If I want to see you, I want to see, at least a little bit, how you see the world. I want to see how you construct your reality, how you make meaning. I want to step, at least a bit, out of my point of view and into your point of view.

If you want to understand humanity, you have to focus on the thoughts and emotions of individuals,…

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Perhaps to really know another person, you have to have a glimmer of how they experience the world. To really know someone, you have to know how they know you.

ANXIETY. The number two reason people don’t see others is that they have so much noise in their own heads, they can’t hear what’s going on in other heads. How am I coming across? I don’t think this person really likes me. What am I going to say next to appear clever? Fear is the enemy of open communication.

Intriguingly, Ickes finds that the longer many couples are married, the less accurate they are at reading each other. They lock in some early version of who their spouse is, and over the years, as the other person changes, that version stays fixed—and they know less and less about what’s actually going on in the other’s heart and mind.

I hope I would have understood, as good accompanists do, that everybody is in their own spot, on their own pilgrimage, and your job is to meet them where they are, help them chart their own course.

When ministering to others in such circumstances, good conversationalists adopt the posture of a midwife. A midwife is there not to give birth but simply to assist the other person in their own creation. In conversation, a midwife is there not to lead with insights but to receive and build on the insights the other person is developing. The midwife

The Germans (of course) have a word for it: herzensbildung, training one’s heart to see the full humanity in another.

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