How to Know a Person

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.

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.

The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them,” George Bernard Shaw wrote, “but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.

The roots of resilience,” the psychologist Diana Fosha writes, “are to be found in the sense of being understood by and existing in the mind and heart of a loving, attuned, and self-possessed other.” In how you see me, I will learn to see myself.

Perhaps to really know another person, you have to have a glimmer of how they

experience the world. To really know someone, you have to know how they know you.

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.

Being an Illuminator, seeing other people in all their fullness, doesn’t just happen. It’s a craft, a set of skills, a way of life. Other cultures have words for this way of being. The Koreans call it nunchi, the ability to be sensitive to other people’s moods and thoughts. The Germans (of course) have a word for it: herzensbildung, training one’s heart to see the

full humanity in another. What exactly are these skills? Let’s explore them, step by step.

THREE: Illumination

“That gaze, that first sight, represents a posture toward the world. A person who is looking for beauty is likely to find wonders, while a person looking for threats will find danger. A person who beams warmth brings out the glowing sides of the people she meets, while a person who conveys formality can meet the same people and find them stiff and detached. “Attention,” the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist writes, “is a moral act: it creates, brings

aspects of things into being.

The questions she asks are intended to steer people toward the positive: Isn’t it time you forgave yourself for that? When you and your parents are close again, what will you want them to understand about this time in your life? Early in her career, she tried to understand people by asking how others treated or mistreated them. As she matured, she found it

more useful to ask, How do you treat others? How do you make them feel?

FOUR: Accompaniment

“After the illuminating gaze, accompaniment is the next step in getting to know a person.

We’re becoming comfortable with each other, and comfort is no small thing. Nothing can be heard in the mind until the situation feels safe and familiar to the body. Small talk and just casually being around someone is a vastly underappreciated stage in the process of getting to know someone. Sometimes you can learn more about a person by watching how they talk to a waiter than by asking some profound question about their philosophy of life.

Even when you know someone well, I find that if you don’t talk about the little things on a regular basis, it’s hard to talk about the big things.

Accompaniment, in this meaning, is an other-centered way of moving through life. When you’re accompanying someone, you’re in a state of relaxed awareness—attentive and sensitive and unhurried. You’re not leading or directing the other person. You’re just riding alongside as they experience the ebbs and flows of daily life. You’re there to be of help, a faithful presence, open to whatever may come. Your movements are marked not by

willfulness but by willingness—you’re willing to let the relationship deepen or not deepen, without forcing it either way. You are acting in a way that lets other people be perfectly themselves.

Accompaniment is a necessary stage in getting to know a person precisely because it is

so gentle and measured. As D. H. Lawrence put it:

Whoever wants life must go softly towards life, softly as one would go towards a deer and fawn that are nestling under a tree. One gesture of violence, one violent assertion of self- will and life is gone But with quietness, with an abandon of self-assertion and a fullness

of the deep true self one can approach another human being, and know the delicate best

of life, the touch.

Accompaniment is a humble way of being a helpful part of another’s journey, as they go about making their own kind of music.

If I’d been better schooled back then in the art of accompaniment, I would have

understood how important it is to honor another person’s ability to make choices. I hope I would have understood, as good accompanists do, that everybody is in their own spot, on their own pilgrimage, and your job is to meet them where they are, help them chart their own course. I wish I had followed some advice that is rapidly becoming an adage: Let others voluntarily evolve.

A writer could blast out her opinions, but writers are at their best not when they tell people what to think but when they provide a context within which others can think.” (Brooks,

“How to Know a Person”, p.52)

“Finally, a person who is good at accompaniment understands the art of presence.

Presence is about showing up.

FIVE: What is a Person?

“And this traumatic vignette highlights a central truth about what human beings are: A person is a point of view. Every person you meet is a creative artist who takes the events of life and, over time, creates a very personal way of seeing the world. Like any artist, each person takes the experiences of a lifetime and integrates them into a complex representation of the world. That representation, the subjective consciousness that makes you you, integrates your memories, attitudes, beliefs, convictions, traumas, loves, fears,

desires, and goals into your own distinct way of seeing.” (Brooks, “How to Know a Person”,

p.64)

“People don’t see the world with their eyes; they see it with their entire life.

Each person actively constructs their own perception of reality. That’s not to say there is not an objective reality out there. It’s to say that we have only subjective access to it. “The mind is its own place,” the poet John Milton wrote, “and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

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?

