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

Brooks, David

Part 1: I See You

My favorite saying about University of Chicago is this one: It’s a Baptist school where atheist professors teach Jewish students Saint Thomas Aquinas.

The students there still wear T-shirts that read, “Sure it works in practice, but does it work in theory?” And so into this heady world I traipsed and… shocker, I fit right in.

When I was young, I wanted to be knowledgeable, but as I got older, I wanted to be wise. Wise people don’t just possess information; they possess a compassionate understanding of other people. They know about life. I learned something profound along the way. Being open-hearted is a prerequisite for being a full, kind, and wise human being. But it is not enough. People need social skills. We talk about the importance of “relationships,” “community,” “friendship,” “social connection,” but these words are too abstract. The real act of, say, building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete social actions well: disagreeing without poisoning the relationship; revealing vulnerability at the appropriate pace; being a good listener; knowing how to end a conversation gracefully; knowing how to ask for and offer forgiveness; knowing how to let someone down without breaking their heart; knowing how to sit with someone who is suffering; knowing how to host a gathering where everyone feels embraced; knowing how to see things from another’s point of view.

These are some of the most important skills a human being can possess, and yet we don’t teach them in school. Some days it seems like we have intentionally built a society that gives people little guidance on how to perform the most important activities of life. As a result, a lot of us are lonely and lack deep friendships. It’s not because we don’t want these things. Above almost any other need, human beings long to have another person look into their face with loving respect and acceptance. It’s that we lack practical knowledge about how to give each other the kind of rich attention we desire. I’m not sure Western societies were ever great at teaching these skills, but over the past several decades, in particular, there’s been a loss of moral knowledge. Our schools and other institutions have focused more and more on preparing people for their careers, but not on the skills of being considerate toward the person next to you. The humanities, which teach us what goes on in the minds of other people, have become marginalized.

In this age of creeping dehumanization, I’ve become obsessed with social skills: how to get better at treating people with consideration; how to get better at understanding the people right around us. I’ve come to believe that the quality of our lives and the health of our society depends, to a large degree, on how well we treat each other in the minute interactions of daily life. 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.Human beings need recognition as much as they need food and water. No crueler punishment can be devised than to not see someone, to render them unimportant or invisible.

On the other hand, there are few things as fulfilling as that sense of being seen and understood. I often ask people to tell me about times they’ve felt seen, and with glowing eyes they tell me stories about pivotal moments in their life. They talk about a time when someone perceived some talent in them that they themselves weren’t even able to see.

They talk about a time when somebody understood exactly what they needed at some exhausted moment—and stepped in, in just the right way, to lighten the load.

And if this ability to truly see others is important in making the marriage decision or in hiring and retaining workers, it is also important if you are a teacher leading students, a doctor examining patients, a host anticipating the needs of a guest, a friend spending time with a friend, a parent raising a child, a spouse watching the one you love crawl into bed at the end of the day. Life goes a lot better if you can see things from other people’s points of view, as well as your own.“Artificial intelligence is going to do many things for us in the decades ahead, and replace humans at many tasks, but one thing it will never be able to do is to create person-to-person connections. If you want to thrive in the age of AI, you better become exceptionally good at connecting with others.”

In every crowd there are Diminishers and there are Illuminators. Diminishers make people feel small and unseen. They see other people as things to be used, not as persons to be befriended. They stereotype and ignore. They are so involved with themselves that other people are just not on their radar screen. Illuminators, on the other hand, have a persistent curiosity about other people. They have been trained or have trained themselves in the craft of understanding others. They know what to look for and how to ask the right questions at the right time. They shine the brightness of their care on people and make them feel bigger, deeper, respected, lit up.

So what are you most of the time, a Diminisher or an Illuminator? How good are you at reading other people?

Chapter Two: How Not to See a Person 

But most of us have all sorts of inborn proclivities that prevent us from perceiving others accurately. The tendency to do the instant size-up is just one of the Diminisher tricks. Here are a few others:

EGOTISM: The number one reason people don’t see others is that they are too self-centered to try. I can’t see you because I’m all about myself. Let me tell you my opinion. Let me entertain you with this story about myself. Many people are unable to step outside of their own points of view. They are simply not curious about other people.

ANXIETY: The number two reason people don’t see others is that they have so much noise in their own heads, they can’t hear what’s going on in other heads. How am I coming across? I don’t think this person really likes me. What am I going to say next to appear clever? Fear is the enemy of open communication.

NAÏVE REALISM: This is the assumption that the way the world appears to you is the objective view, and therefore everyone else must see the same reality you do. People in the grip of naïve realism are so locked into their own perspective, they can’t appreciate that other people have very different perspectives.

THE LESSER-MINDS PROBLEM: University of Chicago psychologist Nicholas Epley points out that in day-to-day life we have access to the many thoughts that run through our own minds. But we don’t have access to all the thoughts that are running through other people’s minds. We just have access to the tiny portion they speak out loud. This leads to the perception that I am much more complicated than you. 

OBJECTIVISM: This is what market researchers, pollsters, and social scientists do. They observe behaviour, design surveys, and collect data on people. This is a great way to understand the trends among populations of people, but it’s a terrible way to see an individual person. If you adopt this detached, dispassionate, and objective stance, it’s hard to see the most

important parts of that person, her unique subjectivity—her imagination, sentiments, desires, creativity, intuitions, faith, emotions, and attachments—the cast of this unique person’s inner world. If you want to understand humanity, you have to focus on the thoughts and emotions of individuals, not just data about groups.

ESSENTIALISM: People belong to groups, and there’s a natural human tendency to make generalizations about them: Germans are orderly, Californians are laid-back. These Essentialists are quick to use stereotypes to categorize vast swaths of people. Essentialism is the belief that certain groups actually have an “essential” and immutable nature. Essentialists imagine that people in one group are more alike than they really are.

