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

by David Brooks

Crucial Conversations, is that every conversation takes place on two levels: the official conversation and the actual conversation. The official conversation is represented by the words we say about whatever topic we are nominally discussing: politics, economics, workplace issues—whatever. The actual conversation occurs in the ebb and flow of underlying emotions that get transmitted as we talk. With every comment you are either making me feel a little more safe or a little more threatened. With every comment I am showing you either respect or disrespect. With every comment we are each revealing something about our intentions: Here is why I am telling you this. Here is why this is important to me. It is the volley of these underlying emotions that will determine the success or failure of the conversation.

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.

You break the momentum by asking the other person, “How did we get to this tense place?” Then you do something the experts call “splitting.” Splitting is when you clarify your own motives by first saying what they are not and then saying what they are. You say something like “I certainly wasn’t trying to silence your voice. I was trying to include your point of view with the many other points of view on this topic. But I went too fast. I should have paused to try to hear your voice fully, so we could build from that reality. That was not respectful to you.” Then you try to reidentify the mutual purpose of the conversation.

“affordances.” A hunter with a gun will see a much bigger field than a hunter with a spear because he has a much wider range of action. A police officer who is holding a gun is more likely to “see” other people holding guns than he would if he were holding a shoe, which is partly why 25 percent of police shootings involve unarmed suspects.

“We perceive the world, not as it is but as it is for us.”

What do my physical, intellectual, social, and economic capacities enable me to do in this situation? If you and I are out with a group contemplating a hike up a mountain, different members of the group are literally seeing different mountains, depending on how fit or unfit we are. Rich people walk into Neiman Marcus and see a different store than poor people do, because rich people actually have the capacity to buy things in that store.

learned, very gradually, that a friend’s job in these circumstances is not to cheer the person up. It’s to acknowledge the reality of the situation; it’s to hear, respect, and love them; it’s to show them you haven’t given up on them, you haven’t walked away.

True friendship offers deep satisfactions, but it also imposes vulnerabilities and obligations, and to pretend it doesn’t is to devalue friendship.”

Every child, even from birth, is looking for answers to the basic questions of life: Am I safe? How does love work? Am I worthy? Will I be cared for? Even in infancy, we internalize answers to those questions based on what we see around

us and how we are treated. This education happens even though later, as adults, we have no conscious memory of this period at all.

When, in adulthood, you get to know someone really well, you often develop a sense for how they were raised. You see in some people’s current insecurities how as children they must have been diminished and criticized. You see, in their terror over being abandoned, how they must have felt left behind when young. On the other hand, when you meet people w...

you sense how as children they must have felt ill...

The problem is that we as parents still carry, often unconsciously, the wounds and terrors of our own early years, which were, in turn, caused by the wounds and terrors of our parents’ early years, and so on and so on. The wounds and traumas get passed down from generation to generation.

The study found—and this was a surprise decades ago—that the quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life. But relationships in childhood had a special power. At one point the directors of the study wondered why some of the men in the study were promoted to officers during World War II and others weren’t. They found that the number one factor that correlated with success in wartime was not IQ, physical endurance, or socioeconomic background. The number one factor was the overall warmth of the man’s family home. The men who had been well loved and seen deeply by their parents could offer love and care to the men under their command.

you hope to know someone well, you have to know something about the struggles and blessings of their childhoods and the defensive architecture they carry through life.

AVOIDANCE. Avoidance is usually about fear. Emotions and relationships have hurt me, so I will minimize emotions and relationships. People who are avoidant feel most comfortable when the conversation stays superficial. They often overintellectualize life. They retreat to work. They try to be self-sufficient and pretend they don’t have needs. Often, they have not had close relationships as kids and have lowered their expectations about future relationships. A person who fears intimacy in this way may be always on the move, preferring not to be rooted or pinned down; they are sometimes relentlessly positive so as not to display vulnerability; they engineer things so they are the strong one others turn to but never the one who turns to others.

DEPRIVATION. Some children are raised around people so self-centered that the needs of the child are ignored. The child naturally learns the lesson “My needs won’t be met.” It is a short step from that to “I’m not worthy.” A person haunted by a deprivation schema can experience feelings of worthlessness throughout life no matter how many amazing successes they achieve.

They sometimes grapple with a fierce inner critic.

OVERREACTIVITY. Children who are abused and threatened grow up in a dangerous world. The person afflicted in this way often has, deep in their nervous system, a hyperactive threat-detection system. Such people interpret ambivalent situations as menacing situations, neutral faces as angry faces.

PASSIVE AGGRESSION. Passive aggression is the indirect expression of anger. It is a way to sidestep direct communication by a person who fears conflict, who has trouble dealing with negative emotions.

like “The most important thing in life is…” or “I’m only safe when…” For example, I know plenty of people in politics who have built up overreactive defensive models. For them the most important thing is to struggle against injustice.

The psychologist Jonathan Haidt says that if you find what is sacred to a person, there you will find “rampant irrationality.” A person with an overreactive defense architecture is thinking, My critics or opponents are not just wrong, they are evil.

The lessons we learned about how to survive childhood are often obsolete by the time we hit adulthood. But we continue to see the world through these old models; our actions are still guided by our old models. This is called “conceptual blindness” and explains why very smart people can

sometimes do phenomenally stupid things. Think,

some point in their lives, most people come to realize that some of their models are no longer working. The defenses they built up in childhood are limiting them in adulthood. The avoidant person wants to become more attached. The person with a deprivation schema wants to feel her full worth.

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. They need friends who will remind them, “The most important part of your life is ahead of you, not behind you. I’m proud to know you and proud of everything you’ve accomplished and will accomplish.” They need people who will practice empathy.