The trauma of the tsunami rearranged his models. He was pushed into intimate contact with others’ minds as they suffered great loss and endured great pain. He sat with these people, talked with them, entered into their experiences. He got to know others in powerful new ways and became something of an Illuminator. When he entered into lives other than his own, his perspectives widened and deepened. He saw others differently, himself differently. He was humanized. He felt with more affection and saw the world with more wisdom. This is the effect that seeing others deeply tends to have on people. As the Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan has observed, what the eye sees more deeply the heart tends to love more tenderly.

SIX: Good Talks

“A good conversationalist is a master of fostering a two-way exchange. A good conversationalist is capable of leading people on a mutual expedition toward understanding.

Everyone in a conversation is facing an internal conflict between self- expression and self- inhibition. If you listen passively, the other person is likely to become inhibited. Active listening, on the other hand, is an invitation to express. One way to think of it is through the metaphor of hospitality. When you are listening, you are like the host of a dinner party. You have set the scene. You’re exuding warmth toward your guests, showing how happy you are to be with them, drawing them closer to where they want to go.

Good conversationalists ask for stories about specific events or experiences, and then they go even further. They don’t only want to talk about what happened, they want to know how you experienced what happened.

KEEP THE GEM STATEMENT AT THE CENTER. In the midst of many difficult

conversations, there is what the mediator Adar Cohen calls “the gem statement.” This is the truth underneath the disagreement, something you both agree on: “Even when we can’t agree on Dad’s medical care, I’ve never doubted your good intentions. I know we

both want the best for him.” If you can both return to the gem statement during a conflict, you can keep the relationship between you strong.

SEVEN: The Right Questions

“In my case, he asked me about three topics: my ultimate goals (What do you want to offer the world?), my skills (What are you doing when you feel most alive?), and my schedule (How exactly do you fill your days?). These were questions that lifted me out of the daily intricacies of my schedule and forced me to look at the big picture.

People answer better with narrative. When they are in the thread of a narrative, they get comfortable and will speak more fully,” David says. In a job interview, he focuses

especially on someone’s high school experience. Did the person feel like an outcast in high school? Did they empathize with the poor and the unpopular? “The only thing you can be certain about every person is that nobody escapes high school. Whatever your high school fears were, they are still there.” David’s getting at a person’s vulnerabilities, trying to see the person whole.

I didn’t cover foreign policy much, or know much about her day-to-day activities, so my questions were ill-informed and kind of dumb. I finally asked her why she kept inviting me

back. She said it was because my questions were so broad and general that they helped her step back from the minutiae of her job and see the big picture. Sometimes a broad, dumb question is better than a smart question, especially one meant to display how well- informed you are.

Humble questions are open-ended. They’re encouraging the other person to take control and take the conversation where they want it to go. These are questions that begin with phrases like “How did you...,” “What’s it like...,” “Tell me about...,” and “In what ways...” In her book You’re Not Listening, Kate Murphy describes a focus group moderator who was trying to understand why people go to the grocery store late at night. Instead of directly asking, “Why do you go to grocery stores late,” which can sound accusatory, she asked,

“Tell me about the last time you went to the store after 11:00 p.m.” A shy, unassuming woman who had said little up to that point raised her hand and responded, “I had just smoked a joint and was looking for a ménage à trois—me, Ben, and Jerry.

Big questions interrupt the daily routines people fall into and prompt them to step back

and see their life from a distance. Here are some of my favorite questions that do that:

• “What crossroads are you at?” At any moment, most of us are in the middle of some

transition. The question helps people focus on theirs.

• “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” Most people know that fear plays some role in their life, but they haven’t clearly defined how fear is holding them back.

• “If you died tonight, what would you regret not doing?”

• “If we meet a year from now, what will we be celebrating?”

• “If the next five years is a chapter in your life, what is that chapter about?”

• “Can you be yourself where you are and still fit in?

We too often think that deep conversations have to be painful or vulnerable conversations. I try to compensate for that by asking questions about the positive sides of life:

• “Tell me about a time you adapted to change.”

• “What’s working really well in your life?”

• “What are you most self-confident about?”

• “Which of your five senses is strongest?”

• “Have you ever been solitary without feeling lonely?” or

• “What has become clearer to you as you have aged?

A 2012 study by Harvard neuroscientists found that people often took more pleasure from sharing information about themselves than from receiving money. The Belgian psychologist Bernard Rimé found that people feel especially compelled to talk about negative experiences. The more negative the experience was, the more they want to talk about it. Over the course of my career as a journalist I, too, have found that if you respectfully ask people about themselves, they will answer with a candor that takes your breath away. Studs Terkel was a journalist who collected oral histories over his long career in Chicago. He’d ask people big questions and then sit back and let their answers unfold. “Listen, listen, listen, listen, and if you do, people will talk,” he once observed. “They always talk. Why? Because no one has ever listened to them before in all their lives.