THE STATIC MINDSET: Some people formed a certain conception of you, one that may even have been largely accurate at some point in time. But then you grew up. You changed profoundly. And those people never updated their models to see you now for who you really are.

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.

What exactly are these skills? Let’s explore them, step by step.

Chapter Three: Illumination 

At that moment, I began to fully appreciate the power of attention. Each of us has a characteristic way of showing up in the world, a physical and mental presence that sets a tone for how people interact with us. Some people walk into a room with an expression that is warm and embracing; others walk in looking cool and closed up. Some people first encounter others with a gaze that is generous and loving; other people regard those they meet with a formal and aloof gaze.

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.

The quality of your life depends quite a bit on the quality of attention you project out onto the world. Jimmy has a big, boisterous personality. If I tried to greet people the way Jimmy does, it would feel fake. It’s just not me. But the point I’m trying to make is more profound than that. Jimmy’s gaze when he greets a person derives from a certain conception of what a person is. Jimmy is a pastor.

When Jimmy sees a person—any person—he is seeing a creature who was made in the image of God. As he looks into each face, he is looking, at least a bit, into the face of God. When Jimmy sees a person, any person, he is also seeing a creature endowed with an immortal soul—a soul of infinite value and dignity. When Jimmy greets a person, he is also trying to live up to one of the great callings of his faith: He is trying to see that person the way Jesus would see that person. He is trying to see them with Jesus’s eyes—eyes that lavish love on the meek and the lowly, the marginalized and those in pain, and on every living person. When Jimmy sees a person, he comes in with the belief that this person is so important that Jesus was willing to die for their sake. As a result, Jimmy is going to greet people with respect and reverence. That’s how he’s always greeted me.

Now, you may be an atheist, an agnostic, a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Buddhist, or something else, but this posture of respect and reverence, this awareness of the infinite dignity of each person you meet, is a precondition for seeing people well. We’re not equal in might, intelligence, or wealth, but we are all equal on the level of our souls. If you see the people you meet as precious souls, you’ll probably wind up treating them well.

If you can attend to people in this way, you won’t be merely observing them or scrutinizing them. You’ll be illuminating them with a gaze that is warm, respectful, and admiring. You’ll be offering a gaze that says, “I’m going to trust you, before you trust me.” Being an Illuminator is a way of being with other people, a style of presence, an ethical ideal.

When you’re practicing Illuminationism, you’re offering a gaze that says, “I want to get to know you and be known by you.” It’s a gaze that positively answers the question everybody is unconsciously asking themselves when they meet you: “Am I a person to you? Do you care about me? Am I a priority for you?” The answers to those questions are conveyed in your gaze before they are conveyed by your words. It’s a gaze that radiates respect. It’s a gaze that says that every person I meet is unique, unrepeatable, and, yes, superior to me in some way. Every person I meet is fascinating on some topic. If I approach you in this respectful way, I’ll know that you are not a puzzle that can be solved but a mystery that can never be gotten to the bottom of. I’ll do you the honor of suspending judgment and letting you be as you are. Respect is a gift you offer with your eyes.

I’d like to list some of the features of the Illuminator’s gaze:

TENDERNESS: If you want to see a stellar example of how to illuminate people, go back and look at how Mister Rogers used to interact with children. Look at how Ted Lasso looks at his players on that TV show. Look at how Rembrandt rendered faces.

RECEPTIVITY: Being receptive means overcoming insecurities and self-preoccupation and opening yourself up to the experience of another. It means you resist the urge to project your own viewpoint; you do not ask, “How would I feel if I were in your shoes?”

ACTIVE CURIOSITY: You want to have an explorer’s heart. The novelist Zadie Smith once wrote that when she was a girl, she was constantly imagining what it would be like to grow up in the homes of her friends. What a fantastic way to train your imagination in the art of seeing others.

AFFECTION: We children of the Enlightenment live in a culture that separates reason fromemotion. Knowing, for us, is an intellectual exercise. When we want to “know” about something, we study it, we collect data about it, we dissect it. But many cultures and traditions never fell for this nonsense about the separation between reason and emotion, and so they never conceived of knowing as a brain-only, disembodied activity. 

GENEROSITY.

A HOLISTIC ATTITUDE: A great way to mis-see people is to see only a piece of them. Some employers mis-see workers when they see only their productivity. We must resist every urge to simplify in this way. Morality is mostly about how you pay attention to others. Moral behaviorhappens continuously throughout the day, even during the seemingly uneventful and everyday moments.

For Murdoch, the essential immoral act is the inability to see other people correctly. Human beings, she finds, are self-centered beings, anxiety-ridden and resentful. We are constantly representing people to ourselves in self-serving ways, in ways that gratify our egos and serve our ends. We stereotype and condescend, ignore and dehumanize. And because we don’t see people accurately, we treat them wrongly. Evil happens when people are unseeing, when they don’t recognize the personhood in other human beings.

The good person tries to cast a selfless attention and to see what the other person sees. This kind of attention leads to the greatness of small acts: welcoming a newcomer to your workplace, detecting anxiety in somebody’s voice and asking what’s wrong, knowing how to host a party so that everyone feels included.

Most of the time, morality is about the skill of being considerate toward others in the complex situations of life. It’s about being a genius at the close at hand.

Chapter Four: Accompaniment 

After the illuminating gaze, accompaniment is the next step in getting to know a person. When you’re first getting to know someone, you don’t want to try to peer into their souls right away. It’s best to look at something together. What do you think of the weather, Taylor Swift, gardening, or the TV series The Crown? You’re not studying a person, just getting used to them. Through small talk and doing mundane stuff together your unconscious mind is moving with mine and we’re getting a sense of each other’s energy, temperament, and manner. We’re attuning with each other’s rhythms and moods and acquiring a kind of subtle, tacit knowledge about each other that is required before other kinds of knowledge can be broached. 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.

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 wilfulness 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.

