By Manuel “Bobby” Orig, Consultant, Apo Agua
HOW TO KNOW A PERSON
The Art of Seeing Others Deeply And Being Deeply Seen
By David Brooks
As #1 New York Times bestselling author observes, “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, and understood.”
And yet we humans don’t do this well. All around us are people who feel invisible, unseen, misunderstood. In How to Know a Person, Brooks sets out to help us do better, posing questions that are essential for all of us. If you want to know a person, what kind of attention should you cast on them? What kind of conversations should you have? What parts of a person’s story should you pay attention to?
Driven by his trademark sense of curiosity and his determination to grow as a person, Brooks draws from the fields of psychology and neuroscience and from the worlds of theater, philosophy, history, and education to present a welcoming, hopeful, integrated approach to human connection. How to Know a Person helps readers become more understanding and considerate toward others, and find the joy that comes from being seen. Along the way it offers a possible remedy for a society that is riven by fragmentation, hostility, and misperception.
The act of seeing another person, Brooks argues, is profoundly creative: How can we look somebody in the eye and see something large in them, and in turn, see something larger in ourselves. How to Know a Person is for anyone searching for connection, and yearning to be understood.
Praise for the book:
For the most part, what makes David’s book so compelling is that it challenges us to put its insights into practice. It’s about being intentional in our interactions, whether that means asking more thoughtful questions, fully listening to the answers, or expressing genuine appreciation. It’s about approaching conversations with generosity and curiosity, looking for ways to connect and understand. And it’s about realizing that even small things—like asking the right question at the right time or giving a nice compliment—can make a big difference in building relationships. I’m certain that what I learned from the book will stay with me for a long time.
Overall, I can’t recommend How to Know a Person highly enough. More than a guide to better conversations, it’s a blueprint for a more connected and humane way of living. It’s a must-read for anyone looking to deepen their relationships and broaden their perspectives—and I believe it has the power to make us better friends, colleagues, and citizens.
—BILL GATES
About the author:
DAVID BROOKS is one of the nation’s leading writers and commentators. He is an op-ed columnist for The New York Times and a writer for The Atlantic, and he appears regularly on PBS NewsHour. Brooks is the bestselling author of The Second Mountain, The Road to Character, The Social Animal, Bobos in Paradise, and On Paradise Drive.
THE POWER OF BEING SEEN
David claims he is not an exceptional person, but he is a grower. He does have the ability to look at his shortcomings, then try to prod himself into becoming a more fully developed human being. He made progress over these years. Twice in his life he’s been lucky enough to have appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s show Super Soul Sunday, once in 2015 and once in 2019. After they were done taping the second interview, Oprah came up to him and said, “I’ve rarely seen someone change so much.” That was a proud moment for him.
He learned something profound along the way. Being open-hearted is a prerequisite for being a full, kind, and wise human being. 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; 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, 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. Our schools and other institutions have focused more and more of preparing people for their careers, but not on the skills of being considerate toward the person next to you. And a life spent on social media is not exactly helping people learn those skills. On social media you can have the illusion of social contact without having to perform the gestures that actually build trust, care, and affection. On social media, stimulation replaces intimacy. There is judgment everywhere and understanding nowhere.
In this age of creeping dehumanization, David became obsessed with social skills: how to get better at treating people with consideration; how to get better at understanding the people around us. He has 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 a 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 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 that not to see someone, to render them unimportant or invisible. “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.” To do that is to say: You don’t matter. You don’t exist.
On the other hand, there are a few things as fulfilling as that sense of being seen and understood. David often ask people to tell him about times they’ve felt seen, and with glowing eyes they tell him about pivotal moments in their life. They talk about a time when someone perceived some talent in them that they themselves weren’t 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.
Over the past four years, David have become determined to learn the skills that go into seeing others, understanding others, making other people feel respected, valued, and safe.
First, he wanted to understand and learn these skills for pragmatic reasons. You can’t make the big decisions in life unless you’re able to understand others. In a 2021 study, McKinsey asked managers why their employees were quitting their firms. Most of the managers believed that people were leaving to get more pay. But when the McKinsey researchers asked the employees themselves why they left, the top reasons were relational. They didn’t feel recognized and valued by their managers and organizations. They didn’t feel seen.
