How to Know a Person Part 1: I SEE YOU

ONE: The Power of Being Seen

“Wise people don’t just possess information; they possess a compassionate

understanding of other people. They know about life.” (Brooks, “How to Know a Person”,

p.7)

“Being open-hearted is a prerequisite for being a full, kind, and wise human being. But it is

not enough. People need social skills.

TWO: How Not to See a Person

“If you want to understand humanity, you have to focus on the thoughts and emotions of individuals, not just data about groups.

I will not reduce you to a type or restrict you to a label, like many of those human-typology systems do—Myers-Briggs, the Enneagram, the zodiac, and so on. Instead, I want to receive you as an active creator. I want to understand how you construct your point of view. I want to ask you how you see things. I want you to teach me about the enduring energies of old events that shape how you see the world today. I’m going to engage with you. Looking at a person is different from looking at a thing because a person is looking back at you. I’m going to get to know you at the same time you’re going to get to know me. Quality conversation is the essence of this approach. If we’re going to become 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 I see?

TWELVE: How Were You Shaped by Your Sufferings?

“People who are permanently damaged by trauma seek to assimilate what happened into their existing models. People who grow try to accommodate what happened in order to create new models. The person who assimilates says, I survived brain cancer and I’m going to keep on chugging. The person who accommodates says, No, this changes who I

am...I’m a cancer survivor. This changes how I want to spend my days. The act of

remaking our models involves reconsidering the fundamentals: In what ways is the world

safe and unsafe? Do things sometimes happen to me that I don’t deserve? Who am I? What is my place in the world? What’s my story? Where do I really want to go? What kind of God allows this to happen?

SIXTEEN: How Do Your Ancestors Show Up in Your Life?

“The challenge in seeing a person, therefore, is to adopt the kind of double vision I mentioned in the chapter on hard conversations. It means stepping back to appreciate the power of group culture and how it is formed over generations and then poured into a person. But it also means stepping close and perceiving each individual person in the midst of their lifelong project of crafting their own life and their own point of view, often in defiance of their group’s consciousness. The trick is to hold these two perspectives together at the same time.