The first quality I associate with accompaniment is patience. Trust is built slowly. The person who is good at accompaniment exercises what the philosopher Simone Weil called “negative effort.” This is the ability to hold back and be aware of the other person’s timetable. “We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them,” Weil wrote.

Before a person is going to be willing to share personal stuff, they have to know that you respect their personal stuff. They have to know that you see their reserve as a form of dignity, their withholding as a sign that they respect themselves.

The next quality of accompaniment is playfulness. When the hosts of retreats and workshops want the participants to get to know each other quickly, they encourage them to play together—whether by means of croquet, cards, music, charades, taking a walk, arts and crafts, or even floating down a river.

We do this because people are more fully human when they are at play. As the essayist Diane Ackerman notes in her book Deep Play, play isn’t an activity; it’s a state of mind. In the midst of play, people relax, become themselves, and connect without even trying. Laughter is not just what comes after jokes. Laughter happens when our minds come together and something unexpected happens: We feel the ping of common recognition. We laugh to celebrate our shared understanding. We see each other.

It’s amazing how much you can come to know someone, even before any deep conversations happen.

The third quality of accompaniment I should mention is the other-centeredness of it.

In normal life, when you’re accompanying someone, you’re signing on to another person’s plan. We’re most familiar with the concept of accompaniment in the world of music. The pianist accompanies the singer. They are partners, making something together, but the accompanist is in the supportive role, subtly working to embellish the beauty of the song and help the singer shine. The accompanist is sensitive to what the singer is doing, begins to get a feel for the experience she is trying to create. Accompaniment is a humble way of being a helpful part of another’s journey, as they go about making their own kind of music. The accompanist is not controlling the journey, but neither is she a passive bystander.

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. I wish I had understood then that trust is built when individual differences are appreciated, when mistakes are tolerated, and when one person says, more with facial expressions than anything else, “I’ll be there

when you want me. I’ll be there when the time is right.”

Accompaniment often involves a surrender of power that is beautiful to behold. A manager could give orders, but sometimes leadership means assisting employees as they become masters of their own task.

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

Presence is about showing up. Showing up at weddings and funerals, and especially showing up when somebody is grieving or has been laid off or has suffered some setback or humiliation. When someone is going through a hard time, you don’t need to say some wise thing; you just have to be there, with heightened awareness of what they are experiencing at that moment.

In his book Consolations, the essayist and poet David Whyte observed that the ultimate touchstone of friendship “is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”

Chapter Five: What Is a Person? 

Events happen in our lives, but each person processes and experiences any given event in their own unique way. Aldous Huxley captured the core reality: “Experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you.”

In other words, there are two layers of reality. There is the objective reality of what happens, and there is the subjective reality of how whathappened is seen, interpreted, made meaningful. That second subjective layer can sometimes be the more important layer.

This subjective layer is what we want to focus on in our quest to know other people. The crucial question is not “What happened to this person?” or “What are the items on their résumé?” Instead, we should ask: “How does this person interpret what happened? How does this person see things? How do they construct their reality?” This is what we really want to know if we want to understand another person.

Or, as the writer Anaïs Nin put it, “We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.”

The second reason I’ve told you this story is that it shows how a person’s whole perspective, his or her way of seeing and interpreting and experiencing the world, can be transformed. In normal times our subjective consciousness changes gradually, but in the wake of shocking events it can change all at once.

If you want to see and understand people well, you have to know what you are looking at. You have to know what a person is.

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. That representation helps you interpret all the ambiguous data your senses pick up, helps you predict what’s going to happen, helps you discern what really matters in a situation, helps you decide how to feel about any situation, helps shape what you want, who you love, what you admire, who you are, and what you should be doing at any given moment. Your mind creates a world, with beauty and ugliness, excitement, tedium, friends, and enemies, and you live within that construction. People don’t see the world with their eyes; they see it with their entire life.

Constructionism is the recognition, backed up by the last half century of brain research, that people don’t passively take in reality. 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.

If I want to see you, I want to see, at least a little bit, how you see the world. I want to see how you construct your reality, how you make meaning. I want to step, at least a bit, out of my point of view and into your point of view.

How do you do that? Constructionism suggests a way forward, a method to engage with others.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? Then we need to ask: What are the experiences and beliefs that cause you to see it that way? For example, I might ask, What happened to you in childhood that makes you still see the world from the vantage point of an outsider? What was it about your home life that makes celebrating holidays and hosting dinner parties so important to you? You hate asking for favors. Why is that such an issue for you? You seem to have it all, and yet you are insecure. Why is that? As we have these conversations, we’re becoming more aware of the models we use to construct reality. We’re getting to know each other better. We’re also getting to know ourselves better

Chapter Six: Good Talks 

Now we’re going to get into what it’s like to really engage, to probe the deep recesses of another person’s mind. This is one of the most crucial and difficult things a person can do.

If you succeed at this task, you’ll be able to understand the people around you, and if you fail, you will constantly misread them and make them feel misread. So where can you go to perform this grand, portentous, and life-altering endeavor?

The epic activity I’m describing is called… having a conversation. If a person is a point of view, then to know them well you have to ask them how they see things. And it doesn’t work to try to imagine what’s going on in their head. You have to ask them. You have to have a conversation.

Being a mediocre conversationalist is easy. Being a good conversationalist is hard. 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. A good conversation is not a group of people making a series of statements at each other. (In fact, that’s a bad conversation.) A good conversation is an act of joint exploration. 

Somebody floats a half-formed idea. Somebody else seizes on the nub of the idea, plays with it, offers her own perspective based on her own memories, and floats it back so the other person can respond. A good conversation sparks you to have thoughts you never had before. A good conversation starts in one place and ends up in another.

I’ve put together a list of some of the nonobvious ways to become a better conversationalist:

TREAT ATTENTION AS AN ON/ OFF SWITCH, NOT A DIMMER.