Second, David wanted to learn this skill for what he think of as spiritual reasons. Seeing someone else is a powerfully creative act. No one can fully appreciate their own beauty and strengths unless those things are mirrored back to them in the mind of another. There is something in being seen that brings forth growth. If you beam the light of attention on David, he blossom. If you see great potential in him, he will probably see great potential in himself. If you can understand his frailties, and sympathize with him when life treats him harshly, then he will more likely have the strength to weather the storms of life. “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 him, he will learn how to see himself.
And third, David wanted to learn this skill for what he calls reason of national survival. Human being evolved to live in small bands with people more or less like themselves. But today, many of us live in wonderfully pluralistic societies. In America, Europe, India, and many other places, we’re trying to build mass multicultural democracies, societies that contain people from diverse races and ethnicities, with different ideologies and backgrounds. To survive, pluralistic societies require citizens who can look across differences and show the kind of understanding that is a prerequisite of trust – who can say, at the very least, “I’m beginning to see you. Certainly, I will never experience the world as you experience it, but I’m beginning, a bit, to see the world through your eyes.”
Our social skills are currently inadequate to the pluralistic societies we are living in. Many of our big national problems arise from the fraying of our social fabric. If we want to begin repairing the big national raptures, we have to learn to do the small things well.
DIMINISHERS AND ILLUMINATORS
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 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.
Perhaps you know the story that is sometimes told of Jennie Jerome, who later became Winston Churchill’s mother. It’s said that when she was young, she dined with the British statesman William Gladstone and left thinking he was the cleverest person in England. Later she dined with Gladstone’s great rival, Benjamin Disraeli, and left that dinner thinking that she was the cleverest person in England. It’s nice to be like Gladstone, but it’s better to be like Disraeli.
Or consider a story from Bell Labs. Many years ago, executives there realized that some of their researchers were far more productive, and amassed many more patents, than the others. Why was this? they wondered. They wanted to know what made these researchers so special. They explored every possible explanation – educational background, position in the company -but came up empty. Then they noticed a quirk. The most productive researchers were in the habit of having breakfast or lunch with an electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist. Aside from making important contributions to communications theory, Nyquist, the scientists said, really listened to their challenges, got inside their heads, asked good questions, and brought out the best in them. In other words, Nyquist was an Illuminator.
So what are you most of the time, a Diminisher or an Illuminator? How good are you at reading other people?
THE PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK is to help us become more skilled at the art of seeing others and making them feel seen, heard, and understood. There are so many professions in which the job is to see, anticipate, and understand people: nursing, management, social work, marketing, journalism, editing, HR, and on and on. David’s approach was to gather some of the knowledge that is dispersed across these professions and integrate it into a single practical approach.
David is hoping that this book will help you adopt a different posture toward other people, a different way of being present with people, a different way of having bigger conversations. Living this way can yield the deepest pleasures.
HOW NOT TO SEE A PERSON
A few years ago, David was sitting at a bar near his home in Washington, DC. Right next to him was a couple apparently on a first date, with the guy droning about himself. As his monologue hit its tenth minute, he sensed that she was silently praying that she might spontaneously combust, so at least this date could be over. He felt the sudden urge to grab the guy by the nose and scream, “For the love of God – just once ask her a question!” He thinks this impulse of his is justified, but he is not proud of it.
Everybody seem to have their eyes wide open, but nobody seemed to be seeing each other. We were all, in one way or another, acting like Diminishers. And in truth, David thought he was the worst of them because he was doing that thing: the size-up. The size-up is what you do when you first meet someone: You check out their look, and you immediately start making judgments about them.
Most of us have all sorts of inborn proclivities that prevent us from perceiving others accurately. Here are a few other Diminisher tricks:
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 too much noise in their own heads, they can’t hear what’s going on in their 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 reality are so locked into their own perspective, they can’t appreciate that other people have very different perspectives. You may have heard the story about a man by the river. A woman standing on the opposite shore shouts at him: “How do I get to the other side of the river?” and the man shouts back: “You are on the other side of the river.”
