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. That is at the heart of being a good person, the ultimate gift you can give to others and to yourself.

A person who is good at mirroring is quick to experience the emotions of the person in front of them, is quick to reenact in his own body the emotions the other person is holding in hers. A person who is good at mirroring smiles at smiles, yawns at yawns, and frowns at frowns. He unconsciously attunes his breathing patterns, heart rate, speaking speed,

posture, and gestures and even his vocabulary levels.” (Brooks, “How to Know a Person”,

p.146)

“People who are good at mirroring, by contrast, have high emotional granularity and experience the world in rich, supple ways. They can distinguish between similar emotions, such as anger, frustration, pressure, stress, anxiety, angst, and irritation. These people have educated their emotions by reading literature, listening to music, reflecting on their relationships. They are attuned to their body and have become expert at reading it, and so they have a wide emotional repertoire to draw on as life happens.

The second empathy skill is not mirroring but mentalizing. Most primates can mirror another primate’s emotions at least to some degree.

Mentalizing also helps us simultaneously sympathize with a person while also detaching to make judgments about them.

The third empathy skill is caring. Con artists are very good at reading people’s emotions, but we don’t call them empathetic, because they don’t have genuine concern for the

people they are reading.