We’ve all had the experience of telling somebody something and noticing that they are not really listening. It feels like you’re sending a message out to them and they’re just letting it fly past. The solution as a listener is to treat attention as all or nothing. If you’re here in this conversation, you’re going to stop doing anything else and just pay attention to this.

You’re going to apply what some experts call the SLANT method: sit up, lean forward, ask questions, nod your head, track the speaker. Listen with your eyes. That’s paying attention 100 percent. 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. When you are speaking, you are like a guest at a dinner party. You are bringing gifts.

FAVOR FAMILIARITY.

To get a conversation rolling, find the thing the other person is most attached to. If they’re wearing a T-shirt from their kid’s sports team, ask about that. If they’ve got a nice motorcycle, lead with a question about it.

MAKE THEM AUTHORS, NOT WITNESSES. 

People aren’t specific enough when they tell stories. They tend to leave out the concrete details. But if you ask them specific questions—“ Where was your boss sitting when he said that? And what did you say in response?”—they are likely to revisit the moment in a more vivid way.

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. They want to understand what you were feeling when your boss told you that you were being laid off. Was your first thought “How will I

tell my family?” Was your dominant emotion dread, humiliation, or perhaps relief?

Then a good conversationalist will ask how you’re experiencing now what you experienced then. In retrospect, was getting laid off a complete disaster, or did it send you off on a new path that you’re now grateful for? Sometimes things that are hard to live through are very satisfying to remember. It’s your job to draw out what lessons they learned and how they changed as a result of what happened.

DON’T FEAR THE PAUSE.

speaking and listening involve many of the same brain areas, so once you go into response mode, your ability to listen deteriorates. Like a good improv comedian, a good conversationalist controls her impatience and listens to learn, rather than to respond. That means she’ll wait for the end of the other person’s comment, and then pause for a few beats to consider how to respond to what’s been said, holding up her hand, so the other person doesn’t just keep on talking.

Taking that extra breath creates space for reflection.

DO THE LOOPING.

The experts suggest that when somebody expresses something important, you respond to their story with a question like “What I hear you saying is that you were really pissed at your mother.” If you try this looping method, you will realize how often you are interpreting people incorrectly; that speaker might come back with “No, I wasn’t angry at my mother. I just felt diminished by her. There’s a difference.”

Looping forces you to listen more carefully. Other people will sense the change in you. Looping is also a good way to keep the other person focused on their core point, rather than drifting away on some tangent. The problem is that some people, including me, feel a little phony when we’re looping. If I say, “So what I hear you saying is…” six times in a twenty-minute conversation, I’m going to wind up sounding more like a shrink performing analysis than a friend having a conversation. So I try to do it, but in a less formal way. I find it more natural to paraphrase what they just said—“ So you’re really pissed at your mom?”—and pause to see if they agree with my paraphrase.

THE MIDWIFE MODEL.

Many good conversations are reciprocal. Both people talk about half of the time. But some good conversations are, by necessity, lopsided. One person is going through a hard time or facing a big life decision, and the other person is accompanying them in their process of deliberation.

When ministering to others in such circumstances, good conversationalists adopt the posture of a midwife. A midwife is there not to give birth but simply to assist the other person in their own creation. In conversation, a midwife is there not to lead with insights but to receive and build on the insights the other person is developing. The midwife is there to make the person feel safe, but she is also there to prod. There are always ways we’re not fully honest with ourselves. The midwife is there to encourage a deeper honesty.

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.

FIND THE DISAGREEMENT UNDER THE DISAGREEMENT.

When you search for the disagreement under the disagreement, you are looking for the moral, philosophical roots of why you each believe what you do. You’re engaged in a mutual exploration. Suddenly, instead of just repeating our arguments, we’re pulling stories out of each other. As the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett puts it, “Being curious about your friend’s experience is more important than being right.”

DON’T BE A TOPPER. 

If somebody tells you they are having trouble with their teenage son, don’t turn around and say, “I know exactly what you mean. I’m having incredible problems with my Steven.” You may think you’re trying to build a shared connection, but what you are really doing is shifting attention back to yourself. You’re saying, in effect, “Your problems aren’t that interesting to me; let me tell you about my own, much more fascinating ones.” If you want to build a shared connection, try sitting with their experience before you start ladling out your own.

Chapter Seven: The Right Questions 

Job interviews are notoriously unreliable, in part because many people aren’t good at seeing others, and in part because job applicants often lie during them. David hires well because he’s very focused. The first thing he is looking for when he hires someone, he says, is “extreme talent.” He defines this narrowly. He doesn’t want someone who says they love teaching in general; he wants to hear someone identify the specific teaching task they excel at: I love writing out a lesson plan. Or I love working with remedial students. Or I love one-on-one tutoring. “People love to do the thing they are wired to do,” he says. A person can go a long way with a narrow skill set.

Second, David is looking for a “spirit of generosity.” Will this person be kind to others? One way he tries to discern a person’s character is with what he calls the “take me back” technique. When you ask people about their lives, David finds, they tend to start in the middle—with their career. So he’ll ask, “Take me back to when you were born.” In this way he can get people out of talking about their professional life and into talking about their personal life. He can begin to get a sense of how they treat others, who they love, what they do to make the world a better place.

“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.

Asking good questions can be a weirdly vulnerable activity. You’re admitting that you don’t know. An insecure, self-protective world is a world with fewer questions.

I’ve come to think of questioning as a moral practice. When you are asking a good question, you are adopting a posture of humility. You’re confessing that you don’t know and you want to learn. You’re also honouring a person.

The worst kinds of questions are the ones that don’t involve a surrender of power, that evaluate: Where did you go to college? What neighbourhood do you live in? What do you do? They imply, “I’m about to judge you.”

Closed questions are also bad questions. Instead of surrendering power, the questioner is imposing a limit on how the question can be answered.