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 have access to the tiny portion they speak out loud. This leads to the perception that I am much more complicated than you – deeper, more interesting, more subtle, and more high-minded. To demonstrate this phenomenon, Epley asked his business school students why they are going into business. The common answer was “I care about something worthwhile.” When he asked them why they thought other students at the school were going into business, they commonly replied, “For the money.” You know, because other people have lesser motivation … and lesser minds.
OBJECTIVISM. This is what market researchers, pollsters, and social scientists do. They observe behavior, 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 the person, her unique subjectivity – her imagination, sentiments, desires, creativity, intuitions, faith, emotions, and attachments – the cast of this unique person’s inner world.
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 generalizations occasionally have some basis in reality. But they are all false to some degree. Essentialists don’t recognize this. 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.
THE STATIC MINDSET. Some people have formed a certain conception of you, one that may 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.
DAVID IS BREAKING OUT THESE DIMINISHER PROCLIVITIES to emphasize that seeing another person well is the hardest of all the hard problems. Each person is a fathomless mystery, and you have only an outside view of who they are.
The second point David is trying to make is this: The untrained eye is not enough. You’d never think of trying to fly a plane without going to flight school. Seeing another person well is even harder than that. If you and I are relying on our untrained ways of encountering others, we won’t be seeing each other as deeply as we should. We’ll lead our lives awash in social ignorance, enmeshed in relationships of mutual blindness.
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 have a word for it: herzensbildung, training one’s heart to see the full humanity in another.
ILLUMINATION
A few years ago, David was in Waco, Texas. In Waco, a number of people told him about a ninety-three-year-old Black woman named LaRue Dorsey. He reached out and they arranged to get together over breakfast at a diner. She’d spent her career mostly as a teacher, and he asked her about her life and the communities she was part of.
That morning, Mrs. Dorsey presented herself to David as a stern-sergeant type, a woman, she wanted him to know, who was tough, who had standards, who laid down the law. “I love my students enough to discipline them,” she told him. He was a bit intimidated by her.
In the middle of the meal, a mutual friend named Jimmy Dorrel entered the diner. He and Mrs. Dorsey had worked together on various community projects over the years.
Jimmy saw her across the room and came up to their table smiling as broadly as it is possible for a human face to smile. Then he grabbed her by the shoulders and shake her harder than you should ever shake a ninety-three-year-old. He leaned in inches from her, and cried out in a voice that filled the whole place: “Mrs. Dorsey! Mrs. Dorsey! You’re the best! I love you! I love you!”
David never saw a person whose whole aspect transformed suddenly. The old, stern disciplinarian face shed put on under his gaze vanished, and a joyous, delighted nine-year-old girl appeared. By projecting a different quality of attention, Jimmy called forth a different version of her. Jimmy is an illuminator.
At that moment, David 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 with warmth brings out the glowing sides of the people she meets, while a person who beams 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 quality of life depends quite a bit on the quality of attention you project out onto the world.
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.
David list some of the features of the illuminator’s gaze:
TENDERNESS. “Tenderness is deep emotional concern about another being,” the novelist Olga Tokarczuk declared in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “Tenderness perceives the bonds that connect us, the similarities and sameness between us.” Literature, she argued, “is built on tenderness toward any being other than ourselves.” And so is seeing.
RECEPTIVITY. Being receptive means overcoming insecurities and self-preoccupation and opening yourself up to the experiences 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?” Instead, you are patiently ready for what the other person is offering.
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 friends. “I rarely entered a friend’s home without wondering what it might be like to never leave,” she wrote. “I was an equal opportunity voyeur. I wanted to know what it was like to be everybody. Above all, I wondered what it would be like to believe the sorts of things I didn’t believe.” 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 from emotion. 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.
The human characters in the Bible are measured by how well they can imitate this affectionate way of knowing. They often fail in these dramas of recognition. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, an injured Jew lies beaten and left for dead on the side of the road. At least two other Jews, one of them a priest, pass him by, crossing to the other side of the street, not doing anything to help. They see him strictly intellectually. Only the Samaritan, a man from an alien and hated people, truly sees him. Only the Samaritan enters into the injured man’s experience and actually does something to help him. In these biblical cases, where someone sees another without really seeing, these failures of knowledge are not intellectual failures; they are failures of the heart.