Perhaps they’ve not ever even listened to themselves.” Each person is a mystery. And when you are surrounded by mysteries, as the saying goes, it’s best to live life in the form of a question.

Part 2: I SEE YOU IN YOUR STRUGGLES

EIGHT: The Epidemic of Blindness

“Between 1999 and 2019, American suicide rates increased by 33 percent. Between 2009

and 2019, the percentage of teens who reported “persistent feelings of sadness or

hopelessness” rose from 26 percent to 37 percent. By 2021, it had shot up to 44 percent. The percentage of Americans who said they have no close friends quadrupled between 1990 and 2020. In one survey, 54 percent of Americans reported that no one knows them well.

The General Social Survey asks Americans to rate their happiness levels. Between 1990 and 2018, the share of Americans who put themselves in the lowest happiness category increased by more than 50 percent.

As Van der Kolk writes, “Knowing that we are seen and heard by the important people in our lives can make us feel calm and safe, and...being ignored or dismissed can precipitate rage reactions or mental collapse.” Sadness, lack of recognition, and loneliness turn into bitterness. When people believe that their identity is unrecognized, it feels like injustice— because it is. People who have been treated unjustly often lash out, seek ways to humiliate those who they feel have humiliated them.

In our society, we confer huge amounts of recognition on those with beauty, wealth, or

prestigious educational affiliations, and millions feel invisible, unrecognized, and left out.

I realize the phrase “moral formation” may sound stuffy and archaic, but moral formation is really about three simple, practical things. First, it is about helping people learn how to restrain their selfishness and incline their heart to care more about others. Second, it’s about helping people find a purpose, so their life has stability, direction, and meaning.

Third, it’s about teaching the basic social and emotional skills so you can be kind and considerate to the people around you.

In 2018, the Pew Research Center asked Americans what gives them meaning in life. Only

7 percent said helping other people. Only 11 percent said that learning was a source of

meaning in their life.

NINE: Hard Conversations

“I’ve talked to experts and read books on the subject, of which my favorites include High Conflict by Amanda Ripley, I Never Thought of It That Way by Mónica Guzmán, and, especially, Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler.

It’s best to avoid this temptation. As soon as somebody starts talking about times when they felt excluded, betrayed, or wronged, stop and listen. When somebody is talking to you about pain in their life, even in those cases when you may think their pain is performative or exaggerated, it’s best not to try to yank the conversations back to your frame. Your first job is to stay within the other person’s standpoint to more fully understand how the world looks to them. Your next job is to encourage them to go into more depth about what they have just said. “I want to understand your point of view as much as possible. What am I

missing here?” Curiosity is the ability to explore something even in stressful and difficult circumstances. 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.

The authors of Crucial Conversations observe that in any conversation, respect is like air. When it’s present nobody notices, but when it’s absent it’s all anybody can think about.

I’ve learned that if you find yourself in a hard conversation that is going south, there are ways to redeem it. First, you step back from the conflict, and you try to figure out together what’s gone wrong. 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.

Then you try to reidentify the mutual purpose of the conversation. That’s done by enlarging the purpose so that both people are encompassed by it.

Finally, you can take advantage of the fact that a rupture is sometimes an opportunity to forge a deeper bond.

Proffitt was conducting experiments in which he asked groups of students to estimate the grade of various hills around UVA’s campus. A hill on campus might actually have a 5 percent grade, but a typical participant would estimate that it had a 20 percent grade. One day Proffitt took a look at the most recent batch of experimental data and was stunned to find that suddenly the students had gotten much better at estimating the grade of a particular hill. Proffitt and his team delved into the mystery and discovered that the latest batch of questionnaires had been filled out by members of UVA’s women’s varsity soccer team. The hills didn’t look so steep because these were extremely fit Division 1 athletes who would have relatively little trouble walking up them. How you see a situation depends on what you are capable of doing in a situation.

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,” Proffitt and co-author Drake Baer later wrote in their book Perception.

Unconsciously, you and I are always asking ourselves, 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.” (Brooks, ‘How to Know a Person”,

p.120)

“One of the reasons hard conversations are necessary is that we have to ask other people the obvious questions—How do you see this?—if we’re going to have any hope of entering, even a bit, into their point of view. Our differences of perception are rooted deep in the

hidden kingdom of the unconscious mind and we’re generally not aware how profound those differences are until we ask.

Even in the midst of civil strife and hard conversations, I try to return to the great humanistic declaration made by the Roman dramatist Terence: “I am human, and nothing human is alien to me.

TEN: How Do You Serve a Friend Who Is in Despair?