A third sure way to shut down conversations is to ask vague questions, like “How’s it going?” or “What’s up?” These questions are impossible to answer. They’re another way of saying, “I’m greeting you, but I don’t actually want you to answer.”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…”

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 favourite 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?”

Peter Block is an author and consultant who writes about community development and civic engagement. He is a master at coming up with questions that lift you out of your ruts and invite fresh reevaluations. Here are some of his: “What is the no, or refusal, you keep postponing?… What have you said yes to that you no longer really believe in?… What forgiveness are you withholding?… How have you contributed to the problem you’re trying to solve?… What is the gift you currently hold in exile?”

Part 2: I See You in Your Struggles

Chapter Eight: The Epidemic of Blindness

“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.

Loneliness thus leads to meanness. As the saying goes, pain that is not transformed gets transmitted. High-trust societies have what Francis Fukuyama calls “spontaneous sociability,” meaning that people are quick to get together and work together. Low-trust societies do not have this. Low-trust societies fall apart. Distrust sows distrust. It creates a feeling that the only person you can count on is yourself. Distrustful people assume that others are out to get them, they exaggerate threats, they fall for conspiracy theories that explain the danger they feel. Every society possesses what the philosopher Axel Honneth calls a “recognition order.” 

Love rejected comes back as hatred. The stressors build up: bad at school, bad at work, humiliating encounters with others. These young men contemplate suicide. And in their despair, they seem to experience something that feels like an identity crisis: Is it my fault or is it the world’s fault? Am I a loser or are they losers? Why, over the past two decades, have we seen this epidemic of loneliness and meanness, this breakdown in the social fabric? We can all point to some contributing factors: social media, widening inequality, declining participation in community life, declining church attendance, rising populism and bigotry, vicious demagoguery from our media and political elites.

As a society, we have failed to teach the skills and cultivate the inclination to treat each other with kindness, generosity, and respect. 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.

As schools became more fixated on career success, they stopped worrying about churning out students who would be considerate to others. The breakdown in basic moral skills produced disconnection, alienation, and a culture in which cruelty was permitted. Our failure to treat each other well in the small encounters of everyday life metastasized and, I believe, led to the horrific social breakdown we see all around us. This is a massive civilizational failure. We need to rediscover ways to teach moral and social skills. This crisis helped motivate me to write this book.

Chapter Nine: Hard Conversations

The first thing I learned is that prior to entering into any hard conversation, it’s important to think about conditions before you think about content. What are the conditions in which this conversation is going to take place? If you are a well-educated professional attending a conference in a nice hotel somewhere, you can show up in a room and just be yourself. But if you are a trucker from West Virginia with a high school education, you have to be much more aware of the social dynamics, much more discerning about what version of yourself you can present. Also, for members of dominant or majority groups, there’s usually little or no gap between how others you and how you see yourself.

For people from marginalized or historically oppressed groups, there’s usually a chasm between who you are and how you are perceived. Everybody has to walk into a hard conversation aware of these dynamics. If I meet a trucker at a conference in a luxury hotel, I’m going to show genuine curiosity about his work. I’m going to do whatever I can—and it may not be much—to let him know that he can be his full self with me.

The second crucial thing I learned, especially from the authors of Crucial Conversations, is that every conversation takes place on two levels: the official conversation and the actual conversation. The official conversation is represented by the words we say about whatever topic we are nominally discussing: politics, economics, workplace issues—whatever. The actual conversation occurs in the ebb and flow of underlying emotions that get transmitted as we talk. With every comment you are either making me feel a little more safe or a little more threatened. With every comment I am showing you either respect or disrespect.

With every comment we are each revealing something about our intentions: Here is why I am telling you this. Here is why this is important to me. It is the volley of these underlying emotions that will determine the success or failure of the conversation. The authors of Crucial Conversations also remind us that every conversation exists within a frame: What is the purpose here? What are our goals? A frame is the stage on which the conversation takes place.

In either case, there’s a temptation to get defensive. There’s a temptation to try to yank the conversation back to your frame: Here’s how the situation looks to me. Here’s what I’m doing to alleviate that problem. Here are all the other problems I have you might not be aware of. There’s a temptation, in other words, to revert to the frames you feel comfortable with. 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. The Scots have a word that’s useful in this context: “ken”; you may be familiar with it from the expression “beyond your ken.” It comes from sailors who used the word to describe the area as far as they could see to the horizon. If you’re going to have a good hard conversation with someone, you have to step into their ken.

If you step into someone’s ken, it shows that you at least want to understand. That’s a powerful way to show respect. When you stand in someone else’s standpoint—seeing the world from the other’s point of view—then all participants in the conversation are contributing to a shared pool of knowledge. But very often in hard conversations, there is no shared pool of knowledge. One person describes their set of wrongs. The other person describes their own different set of wrongs. As the conversation goes on, they each go into deeper detail about their particular wrongs, but there’s no shared pool. Pretty soon nobody is listening. It doesn’t take much to create an us/ them dynamic. This is a surefire way to do it.

When hard conversations go bad, everybody’s motivations deteriorate. Two people at a company, for example, may be debating a new marketing strategy. At first their intentions are clear: They both want what’s best for the firm. But as the conversation continues, their motivations shift: They each want to win the argument. They each want to show that they are smarter, more powerful. That’s when they start pulling out the rhetorical dirty tricks. That’s when, for example, they start labelling each other. Labelling is when you try to discredit another person by tossing them into some disreputable category: You’re a reactionary. You’re the old establishment. You’re woke. Slapping a label on someone is a great way to render them invisible and destroy a hardconversation.

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.” Splitting is when you clarify your own motives by first saying what they are not and then saying what they are. You say something like “I certainly wasn’t trying to silence your voice. I was trying to include your point of view with the many other points of view on this topic. But I went too fast. I should have paused to try to hear your voice fully, so we could build from that reality. That was not respectful to you.”