GENEROSITY. Dr. Ludwig Guttman was a German Jew who escaped Nazi Germany in 1939 and found a job in a hospital in Britain that served paraplegics, mostly men injured in the war. When he first started working there, the hospital heavily sedated these men and kept them confined in their beds. Guttman, however, didn’t see the patients the way the other doctors saw them. He cut back on the sedatives, forced them out of bed, and started throwing balls at them and doing other things to get them active. As a result, he was summoned to a tribunal of his peers, where his methods were challenged.
“These are moribund cripples,” one doctor asserted. “Who do you think they are?”
“They are the best of men,” Gutmann replied.
It was his generosity of spirit that changed how he defined them. He continued organizing games, first at the hospital, then for paraplegics around the nation. In 1960 this led to the Paralympic Games.
BEING AN ILLUMINATOR IS AN IDEAL, and one that most of us will fall short a lot of the time. But if we try our best to illuminate people with a glowing gaze that is tender, generous, and receptive, we’ll at least be on the right track. We will see beyond the cliché character types we often lazily impose on people: the doting grandmother, the tough coach, the hard-charging businessperson. We will be on our way toward improving how we show up in the world.
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 an objective reality of what happens, and there is the subjective reality of how what happened is seen, interpreted, made meaningful. That second subjective layer can sometimes be the more important layer. As the Yale psychologist Marc Brackett puts it, “Well-being depends less on objective events than on how those events are perceived, dealt with, and shared with others.” 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 resume?” Instead, we should ask: “How does this person interpret what happened? How does this person see things? How do they construct reality?” This is what we really want to know if we want to understand another person.
An extrovert walks into a party and sees a different room than an introvert does. A person who has been trained as an interior designer sees a different room than someone who’s been trained as a security specialist. The therapist Irvin Yalom once asked one of his patients to write a summary of each group therapy session they did together. When he read her reports, Yalom realized that she experienced each session radically different than he did. In other words, we may be at the same event together, but we’re each having our own experience of it. Or, as the writer Anais Nin put it, “We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.”
If you want to see and understand people well, you have to know what you are looking for. You have to know what a person is. The 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 personal way of seeing the world. Your mind creates a world, with beauty and ugliness, excitement, tedium, friends, and enemies, and you live within that construction. People do not see the world with their eyes; they see it with their entire life.
Cognitive scientists call this view of the human person “constructionism.” Constructionism is the recognition, backed up by the last half century of brain research, that people don’t passively take in 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.”
As we try to understand other people, we want to be constantly asking ourselves: How are they perceiving this situation? How are they experiencing this moment? How are they constructing their reality
David has taken this dip into neuroscience to give the briefest sense of just how much creative artistry every person is performing every second of the day. And if your mind has to do a lot of constructive work in order for you to see the physical objects in front of you, imagine how much work it has to undertake to construct your identity, your life story, your belief system, your ideals. There are roughly eight billion people on Earth, and each one of them sees the world in their own unique, never-to-be-repeated way.
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 this way?
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.
The greatest thing a person does is to take the lessons of life, the hard knocks of life, the surprises of life, and the mundane realities of life and refine their own consciousness so that they can gradually come to see the world with more understanding, more wisdom, more humanity, and more grace. George Bernard Shaw got it right: Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
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 get to perform this grand, portentous, and life-altering endeavor?
The epic activity David is 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 heads. You have to ask them. You have to have a conversation.
Being a mediocre conversationalist is easy. Being a good conversationalist is hard. As David tried to understand how to become a better conversationalist, he found that he had to overcome weird ideas about what a good conversationalist is like. A lot of people think a good conversationalist is someone who can tell funny stories. A lot of people think that a good conversationalist is someone who can offer piercing insights on a range of topics. That’s a lecturer, but not a conversationalist. 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. A good conversation is an act of joint exploration. Somebody floats a half-formed idea. Somebody else seizes the nub of the idea, plays with it, offers her own perspective based on her own memories, and floats it back so the person can respond. A good conversation sparks you to have thoughts you never had before. A good conversations starts in one place and ends up in another.