Empathy consists of at least three related skills. First, there is the skill of mirroring. This is the act of accurately catching the emotion of the person in front of you.

Some people are not good at recognizing emotions. They have low emotional granularity. Such people have just a few emotional concepts in their head.

“projective” empathy: the act of projecting my memories onto your situation. As we do this, we rise to a higher level of empathy. We don’t see “woman crying.” We see “woman who has suffered a professional setback and a public humiliation.” I’ve been through a version

empathy skill is caring. Con artists are very good at reading people’s emotions, but we don’t call

“There were many times when we felt blessed. It was as though certain death had granted us an extra life.”

a subtext of this book is that experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you, then one of the subsequent lessons is that to know someone who has grieved, you have to know how they have processed their loss—did they emerge wiser, kinder, and stronger, or broken, stuck, and scared? To be a good friend and a good person you have to know how to accompany someone through this process.

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.

Illuminator ideal. The Illuminator ideal begins with a different understanding of human nature. 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.

But the Illuminator is not just there to see the depths of your pain, she’s there to see your strength, to celebrate with you in your triumphs. How do you see and recognize the gifts other people bring to the world? That is the subject of the final section of this book.

healthy society depends on a wide variety of human types. Such a society has outgoing people to serve as leaders, organized people to make companies and schools run smoothly, curious people to invent new products and try on new ideas, nervous people to warn of danger, and kind people to care for the sick and ill. Fortunately, evolution has helped us out here. Human beings come into this world with a wide variety of personalities, which prepare them to serve a wide variety of social roles. As Rabbi Abraham Kook put it, God “dealt kindly with his world by not putting all the talents in one

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

EXTROVERSION. We often think of extroverts as people who derive energy from other people. In fact, people who score high in extroversion are highly drawn to all positive emotions. They are excited by any chance to experience pleasure, to seek thrills, to win social approval. They are motivated more by the lure of rewards than the fear of punishment.

CONSCIENTIOUSNESS. If extroverts are the people you want livening up your party, those who score high in conscientiousness are often the ones you want managing your organization. People who score high on this trait have excellent impulse control.

upsides, like all traits, it also has its downsides too. People high in conscientiousness experience more guilt. They are well suited to predictable environments but less well suited to unpredictable situations that require fluid adaptation.

NEUROTICISM. If extroverts are drawn to positive emotions, people who score high in neuroticism respond powerfully to negative emotions. They feel fear, anxiety, shame, disgust, and sadness very quickly and very acutely. They are sensitive to potential threats. They are more likely to worry than to be calm, more highly strung than laid-back, more vulnerable than resilient. If there is an angry face in a crowd, they will fixate on it and have trouble drawing their attention away.

neuroticism have more emotional ups and downs over the course of the day. They can fall into a particular kind of emotional spiral: They are quick to see threats and negative emotions; they interpret ambiguous events more negatively; they are therefore exposed to more negative experiences; this exposure causes them to believe even more strongly that the world is a dangerous place; and thus they grow even more likely to see threats; and so on and so on. They often feel uncomfortable with uncertainty; they prefer the devil they know to the devil they don’t know.

They are quick to make unrealistic plans for themselves and quick to abandon them. Even though they are always ready to perceive danger, neurotics often enter into relationships with precisely those people who will threaten them. They also have a lot of negative emotions toward themselves, and think they deserve what they get.

AGREEABLENESS. Those who score high on agreeableness are good at getting along with people. They are compassionate, considerate, helpful, and accommodating toward others. Such people tend to be trusting, cooperative, and kind—good-natured rather than foul-tempered, softhearted rather than hard-edged, polite more than rude, forgiving more than vengeful.

Agreeableness, which is basically being kind, doesn’t seem like a very romantic or sexy trait, but high agreeables have lower divorce rates and in some studies are found to be better in bed. In his book The Science of Happily Ever After, Ty Tashiro advises that when picking a marriage partner, it’s best to go with agreeableness and avoid neuroticism.

OPENNESS. If agreeableness describes a person’s relationship to other people, openness describes their relationship to information. People who score high on this trait are powerfully motivated to have new experiences and to try on new ideas. They tend to be innovative more than conventional, imaginative and associative rather than linear, curious more than closed-minded. They tend not to impose a predetermined ideology on the world and to really enjoy cognitive exploration, just wandering around in a subject.

If Dad is low in agreeableness and thus quick to criticize and his daughter is high on neuroticism and sensitive to negative emotion, she will hear even his mild critiques as a brutal attack. What seems gentle to him seems violent to her. Dad has to modulate his tone and approach if he wants his daughter to hear what he is saying, and if he wants to preserve a loving relationship. Danielle Dick adds that a lot of parenting is pushing gently against your kid’s traits: encouraging your timid child to try new experiences or teaching your extroverted child to slow down and have some quiet time. Punishing children so they won’t repeat bad behavior doesn’t work, she argues. Focusing on the “positive opposite” does. Instead of calling attention to the behavior you want your child to stop, call attention to the behavior you want them to do.

and especially neuroticism, were found to be modifiable through clinical intervention, with changes being on average half of a standard deviation over periods as short as 6 weeks.” In general, people get better as they age. They become more agreeable, conscientious, and emotionally stable versions of themselves.

How Babies Think, Alison Gopnik, Andrew Meltzoff, and Patricia Kuhl point out that newborns are nearsighted. An object a foot away—like the face of a nursing mother—is in sharp focus, but everything farther away is blurred. To a newborn, the world looks like a bunch of Rembrandt portraits: brightly lit faces,

The life tasks continue to roll, throughout one’s life. The theme of this chapter is that if you want to understand someone well, you have to understand what life task they are in the middle of and how their mind has evolved to complete this task.