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. “You and I have very different ideas of what marketing plan this company should pursue. But we both believe in the product we are selling. We both want to get it before as many people as possible. I think we are both trying to take this company to the next level.” Finally, you can take advantage of the fact that a rupture is sometimes an opportunity to forge a deeper bond. You might say, “You and I have just expressed some strong emotions. Unfortunately, against each other. But at least our hearts are out on the table and we’ve both been exposed. Weirdly, we have a chance to understand each other better because of the mistakes we’ve made, the emotions we’ve aroused.”

I’ve learned over these years that hard conversations are hard because people in different life circumstances construct very different realities. It’s not only that they have different opinions about the same world; they literally see different worlds.

Dennis Proffitt, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, studies perception. He wants to know how people construct their realities, sometimes at the most elementary level. “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.

Gibson’s insight was that as we enter a scene, we’re looking for opportunities for action. How do I fit into this situation? What can I do here? What possibilities does this situation afford? In Gibson’s language, we see

“affordances.” A hunter with a gun will see a much bigger field than a hunter with a spear because he has a much wider range of action. A police officer who is holding a gun is more likely to “see” other people holding guns than he would if he were holding a shoe, which is partly why 25 percent of police shootings involve unarmed suspects. Proffitt and Baer hammer home the point: “We perceive the world, not as it is but as it is for us.”

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.

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. There is no way to make hard conversations un-hard. You can never fully understand a person whose life experience is very different from your own.

Nevertheless, I have found that if you work on your skills—your capacity to see and hear others—you really can get a sense of another person’s perspective. And I have found that it is quite possible to turn distrust into trust, to build mutual respect.

Chapter Eleven: The Art of Empathy

The famous Grant Study followed 268 Harvard men from their days as college students in the 1940s until their deaths many decades later, in an attempt to discover the patterns of human development and achievement. The study found—and this was a surprise decades ago—that the quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life. But relationships in childhood had a special power. At one point the directors of the study wondered why some of the men in the study were promoted to officers during World War II and others weren’t. They found that the number one factor that correlated with success in wartime was not IQ, physical endurance, or socioeconomic background. The number one factor was the overall warmth of the man’s family home. The men who had been well loved and seen deeply by their parents could offer love and care to the men under their command.

A warm childhood environment was also a better predictor of adult social mobility than intelligence.Children respond to harsh circumstances the only way they know how. They construct defences to protect against further wounding. They draw lessons—adaptive or maladaptive—about what they can expect from life and what they need to do to survive. These defences and lessons are often unconscious. If you hope to know someone well, you have to know something about the struggles and blessings their childhoods and the defensive architecture they carry through life. Here are a few of the defences that many people carry inside, sometimes for the rest of their lives:

AVOIDANCE: Avoidance is usually about fear. Emotions and relationships have hurt me, so I will minimize emotions and relationships. People who are avoidant feel most comfortable when the conversation stays superficial. They often overintellectualize life. They retreat to work. They try to be self-sufficient and pretend they don’t have needs. Often, they have not had close relationships as kids and have lowered their expectations about future relationships. A person who fears intimacy in this way may be always on the move, preferring not to be rooted or pinned down; they are sometimes relentlessly positive so as not to display vulnerability; they engineer things so they are the strong one others turn to but never the one who turns to others. 

DEPRIVATION.Some children are raised around people so self-centered that the needs of the child are ignored. The child naturally learns the lesson “My needs won’t be met.” It is a short step from that to “I’m not worthy.” A person haunted by a deprivation schema can experience feelings of worthlessness throughout life no matter how many amazing successes they achieve. They often carry the idea that there is some flaw deep within themselves, that if other people knew it, it would cause them to run away. When they are treated badly, they are likely to blame themselves. They sometimes grapple with a fierce inner critic.

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.

PASSIVE AGGRESSION: Passive aggression is the indirect expression of anger. It is a way to sidestep direct communication by a person who fears conflict, who has trouble dealing withnegative emotions. It’s possible such a person grew up in a home where anger was terrifying, where emotions were not addressed, or where love was conditional and the lesson was that direct communication would lead to the withdrawal of affection. Passive aggression is thus a form of emotional manipulation, a subtle power play to extract guilt and affection.

Empathy is involved in every stage of the process of getting to know a person. But it is especially necessary when we are accompanying someone who is wrestling with their wounds. The problem is that a lot of people don’t know what empathy really is. They think it’s an easy emotion: You open up your heart and you experience this gush of fellow feeling with another person. By this definition, empathy feels simple, natural, and automatic: I feel for you. But that’s not quite right. Empathy is a set of social and emotional skills. These skills are a bit like athletic skills: Some people are more naturally talented at empathy than others; everybody improves with training. 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.

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. He does this because a good way to understand what another person is feeling in their body is to live it out yourself in your own body, at least to some extent.

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. They have become emotion experts. It’s like being a painter with more colors on your palate.

The second empathy skill is not mirroring but mentalizing. Only humans can figure out why they are experiencing what they are experiencing. Wedo this by relying on our own experience and memory. As with all modes of perception, we ask, “What is this similar to?” When I see what a friend is experiencing, I go back to a time in my life when I experienced something like that. I make predictions about what my friend is going through based on what I had to go through.

As we do this, we rise to a higher level of empathy. We don’t see “woman crying.” We see “woman who has suffered a professional setback and a public humiliation.” I’ve been through a version of that, and I can project some of what I felt onto her.

When practiced well, this mentalizing skill helps us see emotional states in all their complexity. People generally have multiple emotions at once.

Mentalizing also helps us simultaneously sympathize with a person while also detaching to make judgments about them. I may feel genuinely bad that you are miserable because somebody scratched your Mercedes. I may also think you are reacting childishly because too much of your identity is wrapped up in your car.

The third empathy skill is caring. Con artists are very good at reading people’s emotions. 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.

