How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
by David Brooks
added by Sriya Sridhar and · updated 1h ago
by David Brooks
added by Sriya Sridhar and · updated 1h ago
Big questions interrupt the daily routines people fall into and prompt them to step back and see their life from a distance. Here are some of my favorite questions that do that: “What crossroads are you at?” At any moment, most of us are in the middle of some transition. The question helps people focus on theirs. “What would you do if you weren’t a
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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 sp
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The Big Five traits are extroversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness. Psychologists have devised a series of questionnaires to help you discover how high or low you score on each of these traits—whether,
Grisha Samus added 5mo ago
In a world in which most people are overconfident about their abilities and overly optimistic about the outcomes of their behavior, there’s a benefit in having some people who lean the other way.
Grisha Samus added 5mo ago
Looking back, I want to scream at myself: “Show a little joy!” But when it came to spontaneous displays of emotion, I had the emotional capacity of a head of cabbage.
sari added 4mo ago
Life has a way of tenderizing you, though. Becoming a father was an emotional revolution, of course. Later, I absorbed my share of the blows that any adult suffers: broken relationships, public failures, the vulnerability that comes with getting older. The ensuing sense of my own frailty was good for me, introducing me to deeper, repressed parts of
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We too often think that deep conversations have to be painful or vulnerable conversations. I try to compensate for that by asking questions about the positive sides of life: “Tell me about a time you adapted to change.” “What’s working really well in your life?” “What are you most self-confident about?” “Which of your five senses is strongest?” “Ha
... See moreGrisha Samus added 5mo ago
Remember that the person who is lower in any power structure than you are has a greater awareness of the situation than you do. A servant knows more about his master than the master knows about the servant. Someone who is being sat on knows a lot about the sitter—the way he shifts his weight and moves—whereas the sitter may not be aware that the sa
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He had come to realize that excavation is not a solitary activity. It’s by sharing our griefs with others, and thinking together about what they mean, that we learn to overcome fear and know each other at the deepest level. “What we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we a
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