We should explicitly teach people, from a young age, how to be good conversationalists. But we don’t. In an attempt to make up for this lack, David spent some time talking with conversation experts and reading their books.
He put together a list of some of the nonobvious ways to become a good 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. If feels like you’re sending a message out to them and they’re just letting it fly past. You become self-conscious, start stumbling, and finally trail off.
The problem is the average person speaks at the rate of 120 to 150 words a minute, which is not nearly enough data to occupy the brain of the person being spoken to. 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 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.
BE A LOUD LISTENER. When another person is talking, you want to be listening so actively that you’re practically burning calories. Watch Oprah Winfrey, a true master of conversation, as she interviews someone. You can see her feeling, in her highly reactive way, the emotions the other person is describing. Her mouth hangs open in surprise, her eyes light up with delight. When the conversation takes a happy turn, she volleys back musical verbal affirmations: “Aahh … oooh … eeee,” a subtle chorus of encouragements. When a conversation takes a sad or serious turn, she wears a concerned look on her face and sits in attentive silence, allowing a slowing pause that invites deeper reflection.
Everyone in a conversation is facing an internal conflict between self-expression and self-exhibition. 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 hospitality. When you are listening, you are like the host of a dinner party. You’re exuding warmth toward your guests, showing how happy you are to be with them, drawing them closer to where you want to go. When you’re speaking, you are like a guest at a dinner party. You are bringing gifts.
FAVOR FAMILIARITY. You might think that people love to hear and talk about things that are new and unfamiliar. In fact, people love to talk about the movie they have already seen, the game they already watched. The social psychologist Gus Cooney and others have found that there is a “novelty penalty” when we speak. People have trouble picturing and getting excited about the unfamiliar, but they love to talk about what they know. To get a conversation rolling, find the thing the other person is most attached to. It 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 you boss sitting when he said that? And what did you say in response?” – they are likely to revisit the moment in a 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.
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.
DO THE LOOPING. Psychologists have a concept they call looping. That’s when you repeat what someone just said in order to make sure you accurately received what they were trying to project. Conversation experts recommend this somewhat clumsy practice because people tend to believe they are much more transparent than they really are and that they are being clearer than they really are. Somebody might say, “My mother can be a real piece of work,” and assume that the other person knows exactly what she’s talking about.
The experts suggests that when somebody expresses something important, you respond to their story like “What I hear you are 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. Or you can do it in a less formal way. David find it more natural to paraphrase what they just said – “So you’re really pissed off at your mom? – and pause to see if they agree with his paraphrase.
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: “Even if 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 arguing, the natural thing is to restate your point of view until the other person sees the issue the way you do. The more interesting thing to do is to ask, “Why, at heart, do we disagree? What is the values disagreement underneath our practical 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 puts it, “Being curious about your friend’s experience is more important than being right.”
THE RIGHT QUESTIONS
David has a friend David Bradley who does this thing with index cards. You go to him with a problem. May be you have a job opportunity you’re considering or you’re wondering if you should get married – or divorced. When David went to him about a decade ago, he was feeling overwhelmed. He was responding to other people’s requests for his time, and he wasn’t able to focus his energy on the stuff he thought was most important. He presented his problem to Bradley, and Bradley started by asking questions. In David’s case, he asked him about three topics: my ultimate goal ( 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 David out of the daily intricacies of his schedule and forced him to look at the big picture.
After the questions, Bradley handed him a newspaper and asked him to read it while he digested his answers. Then a few minutes later, he started writing notes on the index cards. About fifteen minutes later, he laid the cards before him. They didn’t have the answer to his problem on them; instead, they offered him an analytic frame to help him think about his problem. In his case, Bradley ranked the things he really wanted to do on one card and the things he was actually doing on another card. On a third card, he had written out a strategy for how he could get card B to look more like card A.
