions, but writers are at their best not when they tell people what to think but when they provide a context within which others can think.

Pope Paul VI said it wonderfully: “Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it’s because they are witnesses.”

I recently read about a professor named Nancy Abernathy who was teaching first-year med students, leading a seminar on decision-making skills, when her husband, at age fifty, died of a heart attack while cross-country skiing near their Vermont home. With some difficulty, she managed to make it through the semester and carried on with her teaching. One day she mentioned to the class that she was dreading teaching the same course the next year, because each year, during one of the first sessions of the course, she asks everybody to bring in family photos so they can get to know one another. She wasn’t sure if she could share a photo of her late husband during that session without weeping. The course ended. Summer came and went, and fall arrived and, with it, the day she dreaded. The professor entered the lecture hall, full of trepidation, and sensed something strange: The room was too full. Sitting there, along with her current class, were the second-year students, the ones who had taken her class the year before. They had come simply to lend their presence during this hard session. They knew exactly what she needed, and didn’t need to offer anything more. “This is compassion,” Abernathy later remarked. “A simple human connection between the one who suffers and one who would heal.”

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.”

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.

Or, as the writer Anaïs Nin put it, “We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.”

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.

People don’t see the world with their eyes; they see it with their entire life.

Constructionism is the recognition, backed up by the last half century of brain research, that people don’t passively take in reality. Each person actively constructs their own perception of reality. That’s not to say there is not an objective reality out there. It’s to say that we have only subjective access to it.

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?

In my favorite experiment of this sort, a researcher asks a student for directions to a particular place on a college campus. The student starts giving directions. Then a couple of “workmen”—actually, two other researchers—rudely carry a door between the directions asker and the directions giver. As the door passes between them, the directions asker surreptitiously trades places with one of the workmen. After the door has passed, the directions giver finds himself giving directions to an entirely different human being. And the majority of these directions givers don’t notice. They just keep on giving directions. We don’t expect one human being to magically turn into another, and therefore we don’t see it when it happens.

Researchers like exposing the flaws in our way of seeing, but I’m constantly amazed at how brilliant the human mind is at constructing a rich, beautiful world. For example, in normal conversation, people often slur and mispronounce words. If you heard each word someone said in isolation, you wouldn’t be able to understand 50 percent of them. But because your mind is so good at predicting what words probably should be in what sentence, you can easily create a coherent flow of meaning from other people’s talk.

What happened to you in childhood that makes you still see the world from the vantage point of an outsider?

He viewed life through the prism of his ambition: “I who live in dissatisfaction, constant tension, running after dreams of glory and laying waste to my loves because I always imagine that one day, somewhere else, I’ll find something better.” He was imprisoned by a set of models that made him feel perpetually unsatisfied with his own life, perpetually unable to see the beauty of the people right around him.

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.”

If a person is a point of view, then to know them well you have to ask them how they see things.

Being a mediocre conversationalist is easy. Being a good conversationalist is hard.

TREAT ATTENTION AS AN ON/OFF SWITCH, NOT A DIMMER.

The problem is that the average person speaks at the rate of about 120 to 150 words a minute, which is not nearly enough data to occupy the brain of the person being spoken to.

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.

A study of Japanese businesspeople found that they are typically comfortable with eight-second pauses between one comment and another, roughly twice as long as Americans generally tolerate.

I’ve come to think of questioning as a moral practice. When you are asking a good question, you are adopting a posture of humility. You’re confessing that you don’t know and you want to learn. You’re also honoring a person.