I am not naturally socially gifted. I was introverted and awkward as a young person, and it took many years to develop the skills and confidence to be able to feel comfortable in groups or with strangers.
While I’ve learned how to cope – for lack of a better word – with environments like networking events and parties where I don’t know anyone but the host, I am certainly still not a natural conversationalist. This makes it challenging to learn from and connect with new people.
David Brooks’ new book, How to Know a Person, is much more than a manual about how to make small talk at a dinner party with people you don’t know well. While it does have many actionable suggestions about how to successfully engage, it also delves into understanding people at a deeper level, and how to effectively accompany others through good times and bad.
Brooks talks about the idea of being an “Illuminator.” An Illuminator is someone who brings out the best in others, and who people feel they can turn to in times of struggle. This is a person with the empathy, compassion, and authenticity to see people fully and make them feel seen.
One of the most practical takeaways for me was ideas for interesting questions that help others to open up and share something deeper that can help to build a genuine connection. This might be something simple like an open-ended question about someone’s life experiences. For example, “What is it like <to have had an experience you’ve had>?” or “How did you come to <make this decision/have this experience>?”
We can also ask questions that encourage others to tell us stories. These stories might help us to learn about their background, what familiar topics they enjoy, and lead the conversation down interesting paths. A simple question that can tell us a lot about how someone grew up might be something like, “How did your parents choose your name?”
When asking story questions, we can help the speaker feel engaged and heard by bringing them back to the memory and asking for details about what their experience was like. For example, imagine we’re hearing from a friend about their recent layoff at work. We could ask things like, “Where were you sitting when your boss told you? How did you feel when you heard the news? How are you feeling about everything now?”
We can also ask big questions. These questions might be a bit abrupt if we don’t know someone well, but I think most people would be happy to have someone show such a deep interest in them. These questions can also be useful to check-in with ourselves. There are many good examples in the book, such as:
- “What are you doing when you feel most alive?”
- “What do you want to offer the world?”
- “How do you fill your days?”
- “What crossroads are you at?”
- “What would you do if you were not afraid?”
- “If you were to die tonight, what would you regret not doing?”
- “If we meet again in a year, what will we be celebrating?”
- “If the next five years are a chapter in your life, what is that chapter about?”
- “Can you be yourself where you are and still fit in?”
- “What has become clearer as you’ve aged?”
- “What’s going really well for you right now?”
Brooks spends the later part of the book talking about how to consider someone in the context of their personal experiences. The idea is that people are a point of view, and reality is subjective based on one’s lived experiences, social context, and personality. We can know each other more deeply by asking how others are perceiving a situation, and what life events or context led to that perspective.
For example, we see the world differently based on our capacity of action in a given situation. Fit people literally estimate hills to be less steep, and someone with a healthy savings sees a parking ticket very differently from someone living paycheck-to-paycheck.
The impact of individual context is particularly important when we’re in a situation where we disagree with someone. At that time, it can be useful to stop and ask ourselves why, at heart, we are disagreeing. What is the point of view or philosophical root underneath the disagreement? To gain even more curiosity and empathy in these situations, understanding differences in moral philosophy can be a huge advantage (I’d highly recommend The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt to learn more about this).
Finally, we must remember that even those we know the best change over time. Romantic partners actually misinterpret each others’ meanings more over time. We assume that the one we love hasn’t changed since we first created a mental model of who they are and what they believe, which closes us to being continuously curious and trying to deeply understand them as they (and we) change and grow.
Gratitude Driven 