How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

A study of Japanese businesspeople found that they are typically comfortable with eight-second pauses between one comment and another, roughly twice as long as Americans generally tolerate. They’re wise to take that pause.

People have trouble picturing and getting excited about the unfamiliar, but they love to talk about what they know. To get a conversation rolling, find the thing the other person is most attached to. If they’re wearing a T-shirt from their kid’s sports team, ask about that. If they’ve got a nice motorcycle, lead with a question about it.

A good conversation is an act of joint exploration. Somebody floats a half-formed idea. Somebody 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

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.

“Every epistemology becomes an ethic,” the educator Parker J. Palmer once observed. “The shape of our knowledge becomes the shape of our living; the relation of the knower to the known becomes the relation of the living self to the larger world.”

Each person actively constructs their own perception of reality. That’s not to say there is not an objective reality out there. It’s to say that we have only subjective access to it.

Accompaniment is a humble way of being a helpful part of another’s journey, as they go about making their own kind of music.

“We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.”

Every man bears within him the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently he is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.