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

by David Brooks

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.

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

“We project our individual mental experience into the world, and thereby mistake our mental experience to be the physical world, oblivious to the shaping of perception by our sensory systems, personal histories, goals, and expectations,”6

Similarly, when writing a thank-you note, my egotistical instinct is to write a note about all the ways I’m going to use the gift you just gave me. But if I’m going to be an empathetic person, I need to get outside of my perspective and get inside yours. I’m going to write about your intentions—the impulses that led you to think that this gift is right for me and the thinking process that impelled you to buy it.

A guardian has an in-depth respect for the institution she has inherited. She sees herself as someone who has been entrusted with something, has taken delivery of something precious and thus has a responsibility to steward it, and to pass it along in better shape than she found it. A person with this mindset is defined not by what she takes out of the institution but by what she pours into it.

We don’t start conversations because we’re bad at predicting how much we’ll enjoy them. We underestimate how much others want to talk; we underestimate how much we will learn; we underestimate how quickly other people will want to go deep and get personal. If

the people who address themselves in the second or even the third person have less anxiety, give better speeches, complete tasks more efficiently, and communicate more effectively.

Frequently the goal of therapy is to help the patient tell a more accurate story, a story in which the patient is seen to have power over their own life. They craft a new story in which they can see themselves exercising control.