“Perhaps the most useful thing I did was send him a video. My friend Mike Gerson, the Washington Post columnist, had been hospitalized with depression in early 2019. He delivered a beautiful sermon at the National Cathedral about his experience before he died of complications from cancer in November 2022. Depression, he said, was a “malfunction of the instrument we use to determine reality.

ELEVEN: The Art of Empathy

“As the study’s longtime director George Vaillant put it, “Whereas a warm childhood, like a rich father, tends to inoculate a man against future pain, a bleak childhood is like poverty; it cannot cushion the difficulties of life. Yes, difficulties may sometimes lead to post- traumatic growth, and some men’s lives did improve over time. But there is always a high cost in pain and lost opportunities, and for many men with bleak childhoods the outlook remained bleak until they died, sometimes young and sometimes by their own hands.

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. They are trapped in a hyperactive mind theater in which the world is dangerous. They overreact to things and fail to understand why they did so.

A person, because of their own stupid behavior, has broken a marriage, been fired from a job, lost a friend, hurt their children, suffered a public humiliation. Their world has crumbled. In theory, it should be possible to repair yourself alone. In theory, it should be possible to understand yourself, especially the deep broken parts of yourself, through

introspection. But the research clearly shows that introspection is overrated. That’s in part because what’s going on in your mind is not only more complicated than you understand, it is more complicated than you can understand. Your mind hides most of your thinking so you can get on with life. Furthermore, you’re too close to yourself. You can’t see the

models you use to perceive the world because you’re seeing with them. Finally, when people are trying to see themselves by themselves, they tend to bend off in one of two unhelpful directions. Sometimes they settle for the easy insight. They tell themselves they’ve just had a great epiphany. In actuality, they’ve done nothing more than come up with a make-believe story that will help them feel good about themselves. Or else they spiral into rumination. They revisit the same flaws and traumatic experiences over and over again, reinforcing their bad mental habits, making themselves miserable. 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.

Over the centuries many philosophers assumed that reason is separate from emotions— reason is the cool, prudential charioteer, and emotions are the hard-to-control stallions. None of that is true. Emotions contain information. Unless they are out of control, emotions are supple mental faculties that help you steer through life. Emotions assign value to things; they tell you what you want and don’t want.” (Brooks, “How to Know a

Person”, p.145)

“This emotional state alters your thinking so you are quick to look for danger. Emotions also tell you whether you are moving toward your goals or away from them. If I want to know you, it’s moderately important that I know what you think, but it’s very important that I have some sense of the flow of what you feel.

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.

If mentalizing is me projecting my experiences onto you, caring involves getting out of my experiences and understanding that what you need may be very different from what I would need in that situation. This is hard. The world is full of people who are nice; there are many fewer who are effectively kind.

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.

The novelist Pearl Buck argued that artists are people who tend to be extremely sensitive

to any emotional input:

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanely sensitive. To them, a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create By some strange unknown inward urgency, he is not really alive unless he is

creating.

LITERATURE. Researchers have found that people who read are more empathetic. Plot- driven genre books—thrillers and detective stories—do not seem to increase empathy skills. But reading biographies or complex, character-driven novels and plays like Beloved or Macbeth, in which the reader gets enmeshed in the changing emotional life of the characters, does.

EMOTION SPOTTING. The emotion scholar Marc Brackett has developed a tool to

improve a person’s emotional granularity, something he calls the “mood meter.” It is based on the idea that emotions have two core dimensions, energy and pleasantness. So he constructed a chart with four quadrants. The top right quadrant contains emotions that are high in pleasantness and high-energy: happiness, joy, exhilaration. The bottom right quadrant contains emotions that are high in pleasantness but low-energy: contentment, serenity, ease. The top left contains emotions that are low in pleasantness but high- energy: anger, frustration, fear. The bottom left contains emotions that are low-energy and low in pleasantness: sadness, apathy. The mood meter is a map of human emotions. At any given moment you can pause, figure out where your mood is on the map, and attempt to assign it a label. This exercise, Brackett notes, gives people “permission to feel”— permission to choose not to bottle up their emotions but to acknowledge and investigate them.

Brackett has taken his technique to schools and run people through his RULER

curriculum, in when he teaches people a set of emotional skills: how to Recognize,

Understand, Label, Express, and Regulate their emotions. Brackett’s technique is a very powerful way to improve the emotional awareness and emotional regulation of both children and adults. Recently, for example, Brackett and his team developed ways to measure the emotional intelligence of supervisors at various workplaces. They found that employees whose supervisors score low on emotional intelligence say they feel inspired about 25 percent of the time, whereas employees whose supervisors score high on emotional intelligence feel inspired about 75 percent of the time. In other words, people who are good at recognizing and expressing emotions have a huge effect on those around them.