David still keep the cards he gave him that day on a shelf in his office, as a reminder of the framework he offered him. Bradley’s questions helped him get distance from a problem he was too immersed to see. Bradley has performed this exercise with hundreds of people over the years. People come up to Bradley twenty years after they got the index-card treatment to tell him how transformative the experience was. He asked Bradley why he thinks this is. “People often haven’t had anyone tell them about themselves,” he responded.
Second, Bradley 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 what he calls the “take me back” technique. When you ask people about their lives, Bradley 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 sense how they treat others, who they love, and 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,” Bradley says.
David have 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 honoring a person. We all like to think we are so clever that we can imagine what’s going on in another’s mind. But the evidence shows that this doesn’t work. People are just too different from one another, too complicated, too idiosyncratic.
The worst kinds of questions are the one’s that don’t involve a surrender of power, that evaluate: Where did you go to college? What neighborhood 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. For example, if you mention your mother and I ask, “We’re you close? Then I’ve limited your description of your relationship with your mother to the close/distant frame. It’s better to ask, “How is your mother?” That gives the answerer the freedom to go as deep or as shallow as he wants.
A third 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 …”
We too often think that deep conversations have to be painful or vulnerable conversations. David 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 really working well in your life?”
“What are you most self-confident about?”
“Have you ever been solitary without feeling lonely?”
“What has become clearer to you as you have aged?
Over the course of David’s career as a journalist, he found that if you respectfully ask people about themselves, they will answer with a candor that takes your breath away.
Each person is a mystery. And when you are surrounded by mysteries, as the saying goes, it’s best to live in the form of a question.
HARD CONVERSATIONS
So far the author tried to describe the skills needed to see and be seen – when two people happen to meet each other in normal, “healthy” circumstances.
But we don’t merely meet each other as unique individuals or in healthy social circumstances. We meet each other in the current atmosphere of disconnection and distrust. We meet each other as members of groups. We meet each other embedded in systems of power in which some groups have more and some groups have less.
These days, if you want to know someone well, we have to see the person in front as a distinct and never-to-be-repeated individual. But you’ve also got to see their social location – the way some people are insiders and other people are outsiders, how some sit on the top of society and some are marginalized to the fringes. The trick is to be able to see each person on these three levels at once. That requires a graduate-level education in the process of understanding another.
BY NOW DAVID HAD PLENTY OF EXPERIENCE with a certain kind of conversation – the hard conversations. By hard conversations, David mean conversation across differences and across personal power inequalities. These conversations often start with suspicion, but their communications start off reserved, guarded.
One specific hard conversation lingers in David’s mind. It happened on a panel discussion in 2022. The subject was the “culture war.” One of his fellow panelists that day was a prominent black intellectual whose name he does not want to mention because he doesn’t want to make it personal – who heard the phrase “culture war” as an attack on the accurate teaching of Black history in schools. For her, the culture war was white supremacy rearing it’s ugly head once again.
Every time David talked about the broader context of the culture war, she pulled a sour face that demonstrated her contempt for what he was saying. In every conversation, there is some sort of power relationship between participants. It’s possible that she thought David had the power in that one. She’s a radical academic fighting for justice, while he is a member of the elite media establishment. He is implicated in systems, that keep people down. But at the same time, David too felt powerless and afraid. He’s a white man talking about race with a Black woman who has spent her illustrious career writing and thinking about the issue. Does he even have a right to an opinion? It was a hard conversation, and David felt he did not navigate it well. He left it feeling like he should have done more to understand her point of view, but he also should have done more to assert his own, to clarify and to explore any disagreements they might actually have.
Over the past few years, but especially after that panel discussion, David tried to learn a few things about how to have hard conversations. He talked to experts and read books on the subject of which his favorites include High Conflict by Amanda Ripley, I Never Thought of It That Way by Monica Guzman, and especially, Crucial Conversations by Kerry Peterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler.
The first thing he 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 professor attending a conference in a nice hotel, you can show up in a room and just be yourself. But if you are a trucker 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. 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.
The second crucial thing that David learned 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.
