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

by David Brooks

southern England who went to Virginia were more aristocratic. They built, when they could afford it, palatial homes, and had extended patriarchal families. They liked showy and frilly clothing, were more comfortable with class differences, and were

from northern England to Appalachia favored a more militant Christianity and ascribed to an honor culture. They were more violent and put a greater emphasis on clan and kin. Their child-rearing techniques fostered a fierce pride that celebrated courage and independence. They cultivated a strong warrior ethic. Sure enough, even today people from Appalachia make up a disproportionate share of the U.S. military.

When I’m looking at you, and trying to know you, I’m going to want to ask you how your ancestors show up in your life. And if you are looking at me, you’ll want to ask how the past lives in me. I recently attended a great dinner party during which everybody talked about how their ancestors have influenced their lives. Some people at the dinner were Dutch, some were Black, and some were something else, and we all developed interesting and revealing theories

have a deep reverence for the written word. For Jews, argument is a form of prayer, and I went into

the disputation business. Jews put intense focus on education and achievement, and so did my family.

when I see you, I want to see back into the deep sources of your self. That means asking certain key questions: Where’s home? What’s the place you spiritually never leave? How do the dead show up in your life? How do I see you embracing or rejecting your culture? How do I see you creating and contributing to your culture? How do I see you transmitting your culture? How do I see you rebelling against your culture? How do I see you caught between cultures?

I’ve come to believe that wise people don’t tell us what to do; they start by witnessing our story. They take the anecdotes, rationalizations, and episodes we tell, and see us in a noble struggle. They see the way we’re navigating the dialectics of life—intimacy versus independence, control versus uncertainty—and understand that our current self is just where we are right now, part of a long continuum of growth.

The really good confidants—the people we go to when we are troubled—are more like coaches than philosopher-kings. They take in your story, accept it, but push you to clarify what it is you really want, or to name the baggage you left out of your clean tale. They ask you to probe into what is really bothering you, to search for the deeper problem underneath the convenient surface problem you’ve come to them for help about.

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...

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.

She is creating an atmosphere of hospitality, an atmosphere in which people are encouraged to set aside their fear of showing weakness, their fear of confronting themselves. She is creating an atmosphere in which people swap stories, trade confidences. In this atmosphere people are free to be themselves, encouraged to be honest with themselves.

It involves showing positive regard, but also calling people on their self-deceptions. The Buddhists have a useful phrase for unconditional positive regard: “idiot compassion,” which is the kind of empathy that never challenges people’s stories or threatens to hurt their feelings. It consoles but also conceals. So Gottlieb challenged John, but not too aggressively.

truly receptive—particularly, the ability to be generous about human frailty, to be patient and let others emerge at their own pace—but it also illuminates the mental toughness that is sometimes required. The wise person is there not to be walked over but to stand up for the actual truth, to call the other person out when need be, if they are hiding from some hard reality. “Receptivity without confrontation leads to a bland neutrality that serves nobody,”

Wisdom is practiced when people come together to form what Parker Palmer called a “community of truth.” A community of truth can be as simple as a classroom—a teacher and students investigating some problem together. It can be two people at a table in a coffee shop, noodling over some problem. It

A community of truth is created when people are genuinely interested in seeing and exploring together. They do not try to manipulate each other. They do not immediately judge, saying, “That’s stupid” or “That’s right.” Instead, they pause to consider what the meaning of the statement is to the person who just uttered it.

When we are in a community of truth, we’re trying on each other’s perspectives. We’re taking journeys into each other’s minds. It gets you out of the egotistical mindset—I am normal, what I see is objective, everyone else is odd—and instead gives you the opportunity to take a journey with another person’s eyes.

say you’re in a book club. You’ve been meeting for years and years. Sometimes you can no longer remember which ideas were yours and which were someone else’s. You come to see that all your conversations over the years have been woven together into one long conversation. It’s almost as if the club has its own distinct voice, one greater than the individual voice of each member. Two sorts of knowledge have been generated here. The first kind, of course, is a deeper understanding of the books. The second kind of knowledge is more subtle and important. It’s knowledge about the club. It’s each member’s awareness of the dynamics of the group, what role each member tends to take in the conversations, what gifts each member brings.

she who looks with the eyes of compassion and understanding will see complex souls, suffering and soaring, navigating life as best they can. The

And she will maintain this capacious loving attention even as the callousness of the world rises around her, following the advice in that sage W. H. Auden poem: “If equal affection cannot be / Let the more loving one be me.”

encounter. It is the simple capacity to make another person feel seen and understood—that