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

by David Brooks

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.

aka empathy

“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.

In every crowd there are Diminishers and there are Illuminators. Diminishers make people feel small and unseen. They see other people as things to be used, not as persons to be befriended. They stereotype and ignore. They are so involved with themselves that other people are just not on their radar screen. 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.

William Ickes, a leading scholar on how accurate people are at perceiving what other people are thinking, finds that strangers who are in the midst of their first conversation read each other accurately only about 20 percent of the time and close friends and family members do so only 35 percent of the time. Ickes rates his research subjects on a scale of “empathic accuracy” from 0 to 100 percent and finds great variation from person to person. Some people get a zero rating. When they are in conversation with someone they’ve just met, they have no clue what the other person is actually thinking. But other people are pretty good at reading others and score around 55 percent. (The problem is that people who are terrible at reading others think they are just as good as those who are pretty accurate.)

“To be able to understand people and be present for them in their experience—that’s the most important thing in the world.”

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.

A person who is looking for beauty is likely to find wonders, while a person looking for threats will find danger. A person who beams warmth brings out the glowing sides of the people she meets, while a person who conveys formality can meet the same people and find them stiff and detached.

this posture of respect and reverence, this awareness of the infinite dignity of each person you meet, is a precondition for seeing people well.

When you’re practicing Illuminationism, you’re offering a gaze that says, “I want to get to know you and be known by you.” It’s a gaze that positively answers the question everybody is unconsciously asking themselves when they meet you: “Am I a person to you? Do you care about me? Am I a priority for you?” The answers to those questions are conveyed in your gaze before they are conveyed by your words. It’s a gaze that radiates respect. It’s a gaze that says that every person I meet is unique, unrepeatable, and, yes, superior to me in some way. Every person I meet is fascinating on some topic. If I approach you in this respectful way, I’ll know that you are not a puzzle that can be solved but a mystery that can never be gotten to the bottom of. I’ll do you the honor of suspending judgment and letting you be as you are. Respect is a gift you offer with your eyes.

We’re becoming comfortable with each other, and comfort is no small thing. Nothing can be heard in the mind until the situation feels safe and familiar to the body.

In the midst of play, people relax, become themselves, and connect without even trying. 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.

Aldous Huxley captured the core reality: “Experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you.”

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

“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.”

A lot of people think a good conversationalist is someone who can tell funny stories. That’s a raconteur, but it’s not a conversationalist.

A good conversation is not a group of people making a series of statements at each other. (In fact, that’s a bad conversation.) A good conversation is an act of joint exploration. Somebody floats a half-formed idea. Somebody else seizes on the nub of the idea, plays with it, offers her own perspective based on her own memories, and floats it back so the other person can respond. A good conversation sparks you to have thoughts you never had before. A good conversation starts in one place and ends up in another.

The solution as a listener is to treat attention as all or nothing. If you’re here in this conversation, you’re going to stop doing anything else and just pay attention to this. You’re going to apply 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.

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. They’re wise to take that pause.

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

DON’T BE A TOPPER. If somebody tells you they are having trouble with their teenage son, don’t turn around and say, “I know exactly what you mean. I’m having incredible problems with my Steven.” You may think you’re trying to build a shared connection, but what you are really doing is shifting attention back to yourself. You’re saying, in effect, “Your problems aren’t that interesting to me; let me tell you about my own, much more fascinating ones.” If you want to build a shared connection, try sitting with their experience before you start ladling out your own.

When you ask people about their lives, David finds, they tend to start in the middle—with their career. So he’ll ask, “Take me back to when you were born.” In this way he can get people out of talking about their professional life and into talking about their personal life.

Humble questions are open-ended. They’re encouraging the other person to take control and take the conversation where they want it to go. These are questions that begin with phrases like “How did you…,” “What’s it like…,” “Tell me about…,” and “In what ways…”

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?”

“What would you do if you weren’t afraid?”

“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?”

He is a master at coming up with questions that lift you out of your ruts and invite fresh reevaluations. Here are some of his: “What is the no, or refusal, you keep postponing?…What have you said yes to that you no longer really believe in?…What forgiveness are you withholding?…How have you contributed to the problem you’re trying to solve?…What is the gift you currently hold in exile?” Mónica Guzmán, the journalist I quoted in the last chapter, asks people, “Why you?” Why was it you who started that business? Why was it you who felt a responsibility to run for the school board?

“Tell me about a time you adapted to change.” “What’s working really well in your life?” “What are you most self-confident about?” “Which of your five senses is strongest?” “Have you ever been solitary without feeling lonely?” or “What has become clearer to you as you have aged?”

The Scots have a word that’s useful in this context: “ken”; you may be familiar with it from the expression “beyond your ken.” It comes from sailors who used the word to describe the area as far as they could see to the horizon. 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. The authors of Crucial Conversations observe that in any conversation, respect is like air. When it’s present nobody notices, but when it’s absent it’s all anybody can think about.

Storr says you can get a sense for somebody’s models, especially the defensive ones, by asking them to complete sentences like “The most important thing in life is…” or “I’m only safe when…”

CONTACT THEORY. Decades ago, the psychologist Gordon Allport built on the obvious point that it’s hard to hate people close up.

SUFFERING. As Montaigne once observed, you can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but you can’t be wise with other men’s wisdom. There are certain things you simply have to live through in order to understand.

“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.

Open your notebook. Set a timer for twenty minutes. Write about your emotional experiences. Don’t worry about punctuation or sloppiness. Go wherever your mind takes you. Write just for yourself. Throw it out at the end. In the beginning, people who take part in expressive-writing exercises sometimes use different voices and even different handwriting styles. Their stories are raw and disjointed. But then unconscious thoughts surface. They try on different perspectives. Their narratives grow more coherent and self-aware as the days go by. They turn from victims to writers.

People are social animals. People need recognition from others if they are to thrive. People long for someone to look into their eyes with loving acceptance.

The Big Five traits are extroversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness.

The psychologist Daniel Gilbert has a famous saying about this: “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they are finished.”

“All growth is costly,” Kegan writes. “It involves leaving behind an old way of being in the world.”

Robert Kegan, developmental psychologist

I’m no longer content to ask, “What do you think about X?” Instead, I ask, “How did you come to believe X?” This is a framing that invites people to tell a story about what events led them to think the way they do. Similarly, I don’t ask people to tell me about their values; I say, “Tell me about the person who shaped your values most.” That prompts a story.

Wisdom is knowing about people. Wisdom is the ability to see deeply into who people are and how they should move in the complex situations of life. That’s the great gift Illuminators share with those around them.

Wise people don’t tell you what to do; they help you process your own thoughts and emotions. They enter with you into your process of meaning-making and then help you expand it, push it along. All choice involves loss: If you take this job, you don’t take that one. Much of life involves reconciling opposites: I want to be attached, but I also want to be free. Wise people create a safe space where you can navigate the ambiguities and contradictions we all wrestle with. They prod and lure you along until your own obvious solution emerges into view. Their essential gift is receptivity, the capacity to receive what you are sending.

The knowledge that results from your encounter with a wise person is personal and contextual, not a generalization that can be captured in a maxim that can be pinned to a bulletin board. It is particular to your unique self and your unique situation. Wise people help you come up with a different way of looking at yourself, your past, and the world around you. Very often they focus your attention on your relationships, the in-between spaces that are so easy to overlook. How can this friendship or this marriage be nourished and improved? The wise person sees your gifts and potential, even the ones you do not see.

The way I try to see you represents my moral way of being in the world, which will either be generous and considerate or judgmental and cruel. So I am trying to cast the “just and loving attention” that Iris Murdoch wrote about.