Let’s say you’re a college administrator and angry students have come to your office to demand extra time to take their final exams because of the stress they feel. Let’s say you’re a middle-aged manager and angry employees are in your office complaining because your company hasn’t issued a statement on some piece of gun control legislation. In either case, there’s a temptation to get defensive. There’s a temptation to yank the conversation back to your frame: Here’s how the situation looks to me. Here’s what I’m doing to alleviate the 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 is best not 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 than you are in the power structure than you are has a greater awareness of the situation than you do. A servant knows more about his mater than the master knows about the servant.
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. 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.
David 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 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 where 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 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 aroused.”
There is not a way to make hard conversations un-hard. You can never fully understand a person whose life experience is very different from your own. Nevertheless, David found that if you work on your skills – your capacity to see and hear others – you really can get a sense of another’s person’s perspective. And he found that it is quite possible to turn distrust into trust, to build mutual respect.
Like every writer, David is often the recipient of furious, insulting emails. Like every writer, he found that if you respond to such emails in a way that is respectful and curious, the other person’s tone almost always changes – immediately and radically. Suddenly they are civil, kinder, and more human. Everybody wants to be heard. Most people are willing to take an extra effort to be kind, considerate, and forgiving when you give them a chance. Most people long to heal the divides that plaque our society.
At the foundation of all conversation lies one elementary reality: We all share vast range of common struggles, common experiences, and common joys. Even in the midst of civil strife and hard conversations, David returns to the great humanistic declaration made by the Roman dramatist Terence: “I am human, and nothing human is alien to me.”
PERSONALITY: WHAT ENERGY DO YOU BRING INTO THE ROOM?
A healthy society depends on a wide variety of human types. Such a society has outgoing people to serve as leaders, people to make companies and schools run smoothly, curious people to invent new products and try on new ideas, nervous people to warn of danger, and kind people to care for the sick and ill. Fortunately, evolution has helped us out here. Human beings come into this world with a wide variety of personalities, which prepare them to serve a wide variety of personalities, which prepare them to serve a wide variety of social roles. As Rabbi Abraham Kook put it, God “dealt kindly with his world by not putting all the talents in one place.”
Personality traits are dispositional signatures. A personality trait is a habitual way of seeing, interpreting, and reacting to a situation. Every personality is a gift – it enables its bearer to serve the community in some valuable way.
Over the past decades, psychologists have cohered around a 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.
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.
EXTROVERTS. 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.
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 has shown, people who score high in extroversion can be quick to anger. They are more likely to abuse alcohol in adolescence and less likely to save for retirement. Extroverts live their life as a high-reward/high-risk exercise.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 on conscientiousness are often the ones you want managing your organization. People who are 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 distracted.
People high on 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 on conscientiousness are all enjoying fantastic careers and living to age ninety. The world is complicated, and many factors influence the outcomes of life. But more conscientious people do tend to display more competence and grit.
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.
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 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. They often feel uncomfortable with uncertainty.
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 on 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 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.
OPENNESS. If agreeableness describes a person’s relationship to other people, openness describes their relationship with information. People who score high on this trait are powerfully motivated to have new experiences and try on new ideas. They tend to be innovative more than conventional, imaginative and associative more than linear, curious more than closed-minded.
Artists and poets are the quintessential practitioners of openness. Picasso spent his life constantly experimenting with new forms. David Bowie spent his trying on a variety of new personas. Reality is a little more fluid for these people.
PERSONALITY TRAITS ARE NOT ONLY GIFTS, they are gifts you can build over your lifetime. As Brent Roberts and Hee J. Hoon 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.” In general, people get better as they age. They become more agreeable, conscientious, and emotionally stable versions of themselves.
WHAT IS WISDOM?
These days David’s ears perk up whenever he comes across a story in which one person deeply saw another. For example, recently a friend mentioned to him that his daughter had been struggling in second grade. She felt like she wasn’t fitting in with her classmates. But then one day her teacher said to her, “You know, you’re really good at thinking before you speak.” That one comment, his friend said, helped turn his daughter’s whole year around. Something that she might have perceived as a weakness – was now perceived as a strength. Her teacher saw her.
That story reminded David of a time when one of his teachers deeply saw him, though in a different way. He was in eleventh-grade English, making some kind of smart-ass observation in class, as he was prone to do. His teacher barked at him in front of the whole class, “David, you’re trying to get on by glibness. Stop it.” He felt humiliated … and strangely honored. He thought, “Wow – she really knows me!”
