There is a thoughtful book from 2023 by David Brooks titled How to Know a Person: The art of seeing others deeply and being deeply seen. A Google Books preview goes to page 35. There is a seven-minute discussion by Geoff Bennett on the PBS NEWS HOUR for October 25, 2023 titled David Brooks writes about the art of seeing others in new book ‘How to Know a Person’. This book contains three parts and seventeen chapters (starting on the listed pages):
PART 1: I SEE YOU
Chapter 1: The Power of Being Seen 3
Chapter 2: How Not to See a Person 18
Chapter 3: Illumination 28
Chapter 4: Accomplishment 43
Chapter 5: What is a Person? 55
Chapter 6: Good Talks 71
Chapter 7: The Right Questions 82
PART 2: I SEE YOU IN YOUR STRUGGLES
Chapter 8: The Epidemic of Blindness 97
Chapter 9: Hard Conversations 107
Chapter 10: How Do You Serve a Friend Who Is in Despair? 122
Chapter 11: The Art of Empathy 134
Chapter 12: How Were You Shaped by Your Sufferings? 160
PART 3: I SEE YOU WITH YOUR STENGTHS
Chapter 13: Personality: What Energy Do You Bring into the Room? 175
Chapter 14: Life Tasks 190
Chapter 15: Life Stories 212
Chapter 16: How Do Your Ancestors Show Up in Your Life? 228
Chapter 17: What is Wisdom? 246
Starting on page 72 he discusses conversation as follows:
“The subtitle of this book is ‘The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.’ I chose that specifically because I wanted you to immediately get what I was writing about. But it’s not quite accurate, if I’m being honest. If what we’re doing here is studying how to really get to know another person, it should probably be ‘The Art of Hearing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Heard.’ Because getting to know someone else is usually more about talking and listening than about seeing.
Being a mediocre conversationalist is easy. Being a good conversationalist is hard. As I’ve tried to understand how to become a better conversationalist, I’ve found that I’ve 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. That’s a raconteur, but it’s not a conversationalist. A lot of people think 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.
Arthur Balfour was a British satatesman renowned for, among other things, the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which announced British support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. ‘Unhesitatingly I should put him down as the best talker I have ever known,’ his friend John Buchan once observed. Balfour’s particular skill was not that he was capable of uncorking brilliant monologues or spewing strings of epigrams. Instead, he created ‘a communal effort which quickened and elevated the whole discussion and brought out the best in people.
Balfour, Buchan continued,
would take the hesitating remark of a shy man and discover in it unexpected possibilities, would probe it and expand it until its author felt he had really made some contribution to human wisdom. In the last year of the War, he permitted me to take American visitors occasionally to lunch with him in Carlton Gardens, and I remember with what admiration I watched him feel his way with the guests, seize on some chance word and make it the pivot of speculations until the speaker was not only encouraged to give his best, but that best was infinitely enlarged by his host’s contribution. Such guests would leave walking on air.
A good conversation is not a group of people making a series of statements at each other. (in fact, that’s a bad conversation). A good conversation is an act of joint exploration, Someone floats a half-formed idea. Someone else seizes on the nub of the idea, plays with it, offers her own perspective based on her own memories, and floats it back so the other person can respond. A good conversation sparks you to have thoughts you never had before. A good conversation starts in one place and ends up in another.”
And starting on page 177 there is a discussion of personality traits and their assessment:
“Personality traits are dispositional signatures. A personality trait is a habitual way of seeing, interpreting, and reacting to a situation. Every personality trait is a gift – it enables its bearer to serve the community in some valuable way.
Unfortunately, our public conversation about personality is all messed up. For example, sometimes when I’m giving a public talk, I ask people to raise their hands if they are familiar with the Myers-Briggs personality assessment. Usually 80 to 100 percent of the people raise their hands. Then I ask them if they are familiar with the Big Five personality traits. Somewhere between 0 and 20 percent of the audience members raise their hands. This strikes me as a ridiculous situation.
The Myers-Briggs test has no scientific validity. About half the people who take it twice end up in entirely different categories the second time around. That’s because human beings just don’t fit consistently into the categories the Myers-Briggs people imagine are real. The test has almost no power to predict how happy you’ll be in a given situation, how you’ll perform at your job, or how satisfied you’ll be in your marriage. Myers-Briggs relies on false binaries. For example, it divides people into those who are good thinking and those who are good at feeling. But in real life, the research shows, people who are good at thinking are also more likely to be good at feeling. As Adam Grant, who writes about organizational psychology, once put it, the Myers-Briggs questionnaire is like asking someone, ‘What do you like more, shoelaces or earrings?’ and expecting that question to produce a revealing answer.
On the other hand, over the past decades, psychologists have cohered around a different 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. Psychologists have devised a series of questionnaires to help you discover how high or low you score one each of these traits – whether, for example, you are extremely extroverted (like George W. Bush), or not so extroverted, or, like most of us, somewhere near the middle.”
I mentioned the Big Five in a blog post on February 4, 2020 titled The Toastmasters Pathways Level 2 project on Understanding Your Communication Style says there are four communication styles. Where did they come from?
The cartoon was adapted from one by Steve Brodner at the Library of Congress.
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