Throughout this chapter I’ve been trying to emphasize how physical emotions are, that becoming more empathetic is not some intellectual enterprise; it is training your body to respond in open and interactive ways. To recover from painful traumas, people need to live through experiences that contradict what happened to them earlier in their lives. Someone who has been abused has to experience intimacy that is safe. Someone who has been abandoned has to experience others who stayed. This is the kind of knowledge and learning that is held at the cellular level. The rational brain is incapable of talking the emotional body out of its own reality, so the body has to experience a different reality

firsthand.

Over time, a person who enjoys a higher vagal tone will begin to see and construct the world differently. I mean this literally, too. As the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett writes in her book How Emotions Are Made, “You may think that in everyday life, the things you see and hear influence what you feel, but it’s mostly the other way around: What you feel alters your sight and hearing.” People who are scared take in a scene differently. Our ears, for example, immediately adjust to focus on high and low frequencies—a scream or a growl—rather than midrange frequencies, which include normal human speech. Anxiety narrows our attention and diminishes our peripheral vision. A feeling of happiness, by contrast, widens our peripheral vision. A person who feels safe because of the reliable and empathetic presence of others will see the world as a wider, more open, and happier place.

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?

He had grown up to be a novelist and writer of great compassion, faith, and humanity. He had come to realize that excavation is not a solitary activity. It’s by sharing our griefs with others, and thinking together about what they mean, that we learn to overcome fear and know each other at the deepest level. “What we hunger for perhaps more than anything

else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else,” he wrote in his book Telling Secrets. “It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are...because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier...for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own.

As Maya Angelou once put it, “The more you know of your history, the more liberated you are.

Second, you can try “This Is Your Life.” This is a game some couples play at the end of each year. They write out a summary of the year from their partner’s point of view. That is, they write, in the first person, about what challenges their partner faced and how he or she overcame them. Reading over these first-person accounts of your life can be an exhilarating experience. You see yourself through the eyes of one who loves you.

The third exercise is called “Filling in the Calendar.” This involves walking through periods of the other person’s life, year by year. What was your life like in second grade? In third grade?

I write,” Susan Sontag once remarked, “to define myself—an act of self- creation—part

of the process of becoming.

Part 3: I SEE YOU WITH YOUR STRENGHT

THIRTEEN: Personality: What Energy Do You Bring into the Room?

“On the other hand, over the past decades, psychologists have cohered around a different way to map the human personality. This method has a ton of rigorous research behind it. This method helps people measure five core personality traits. Psychologists refer to these as the Big Five.

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. They tend to dive into most situations looking for what goodies can be had.

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. They are disciplined, persevering, organized, self-regulating. They have the ability to focus on long- term goals and not get distracted.

Just as this trait has its 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. They are sometimes workaholics. There can be an obsessive or compulsive quality to them.

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.

People who score high in neuroticism often struggle. Neuroticism is linked to higher rates of depression, eating disorders, and stress disorders. Such people go to the doctor more often. 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.” (Brooks,

“How to Know a Person”, p.183)

“AGREEABLENESS. Those who score high on agreeableness are good at getting along with people. They are compassionate, considerate, helpful, and accommodating toward

others.

Those who score high in agreeableness are naturally prone to paying attention to what’s going on in other people’s minds. If you read high-agreeable people complex stories, they have so much emotional intelligence that they will be able to recall many facts about each character. They are able to keep in mind how different people are feeling about one

another. In one experiment that Daniel Nettle describes, high agreeables could keep track of four levels of social belief: “Tom hoped that Jim would believe that Susan thought that Edward wanted to marry Jenny.

In the workplace, agreeableness is a mixed trait. Those high in agreeableness do not always get the big promotions or earn the most money. People sometimes think, rightly or wrongly, that high agreeables are not tough enough, that they won’t make the unpopular decisions. Often it’s the people who score lower on agreeableness who get appointed to CEO jobs and make the big bucks.

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.” (Brooks,

“How to Know a Person”, p.185)

“When we approach a painting or a song, we want it to be familiar but also a bit surprising. That’s known as the fluency sweet spot. People low in openness feel comfortable when the artwork feels familiar. People high in openness find anything moderately familiar to be

boring.

As Brent Roberts and Hee J. Yoon wrote in a 2022 review on personality psychology, “Although it is still widely thought that personality is not changeable, recent research has roundly contradicted that notion. In a review of over 200 intervention studies, personality traits, 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.

FOURTEEN: Life Tasks

“The templates simply name some common patterns of human behavior. They help us step back and recognize ways in which you or I might be like the template and ways in which you or I might be different from the template. The templates also remind us that each person you meet is involved in a struggle. Here are a few common life tasks, along with the states of consciousness that arise to help us meet each one.