David 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.
David’s view of what a wise person looks like has been transformed over the past couple of years while researching this book. He used to have a conventional view of wisdom. The wise person is that lofty sage who doles out life-altering advice in the manner of Yoda or Solomon. The wise person knows how to solve your problems, knows what job you should take, can tell you whether or not you should marry the person you are dating. We’re all attracted to this version of wisdom because we all want easy answers delivered on a silver platter.
Yet when he think of the wise people in his own life now, he realize it’s not the people capable of delivering a sparkling lecture or dropping a life-altering maxim. Now he takes the more or less opposite view of wisdom.
He has come to believe that wise people don’t tell us what to do; they start witnessing our story. They make 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 own process of meaning-making and then help you to expand it, push it along.
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 wherein people are encouraged to set aside their fear of showing weakness, their fear 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.
We all know people who are smart. But that doesn’t mean they are wise. Understanding and wisdom come from surviving the pitfalls of life, having wide and deep contact with other people. Out of your own moments of suffering, struggle, friendship, intimacy, and joy comes compassionate awareness how other people feel – their frailty, their confusion, and their courage. The wise are those who have lived full, varied lives, and reflected deeply on what they’ve been through.
CONCLUSION
AT THE END OF THIS BOOK, David is going to try to assess himself honestly, in the hopes that the exercise will help you assess yourself honestly. Here’s David speaking:
My chief problem is that for all my earnest resolutions and all that I know about the skill of seeing others, in the hurly-burly of everyday life I still too often let my ego take control. I still spend too much social time telling you the smart things I know, the funny stories I know, putting on the kind of social performance that I hope will make me seem impressive or at least likeable. If you tell me about something that happened in your life, I’ll too often tell you about something vaguely similar to what happened in mine. What can I say? I spend my life as an opinion columnist; the habits of pontification are hard to shake.
My second problem is that I still possess a natural diffidence that, I suppose, I will never completely overcome. I know that being a loud listener is important, but my face and demeanor are still more calm than responsive, more tranquil than highly emotive. I know that every conversation is defined by its emotional volleys as much as what’s actually said, but open emotion-sharing is still a challenge. The other day at a dinner party, I looked across the large table and saw my wife and a woman sitting next to her locked in conversation. They were looking directly into each other’s eyes and talking with such rapt attention and delight that the other people in the room might as well have not existed. For some of us reserved types, that kind of easy intimacy remains a challenge.
On the plus side, I think there’s been a comprehensive shift in my posture. I think I’m much more vulnerable, open, approachable, and, I hope, kind. My gaze is warmer, and I see the world through a personal lens. Even when we’re talking about politics, or sports, or whatever, what I really want to know is you. I’m more aware of your subjectivity – how you are experiencing your experience, constructing your point of view. I’m a lot better at taking average conversations and turning them into memorable conversations.
Plus, I’ve learned a lot more about humanity. I know about personality traits, how people are shaped by the life task they are in the middle of, how people are formed by their moments of suffering, how to talk with someone who is depressed, how to recognize the ways different cultures can shape a person’s point of view. When I’m talking with a person, I know what to look for. I’m much better at asking big questions, much better at sensing all the dynamics of conversation, much bolder when talking with someone whose life is radically different from my own.
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.
She who only looks inward will find only chaos, and she who looks outward with the eyes of critical judgment will find only flaws. But she who looks with the eyes of compassion and understanding will see complex souls, suffering and soaring, navigating life the best they can. The person who masters the skills we’ve been describing here will have an acute perceptiveness. She’ll envelop people in a loving gaze, a visual embrace that will not only help her feel what they are experiencing, but give those around her the sense that she is right there with them, that she is sharing what they are going through.
She’s learned, finally, that it’s not only in the epic acts of heroism and altruism that define a person’s character; it’s the everyday acts of encounter. It is the simple capacity to make another person feel seen and understood – the hard but essential skill that makes a person a treasured co-worker, citizen, lover, spouse, and friend.
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