In order to serve someone well, you have to take the time to get to know them. David Brooks work in How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Seen is a great study in considering what we can learn from people and to understand ourselves in such a way as to make a helpful contribution to others. I highlighted several notes while reading and have posted those below:
- 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. Location: 395
- 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?” Instead, you are patiently ready for what the other person is offering. As the theologian Rowan Williams put it, we want our minds to be slack and attentive at the same time, the senses relaxed, open, and alive, the eyes tenderly poised. Location: 442
- A great way to mis-see people is to see only a piece of them. Location: 474
- Accompaniment often involves a surrender of power that is beautiful to behold. Location: 677
- 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. Location: 980
- I presented my problem to David, and he started by asking questions. In my case, he asked me about three topics: my ultimate goals (What do you want to offer the world?), my skills (What are you doing when you feel most alive?), and my schedule (How exactly do you fill your days?). These were questions that lifted me out of the daily intricacies of my schedule and forced me to look at the big picture. Location: 1,071
- 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 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. Location: 1,138
- 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. Location: 2,693
- This is what our friends do for us. They not only delight us and call forth our best; friends also hold up a mirror so we can see ourselves in ways that would not otherwise be accessible. When we see ourselves that way, we have the opportunity to improve, to become our fuller selves. “A man with few friends is only half-developed,” the radical writer Randolph Bourne observed. “There are whole sides of his nature which are locked up and have never been expressed. He cannot unlock them himself, he cannot discover them; friends alone can stimulate him and open them.” Location: 3,325
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