THE IMPERIAL TASK:

Pretty early in life, sometime in boyhood or girlhood, each of us has to try to establish a sense of our own agency. We have to demonstrate to ourselves and others that we can take control, work hard, be good at things. In the middle of this task, Erikson argues, a person has to either display industry or succumb to inferiority. If children can show themselves and the world that they are competent, they will develop a sense of self- confidence. If they can’t, they will experience feelings of inferiority.” (Brooks, “How to Know a Person”, p.193

“THE INTERPERSONAL TASK:

There’s a rough rhythm to life. Periods that are dominated by an intense desire to stand out and be superior are often followed by periods dominated by an intense desire to fit in. For many of us there’s a moment in life, often in adolescence, when the life task is to establish your social identity.

Lori Gottlieb worked as a TV scriptwriter, entered and then left med school, gave birth to a child, and got a job as a journalist, but she was dissatisfied. She wanted to make a

difference in people’s lives, not just write about them. She thought of becoming a

psychiatrist. But that’s mostly prescribing medication, she worried. One day, her former med school dean told her, “You should go to graduate school and get a degree in clinical psychology.” If you do that, the dean continued, you’ll be able to get to know your patients better. The work will be deeper and leave lasting benefits...

At a certain point in life, we have to find the career that we will devote ourselves to, the way we will make a difference in the world—whether it’s a job or parenting or something else entirely. While confronting this task, Erikson argues, a person must achieve career consolidation or experience drift...

Sébastien Bras is the owner of Le Suquet, a restaurant in Laguiole, France, that earned

three Michelin stars, the world’s highest culinary distinction, for eighteen consecutive years. Then one year he asked the Michelin folks to stopcoming to his restaurant and never come back again. He’d realized that his desire to please the Michelin system had imposed

tremendous pressure, crushing his creativity.

The Grant Study, as I’ve mentioned, is a famous longitudinal study that followed the lives of hundreds of men from the time they enrolled at Harvard in the 1940s to their deaths, decades later...

A generative person gives others the gift of admiration—seeing them for the precious creatures they are. She gives the gift of patience—understanding that people are always developing. He gives them the gift of presence. I know a man who suffered a public disgrace. In the aftermath, one of his friends took him out to dinner every Sunday night for two years—the definition of a generative act.

The psychologist Daniel Gilbert has a famous saying about this: “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they are finished.

FIFTEEN: Life Stories

“As a behavioral psychologist, he was well aware that social connection is the number one source of happiness, success, good health, and much of the sweetness of life. Human beings are social animals who love to communicate with each other. Yet on this commuter train that day, he looked around and it hit him: Nobody was talking to anyone. It was just headphones and screens. And he wondered: Why aren’t these people doing the thing that makes them the happiest? He later conducted some experiments in which he induced people to talk with other commuters during their rides downtown. When the ride was over and they arrived at their destination, researchers were there to ask them how much they enjoyed the trip. The comments were overwhelmingly positive.

So why don’t people talk more? Epley continued his research and came up with an answer to the mystery: 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 you give people a little nudge, they will share their life

stories with enthusiasm. As I hope I’ve made clear by now, people are eager, often desperate, to be seen, heard, and understood. And yet we have built a culture, and a set of manners, in which that doesn’t happen. The way you fix that is simple, easy, and fun: Ask people to tell you their stories.

The psychologist Jerome Bruner distinguished between two different modes of thinking, which he called the paradigmatic mode and the narrative mode.

Narrative thinking, on the other hand, is necessary for understanding the unique

individual in front of you. Stories capture the unique presence of a person’s character and how he or she changes over time. Stories capture how a thousand little influences come together to shape a life, how people struggle and strive, how their lives are knocked about by lucky and unlucky breaks. When someone is telling you their story, you get a much more personal, complicated, and attractive image of the person. You get to experience their experience.

What you do for a living shapes who you become. If you spend most of your day in paradigmatic mode, you’re likely to slip into depersonalized habits of thought; you may begin to regard storytelling as non-rigorous or childish, and if you do that, you will constantly misunderstand people. So when I’m in a conversation with someone now, I’m trying to push against that and get us into narrative mode. I’m no longer content to ask, “What do you think about X?” Instead, I ask, “How did you come to believe X?” This is a framing that invites people to tell a story about what events led them to think the way they do. Similarly, I don’t ask people to tell me about their values; I say, “Tell me about the

person who shaped your values most.” That prompts a story. Then there is the habit of taking people back in time: Where’d you grow up? When did you know that you wanted to spend your life this way? I’m not shy about asking people about their childhoods: What did you want to be when you were a kid? What did your parents want you to be? Finally, I try to ask about intentions and goals. When people are talking to you about their intentions, they are implicitly telling you about where they have been and where they hope to go. Recently, for example, my wife and I were sitting around with a brilliant woman who had retired from a job she’d held for many years. We asked her a simple question: How do you hope to spend the years ahead? All sorts of stuff spilled out: How she was coping with losing the identity that her job had given her.