Let’s say I’m with somebody who is having an anxiety attack. Caring is not necessarily offering what I would want in that situation:glass of wine. Caring begins with the awareness that the other person has a consciousness that is different from my own. They might want me to hold their hand while they do some breathing exercises. I’m going to find that completely awkward, but I’m going to do it because I want to practice effective empathy.

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.

People vary widely in their ability to project empathy. The psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, one of the leading scholars in this field, argues that there’s an empathy spectrum and that people tend to fall within one of seven categories on.

At level zero, people can hurt or even kill others without feeling anything at all. At level one, people can show a degree of empathy, but not enough to brake their cruel behavior. They blow up at others and cause emotional damage without restraint. At level two people are simply clueless. They say rude and hurtful things without awareness. They invade other people’s personal space and miss social cues in ways that make others feel uncomfortable. At level three people avoid social encounters when possible because it is so hard for them. Small talk is exhausting and unpredictable. At level four people can interact easily with others but they do not like it when the conversation shifts to emotional or personal topics. People at level five have many intimate friendships and are comfortable expressing support and compassion.At level six we have people who are wonderful listeners, are intuitive about other’s needs, and are comfortable and effective at offering comfort and support.

You can measure how dispositionally empathetic you are by noting how much you agree or disagree with the following statements:

1. I find it hard to know what to do in social situations. 

2. It doesn’t bother me too much if I’m late meeting a friend. 

3. People often tell me that I went too far in driving my point home in a discussion. 

4. Interpersonal conflict, even when it doesn’t involve me, is physically painful to me. 

5. I often mimic mannerisms, accents, and body language without meaning to. 

6. When I make a social blunder, I feel extremely disturbed.

Agreement with the first three of these statements, taken from Baron-Cohen, are signs that you have low empathy skills. Agreement with the last three, taken from The Art of Empathy by Karla McLaren, are signs of high empathy. Low empaths can be cruel and pitiable creatures.

Chapter Twelve: How Were You Shaped by Your Sufferings? 

C. S. Lewis once observed that grief is not a state but a process. It’s a river that runs through a long valley, and at every turn a new landscape is revealed, and yet somehow it repeats and repeats. Periods of grief and suffering often shatter our basic assumptions about who we are and how life works. We tend to assume that the world is benevolent, that life is controllable, that things are supposed to make sense, that we are basically good people who deserve good things. Suffering and loss can blast all that to smithereens.

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?

The act of remaking your models is hard. Not everyone does it successfully.

To know a person well, you have to know who they were before they suffered their losses and how they remade their whole outlook after them. If a subtext of this book is that experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you, then one of the subsequent lessons is that to know someone who has grieved, you have to know how they have processed their loss—did they emerge wiser, kinder, and stronger, or broken, stuck, and scared? To be a good friend and a good person you have to know how to accompany someone through this process.

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.

A person is hit by a blow. There is a period when the shock of the loss is too great to be faced. Emotions are packed away. The person’s inner

life is held “in suspension,” as the psychologists say. But then, when the time is right, the person realizes that he has to deal with his past. He has to excavate all that was packed away. He has to share his experience with friends, readers, or some audience. Only then can he go on to a bigger, deeper life.

The writer David Lodge once noted that 90 percent of what we call writing is actually reading. It’s going back over your work so you can change and improve it. The excavation task is like that. It’s going back and back over events. The goal is to try to create mental flexibility, the ability to have multiple perspectives on a single event. To find other ways to see what happened. To put the tragedy in the context of a larger story. As Maya Angelou once put it, “The more you know of your history, the more liberated you are.”

How does this process of excavation work? How do we help each other go back into the past and reinvent the story of our lives? There are certain exercises that friends can do together. 

First, friends can ask each other the kinds of questions that help people see more deeply into their own childhoods. Psychologists recommend that you ask your friend to fill in the blanks to these two statements: “In our family, the one thing you must never do is _____” and “In our family, the one thing you must do above all else is ________.” That’s a way to help a person see more clearly the deep values that were embedded in the way they were raised. 

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. People who have been hurt need somebody they trust to narrate their life, stand up to their own self-contempt, and believe the best of them. 

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? 

The fourth is story sampling. For decades, James Pennebaker of the University of Texas at Austin has had people do free-form expressive-writing exercises. He says: Open your notebook. Set a timer for twenty minutes. Write about your emotional experiences. Don’t worry about punctuation or sloppiness. Go wherever your mind takes you. Write just for yourself. Throw it out at the end. In the beginning, people who take part in expressive-writing exercises sometimes use different voices and even different handwriting styles. Their stories are raw and disjointed. But then unconscious thoughts surface. They try on different perspectives. Their narratives grow more coherent and self-aware as the days go by. They turn from victims to writers. Some studies show that people who go through this process emerge with lower blood pressure and healthier immune systems. “I write,” Susan Sontag once remarked, “to define myself—an act of self-creation—part of the process of becoming.”

The fifth exercise is my favorite. Put aside all the self-conscious exercises and just have serious conversations with friends. If you’ve lost someone dear to you, tell each other stories about that person. Reflect on the strange journey that is grief; tell new stories about what life will look like in the years ahead.

This book has been built around a different ideal and a different theory of how to build good character. This book has been built around the Illuminator ideal. The Illuminator ideal begins with a different understanding of human nature. People are social animals. People need recognition from others if they are to thrive. People long for someone to look into their eyes with loving acceptance. Therefore, morality is mostly about the small, daily acts of building connection—the gaze that says “I respect you,” the question that says “I’m curious about you,” the conversation that says, “We’re in this together.”

In the Illuminator model, character building is not something you can do alone. Morality is a social practice. It is trying to be generous and considerate toward a specific other person, who is enmeshed in a specific context. A person of character is trying to be generous and just to the person who is criticizing him. He is trying to just be present and faithful to the person suffering from depression. He is trying to be a deep and caring friend to the person who is trying to overcome the wounds left by childhood. He is a helpful sounding board to the person who is rebuilding her models after losing a spouse or child. Character building happens as we get better at these kinds of tasks.

