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

by David Brooks

“She knocks softly and then goes away if we don’t answer the door.” The questions she asks

‘paint oneself into a corner.’

“I’ll just leave you two alone to talk about this further.”

willingly to witnesses than teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it’s because they are witnesses.”

art of presence.

say some wise thing; you just have to be

privilege of having been seen by someone and

the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have

them for however brief a span, on a journe...

umpteenth

insipid

vignette

person processes and experiences any given event in their own unique

normal times our subjective consciousness changes gradually, but in the

shocking events it can change all at once.

you have to know what you are looking at. You have to know

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

“constructionism.”

“The mind is its own place,” the poet John Milton wrote, “and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell

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

“Scientific evidence shows that what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are largely simulations of the world, not reactions to it.” Most of us non-neuroscientists are not aware of

Proustian

surreptitiously

drab,

There are roughly eight billion people on Earth, and each one of them sees the world in their own unique, never-to-be-repeated way.

Illuminators, we need to first ask questions and engage with answers. We need to ask: How does this look to you? Do you see the same situation

need to ask: What are the experiences and beliefs that cause you to see it that way? For example, I might ask, What happened to you in childhood that makes you still see the world from the vantage point of an outsider? What was it about your home life that makes

models we use to construct reality.

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.”

portentous,

You have to ask them.

Because getting to know someone else is usually more about talking and listening than about seeing.

raconteur,

Arthur Balfour was a British statesman renowned for, among other things, the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which announced British support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

good conversation sparks you to have thoughts you never had before. A good conversation starts in one place and ends up in another.

speaks at the rate of about 120 to 150

Watch Oprah Winfrey,

slowing pause that invites deeper reflection.

“novelty penalty”

People have trouble picturing and getting excited about the unfamiliar, but they love to talk about what they know.

People aren’t specific enough when they tell stories. They tend to leave out the concrete details.

They don’t only want to talk about what happened, they want to know how you experienced

listens to learn, rather than to respond. That means she’ll wait for the end of the other person’s comment, and then pause for a few beats to consider how to respond to what’s been said, holding up her

Taking that extra breath creates space for reflection.

Japanese businesspeople found that they are typically comfortable with eight-second pauses

Looping forces you to listen more carefully. Other people will sense the change in you.

but to receive and build on the insights the other person is developing. The midwife is there to make the person feel safe, but she is also there to prod. There are always ways we’re

clearness committee. The committee is a group of peers

Sometimes we can’t understand personal truths until we hear ourselves say them.