The ability to craft an accurate and coherent life story is yet another vital skill we don’t teach people in school. But coming up with a personal story is centrally important to leading a meaningful life. You can’t know who you are unless you know how to tell your story. You can’t have a stable identity unless you take the inchoate events of your life and

give your life meaning by turning the events into a coherent story. You can know what to do next only if you know what story you are a part of.

As people are telling me their stories, I’m listening hard for a few specific things. First, I’m listening for the person’s characteristic tone of voice. Just as every piece of writing has an implied narrator—the person the writer wants you to think he is—every person has a characteristic narrative tone: sassy or sarcastic, ironic or earnest, cheerful or grave. The narrative tone reflects the person’s basic attitude toward the world—is it safe or

threatening, welcoming, disappointing, or absurd? A person’s narrative tone often reveals their sense of “self-efficacy,” their overall confidence in their own abilities.

Not everyone has established such a clear heroic identity. The psychologist James Marcia argues that there are four levels of identity creation. The healthiest people have arrived at what he calls “identity achievement.” They’ve explored different identities, told different stories about themselves, and finally settled on a heroic identity that works. Less-evolved people may be in a state of “foreclosure.” They came up with an identity very early in their life—I’m the child who caused my parents to divorce, for instance, or I’m the jock who was a star in high school. They rigidly cling to that identity and never update it. Others may find themselves caught in “identity diffusion.” These are immature people who have never explored their identity. They go through life without a clear identity, never knowing what to do. Then there is “moratorium.” People at this level are perpetually exploring new identities, shape-shifting and trying on one or another, but they never settle on one. They never find that stable imago.

The third thing I’m asking myself as people tell me their stories is: What’s the plot here? We tend to craft our life stories gradually, over a lifetime. Children don’t really have life stories. But around adolescence most people begin imposing a narrative on their lives. At first there’s a lot of experimentation. In one study, for example, McAdams asked a group of college students to list the ten key scenes in their life. When he asked the same students the same question three years later, only 22 percent of the scenes were repeated on the second list. The students were in the early process of understanding the plot of their lives, so they had come up with a different list of episodes that really mattered.

In Composing a Life, the cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson argued that we often shoehorn our lives into neat, linear stories of decision and then commitment: I decided to become a doctor and pursued my dream. She argues that many lives are not like that.

The next question I ask myself when hearing stories is: How reliable is this narrator? I guess all of our stories are false and self-flattering to some degree. The seventeenth- century French moralist François de La Rochefoucauld issued the crucial warning here: “We are so used to disguising ourselves from others that we often end up by disguising ourselves from ourselves.” Some people, however, take fabulation to the extreme.

Finally, when I’m hearing life stories, I’m looking for narrative flexibility. Life is a constant struggle to refine and update our stories. Most of us endure narrative crises from time to time—periods in which something happened so that your old life story no longer makes sense. Perhaps you dreamed all your life of becoming an architect.

There’s one more thing that happens as I listen to life stories. I realize I’m not just listening to other people’s stories; I’m helping them create their stories. Very few of us sit down one day and write out the story of our lives and then go out and recite it when somebody asks. For most of us it’s only when somebody asks us to tell a story about ourselves that we have to step back and organize the events and turn them into a coherent narrative. When you ask somebody to tell part of their story, you’re giving them an occasion to take that step back. You’re giving them an opportunity to construct an account of themselves and maybe see themselves in a new way. None of us can have an identity unless it is affirmed and acknowledged by others. So as you are telling me your story, you’re seeing the ways I affirm you and the ways I do not. You’re sensing the parts of the story that work and those that do not. If you feed me empty slogans about yourself, I withdraw. But if you stand more transparently before me, showing both your warts and your gifts, you feel my respectful and friendly gaze upon you, and that brings forth growth. In every life there is a pattern, a story line running through it all. We find that story when somebody gives an opportunity to tell it.

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.

To see a person well, you have to see them as culture inheritors and as culture creators.

So 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? As we talk about this, we’re going to get beyond the shallow stereotypes and the judgments people might lazily rely on. We’re going to talk about how you were gifted by those who came before, and formed by them. And as we talk, I’ll begin to see you whole. “You live through time, that little piece of time that is yours,” the novelist Robert Penn Warren wrote, “but that piece of time is not only your own life, it is the summing-up of all the other lives that are simultaneous with yours What you are is an

expression of History.