In the Illuminator model, we develop good character as we get more experienced in being present with others, as we learn to get outside our self-serving ways of perceiving. 

Part 3: I See You with Your Strengths

 

Chapter Thirteen: Personality: What Energy Do You Bring into the Room? 

If you want to understand another person, you have to be able to describe the particular energy they bring into a 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 corepersonality traits. Psychologists refer to these as the Big Five.

The Big Five traits are extroversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness.

If you understand the essence of each trait, you’ll be able to look at people with more educated eyes.

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.

People who score high in extroversion are warm, gregarious, excitement seekers. People who score high on extroversion are more sociable than retiring, more fun-loving than sober, more affectionate than reserved, more spontaneous than inhibited, and more talkative than quiet.

Extroversion is generally a good trait to have, since high extroverts are often so much fun to be around. But all traits have their advantages and disadvantages. As studies over the years have shown, people who score high in extroversion can be quick to anger. They take more risks. Extroverts live their lives as a high-reward/ high-risk exercise.

People who score low on extroversion just seem more chill. Such people have slower and less volatile emotional responses to things. They are often creative, thoughtful, and intentional. They like having deeper relationships with fewer people. Their way of experiencing the world is not lesser than that of high-extroversion people, just different.

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.

People high in conscientiousness are less likely to procrastinate, tend to be a bit perfectionist, and have high achievement motivation. They are likely to avoid drugs and to stick to fitness routines. As you’d expect, high conscientiousness predicts all sorts of good outcomes: higher grades in school, more career success, longer life spans. Nevertheless, it’s not as if people who score high in conscientiousness are all enjoying fantastic careers

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 have more emotional ups and downs over the course of the day. They can fall into a particular kind of emotional spiral: They are quick to see threats and negative emotions; they interpret ambiguous events more negatively; they are therefore exposed to more negative experiences; this exposure causes them to believe even more strongly that the world is a dangerous place; and thus they grow even more likely to see threats; and so on and so on. They often feel uncomfortable with uncertainty; they prefer the devil they know to the devil they don’t know. They also have a lot of negative emotions toward themselves, and think they deserve what they get.

But, like all traits, neuroticism has its upsides as well. It prepares people for certain social roles. If your community is in danger, it helps to have a prophet who can spot it early on. If there is a lot of emotional pain in your community, it’s good to have a person who scores high in neuroticism, like Sigmund Freud, around to study and understand it. If there’s a need for social change, it’s useful to have indignant people who are calling for it. In a world in which most people are overconfident about their abilities and overly optimistic about the outcomes of their behaviour, there’s a benefit in having some people who lean the other way.

AGREEABLENESS: Those who score high on agreeableness are good at getting along with people. They are compassionate, considerate, helpful, and accommodating toward others. Such people tend to be trusting, cooperative, and kind—good-natured rather than foul-tempered, softhearted rather than hard-edged, polite more than rude, forgiving more than vengeful.

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.

If you’re going to marry someone, you should understand their personality traits so you can prepare to love them in the right way. Agreeableness, which is basically being kind, doesn’t seem like a very romantic or sexy trait, but high agreeables have lower divorce rates and in some studies are found to be better in bed.

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.

Reality is a little more fluid for such people. They report having more transcendent spiritual experiences and more paranormal beliefs. When

Chapter Fifteen: Life Stories 

Social connection is the number one source of happiness, success, good health, and much of the sweetness of life. 

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.

Narrative thinking, 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 bylucky 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.

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. How, for so long, people came to her asking for things, but now she was forced to humble herself and approach others for favors.

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. And you can endure present pains only if you can see them as part of a story that will yield future benefits. “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story,” as the Danish writer Isak Dinesen said.

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. 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.

Fernyhough observes that our inner speech is often made up of different characters in the mind having a conversation. The Polish researcher Małgorzata Puchalska-Wasyl asked people to describe the characters they heard in their head. She found that people commonly named four types of inner voices: the Faithful Friend (who tells you about your personal strengths), the Ambivalent Parent (who offers caring criticism), the Proud Rival (who badgers you to be more successful), and the Helpless Child (who has a lot of self-pity). So when I’m listening to someone tell their story, I’m also asking myself, What characters does this person have in his head? Is this a confident voice or a tired voice, a regretful voice or an anticipating voice? For some reason, I like novels where the narrator has an elegiac voice.

The next question I’m asking myself as people tell me their stories is: Who is the hero here?

By our late twenties or early thirties, most of us have what McAdams calls an imago, an archetype or idealized image of oneself that captures the role that person hopes to play in society.

One person, he finds, might cast himself as the Healer. Another might be the Caregiver. Others maybe be the Warrior, the Sage, the Maker, the Counselor, the Survivor, the Arbiter, or the Juggler. When someone is telling me their story, I find that it’s often useful to ask myself, What imago are they inhabiting? As McAdams writes, “Imagoes express our most cherished desires and goals.”

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.

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. Some people, however, take fabulation to the extreme. They are beset by such deep insecurities and self-doubts that when you ask them to tell their story, what you end up getting is not an account but a performance.

Finally, when I’m hearing life stories, I’m looking for narrative flexibility. Life is a constant struggle to refine and update our stories.

Chapter Seventeen: What Is 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.

Their essential gift is receptivity, the capacity to receive what you are sending. This is not a passive skill. The wise person is not just keeping her ears open. 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.

The knowledge that results from your encounter with a wise person is personal and contextual, not a generalization that can be captured in a maxim that can be pinned to a bulletin board. It is particular to your unique self and your unique situation. 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.

We all know people who are smart. But that doesn’t mean they are wise.

The wise are those who have lived full, varied lives, and reflected deeply on what they’ve been through. 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