1: “One day, not long ago,” David Brooks writes in his book How to Know a Person, “I was reading a dull book at my dining room table when I looked up and saw my wife framed in the front doorway of our house.
“The door was open. The late afternoon light was streaming in around her.
“Her mind was elsewhere, but her gaze was resting on a white orchid that we kept in a pot on a table by the door.
“I paused,” he remembers, “and looked at her with a special attention, and had a strange and wonderful awareness ripple across my mind: ‘I know her,’ I thought. ‘I really know her, through and through.'”
What was it he knew at that moment?
“It wasn’t any collection of facts about her, or her life story, or even something expressible in the words I’d use to describe her to a stranger,” David reflects.
“It was the whole flowing of her being—the incandescence of her smile, the undercurrent of her insecurities, the rare flashes of fierceness, the vibrancy of her spirit. It was the lifts and harmonies of her music. . .
“What I saw, or felt I saw, was the wholeness of her. How her consciousness creates her reality.
“It’s what happens when you’ve been with someone for a while, endured and delighted together, and slowly grown an intuitive sense for how that person feels and responds.
“It might even be accurate to say that for a magical moment I wasn’t seeing her, I was seeing out from her,” he writes.
The word David uses to capture that moment is “beholding.”
He writes: “I don’t have to tell you how delicious that moment felt–warm, intimate, profound. It was the bliss of human connection.”
2: What does it mean to know another person?
William Ickes is a leading researcher who studies how accurate we are at sensing other people’s thoughts. He has found that when strangers have an initial conversation, they read each other correctly only about 20 percent of the time.
As close friends and family members, our ratings are about 35 percent, which is better but far from perfect.
William has developed a scale to measure his research subjects’ “empathic accuracy” from 0 to 100 percent. He finds “great variation from person to person,” David writes.
“Some people get a zero rating. When they are in conversation with someone they’ve just met, they have no clue what the other person is actually thinking.”
Others who are decent at reading others score about 55 percent.
The problem? People who score a low score are convinced they are as correct as those who are more accurate.
Interestingly, being married to someone does not necessarily mean we will be accurate in reading our partner’s thoughts.
In fact, William has found that “the longer many couples are married, the less accurate they are at reading each other,” David notes.
“They lock in some early version of who their spouse is, and over the years, as the other person changes, that version stays fixed–and they know less and less about what’s actually going on in the other’s heart and mind.”
3: David’s purpose in writing his book is “to help us become more skilled at the art of seeing others and making them feel seen, heard, and understood.
“When I started research on this subject,” he shares, “I had no clue what this skill consisted of. But I did know that exceptional people in many fields had taught themselves versions of this skill.
“Psychologists are trained to see the defenses people build up to protect themselves from their deepest fears,” David notes. “Actors can identify the core traits of a character and teach themselves to inhabit the role. Biographers can notice the contradictions in a person and yet see a life whole. Teachers can spot potential. Skilled talk show and podcast hosts know how to get people to open up and be their true selves.”
Understanding and knowing other people is key to success in nursing, ministry, management, social work, marketing, journalism, editing, HR, and many other fields.
After researching this topic for four years, David “gradually realized that trying to deeply know and understand others is not just about mastering some set of techniques; it’s a way of life.
“It’s like what actors who have gone to acting school experience: When they’re onstage, they’re not thinking about the techniques they learned in school. They’ve internalized them, so it is now just part of who they are.
“I’m hoping 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 in this way can yield the deepest pleasures.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: How might I improve my ability to understand other people?
Action: Make this a goal for the day ahead.
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