SEVENTEEN: What is Wisdom?

“Guy de Maupassant captured one of the characters this way: “He was a gentleman with red whiskers who always went first through a doorway.” With that one line, I felt a whole character was revealed—a guy who was pushy, competitive, full of himself. I like to think of these little everyday insights as moments of wisdom. Wisdom isn’t knowing about physics or geography. Wisdom is knowing about people. Wisdom is the ability to see deeply into who people are and how they should move in the complex situations of life. That’s the great gift Illuminators share with those around them.

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 along. All choice involves loss: If you take this job, you don’t take that one. Much of life involves reconciling opposites: I want to be attached, but I also want to be free. 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.” (Brooks, “How to Know a

Person”, p.248-249)

“Wise people help you come up with a different way of looking at yourself, your past, and the world around you. Very often they focus your attention on your relationships, the in- between spaces that are so easy to overlook. How can this friendship or this marriage be nourished and improved? The wise person sees your gifts and potential, even the ones you do not see. Being seen in this way has a tendency to turn down the pressure, offering you some distance from your immediate situation, offering hope.

But gradually, over two years of conversations, Deo’s story came out. “I don’t see any way of doing this without spending time with a person,” Kidder said. “If you spend time, what you want to know will creep out.” The key is to listen, to be attentive, to be patient and not interrupt. Kidder told me he likes the version of himself that comes out when he’s trying to learn about another. He’s humbler, not talking so much. Kidder didn’t merely interview Deo; he accompanied him to the places where his story played out. They went back and visited the spot where he slept in Central Park, the supermarket where he worked as a delivery boy. Their walks together were a way of planting themselves in the concrete details of Deo’s experience. Eventually, they went to Burundi, to trace his journey through the genocide.

I read Strength in What Remains with a kind of awe. Kidder not only created a rich, complex portrait of Deo; he enabled us to see the world through his eyes. When I called Kidder to talk about the book, Deo’s brother was staying at his house, and had become a

family friend. Deo himself had gone back to Burundi to open a health center for the kinds of people he grew up with, including members of the Hutu tribe that had tried to massacre him. Kidder’s curiosity about Deo was still pulsating as we spoke, though it had been a

decade since his book came out.

John couldn’t speak something unspeakable, so he did it by being rude to others and by having this sense of himself as better than everybody else.” Her first task with John was to establish a relationship with him, to make him feel felt. Her method, as she describes it, is “In this room, I’m going to see you, and you’ll try to hide, but I’ll still see you, and it’s going to be okay when I do.

I like the Gottlieb-and-John story because it illuminates many of the gentle skills it takes to be 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,” the theologian Henri Nouwen wrote. “Confrontation without receptivity leads to an oppressive aggression which hurts everybody.”” (Brooks, “How to Know a

Person”, p.259)

“It’s about how to tell someone about their shortcomings in a way that offers maximal support. Let me give you a trivial, everyday example of why critiquing with care can be so effective. When I’m writing, I sometimes unconsciously know that a part of what I’m writing is not working. I have these vague vibrations that something is wrong, kind of like the vibrations you feel when you leave the house and you subtly sense you’ve left something important behind but you don’t know what. I often suppress these vibrations because I’m lazy or I want to be finished with the work. Invariably a good editor will locate the exact spot I semiconsciously knew wasn’t working. It’s only when the editor has named it for me that I fully face the fact that I need to make some changes. Critiquing with care works best when someone names something we ourselves almost but did not quite know. Critiquing with care works best when that naming happens within a context of unconditional regard, that just and loving attention that conveys unshakable respect for another person’s struggles.

Wisdom is a social skill practiced within a relationship or a system of relationships. 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.

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.

A funny thing happens to people in a community of truth. Somebody has a thought. The thought is like a little circuit in their brain. When someone shares a thought and others receive it, then suddenly the same circuit is in two brains. When a whole classroom is considering the thought, it’s like the same circuit in twenty-five brains. Our minds are

intermingling. The cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter calls these circuits loops. He argues that when we communicate, and loops are flowing through different brains, we are thinking as one shared organism, anticipating each other, finishing each other’s sentences. “Empathy” is not a strong enough word to describe this intermingling. It is not one person, one body, one brain that marks this condition, Hofstadter argues, but the interpenetration of all minds in ceaseless conversation with each other.

An Illuminator is a blessing to those around him. When he meets others he has a compassionate awareness of human frailty, because he knows the ways we are all frail. He is gracious toward human folly because he’s aware of all the ways we are foolish. He accepts the unavoidability of conflict and greets disagreement with curiosity and respect.