In David Brooks’ latest book—How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen—he writes: “In how you see me, I will learn to see myself.”  When I asked who illustrated this in his own life, he shared a story about his grandfather. “Whenever I showed him my writing, as early as first grade, he would respond very positively. He saw me growing up to become a writer,” Brooks reflects. “He wrote letters to the editor of The New York Times almost every day and occasionally would get a letter published. After I got my job at The New York Times, I wished I could have called him and said: Wow, I got a job at the place he always dreamed of.”  

Today, Brooks is respected as one of the nation’s leading writers and commentators, at The New York Times, The Atlantic, and PBS Newshour. His grandfather saw him into being, he says. He also illuminated one of the book’s central premises—our transformative capacity to influence each other—and how to get it right. Here, Brooks shares how to ask questions that create depth in relationships, inspire storytelling, and sustain connection in conflict. 

Fast Company: You write: “Good conversationalists ask for stories about specific events or experiences, and then they go even further. They don’t only want to talk about what happened, they want to know how you experienced what happened.” What questions help you learn about a person’s experience? How does that change the nature of the conversation and relationship? 

David Brooks: First, in political journalism, which I do, I don’t ask people anymore: What do you think about this issue? I ask: How did you come to believe that? That’s a way of getting them into narrative mode. They start telling you about an experience or a person who was important to shaping their values and suddenly they’re in storytelling mode. You learn a lot more. We’re most accurate when talking about ourselves in narrative mode, not in argument mode. The story I tell in the book, I got from another book called, You’re Not Listening, by Kate Murphy. She wrote about a woman who organized focus groups. She’d been hired by grocery stores to understand why people go to the grocery store late at night. She could have asked the focus group, Why do you go to the grocery store late at night? And that would have produced generic answers. Instead, she asked about a specific incident: Tell me about the last time you went to a grocery store after 11 p. m. One of the women in the focus group said: Well, I smoked a joint and I needed a ménage à trois with me, Ben, and Jerry. She asked a good question, and suddenly [the woman] is telling a story and you get a glimpse into her life. 

There are so many opportunities to do this in a day-to-day context. Tell us more about how you achieve this in your interactions. 

I always ask people about their childhood. People love to talk about their childhood and, in one way or another, I’m really asking: Who were you in high school and how has that changed? Then: What did you want to do when you were a kid? What was your dream? A) It’s very interesting to learn. Everybody’s interesting on their childhood. B) You can see how they tell the story of their life. And, when they’re telling the story of their life, you can hear: Who’s the character here? How do they see themselves? What plot is here? Everybody tells their story of their life in a slightly different plot. My story is a redemption story: I had some success. I experienced failure. I came back better. Some people tell a rags-to-riches story, which is: I was poor, but I made it. Some tell an overcoming the monster story: I suffered from alcohol, but I beat that addiction and I’m now sober. So, a lot of my conversation is just: Then, what happened? You were in college and then what happened? A lot of it is just simply that. 

After you get to know someone, and you have some time, [like] over dinner, you can say: If this five years is a chapter in your life, what’s the chapter about? That’s a story that gets people reflecting on their own lives in ways they don’t get a chance to do when nobody asks them that question. The key thing is to be a question-asker. I often leave a party and think: That whole time nobody asked me a question. I’ve come to conclude that only about 30 or 40 percent of humanity is question askers. The rest are nice people, they’re just not curious about you. When you ask somebody a question, A) It’s fun. We underestimate how much we’re going to enjoy listening to other people tell their life stories. B) It’s a way of communicating respect. It means I respect you enough to be curious about you and you feel respected when I ask you questions.

You explain: “The actual conversation occurs in the ebb and flow of underlying emotions that get transmitted as we talk . . . It is the volley of these underlying emotions that will determine the success or failure of the conversation.” What are the hallmarks of both a successful and unsuccessful volley? What might we do to elevate our success? 

First, one of the bits of advice somebody gave me is: Be a loud listener. I have a friend, when you talk to him, it’s like talking to a Pentecostal church: He’s like: “Yes, yes. Amen, amen. Preach that, preach.” I just love that guy, because with [that] loud listening—other people do it with their faces—they’re showing they’re enjoying the conversation. They’re affirming what you’re saying. That’s a way to draw somebody out in that way. 

Another thing is to make them authors, not witnesses. Some people, when they tell you about something that happened in their life, they don’t go into enough detail. So, if you say to them: Well, where was your boss sitting when she said that to you? Then, suddenly they’re in the scene and they’re narrating a story for you. You get a much richer description of their experience [and] lives. You not only see what happened, but how they experienced it. Did they show fear? The moment they got laid off, what was their first thought? Was it shame? Was it anger? Was it, I’m going to have to go home and tell my family? You want to get them talking about that emotional reaction to whatever happened, not just what happened. 

During a time when peacefully having different viewpoints feels rare, it’s inspiring when you write: “A good conversationalist is capable of leading people on a mutual expedition toward understanding.” When you’re talking to people who disagree, what practices help you lead them on this expedition? 

The first is to stand in their standpoint. It’s to ask them three or four times: Tell me about your point of view. If you ask them, with different language each time, more questions about, How do you see this? then you may not agree, but at least you’ll communicate a sense of honoring the other person. I read a book where the authors wrote: In any conversation, respect is like air—when it’s present, nobody notices. But, when it’s absent, it’s all anybody can think about.

The second thing is to find the disagreement under the disagreement. This is the exploration idea. I got this from Talmudic scholars in the Jewish tradition; If we disagree, say about tax policy, we could fight about that, but it’s more fun to delve deep down into: What philosophical reason is causing us to disagree about tax policy? Maybe we have different conceptions of the role of the individual in society or the idea of the common good. If instead of just arguing with each other, we seek to probe down together and have an exploration of why we’re disagreeing, it’s more fun and productive. You learn something.

The third thing I heard from a mediator: Keep the gem statement in the center. If my brother and I are fighting over our dad’s healthcare, we may disagree about what we want for our dad, but we both want what’s best for our dad. If we can keep the thing we agree upon—the gem statement—in the center, then we preserve a relationship, even amid a disagreement.  

Conflict is inevitable in collaboration and you share that “a rupture is sometimes an opportunity to forge a deeper bond.” Imagine we’re collaborators. What are the most effective ways you’ve learned to embrace that opportunity? 

The first thing is to stop the conflict before our motivations deteriorate. We might start by disagreeing about our company’s marketing plan. But, if we’re really in a struggle, then after we get angry and our emotions get riled, we’re not really disagreeing about the marketing plan anymore. We want to prove: I’m smarter or more powerful than you. So, our motivations deteriorate.

Then, you can step back and say: We’ve gotten to an ugly spot here. I over escalated, maybe you did, too. How can we build this back? How can we set a new level for our relationship and learn from the fact that we both screwed up over the past 15 minutes, in what we were saying and the tone we said it in? That’s an act of humility and togetherness; We’re both in this. We’ll figure it out. In my life, those periods of pain and error are moments of growth. So, the feeling of humiliation—I screwed this up. Let’s start this over.—is a way [that] suddenly we’re talking at a deeper level because we’re being vulnerable to each other, even in the midst of conflict. 

You share a powerful invitation: “Morality is mostly about the small, daily acts of building connection—the gaze that says ‘I respect you,’ the question that says ‘I’m curious about you,’ the conversation that says, ‘we’re in this together.‘” I’d love to close with one simple act we can take to embody this principle. 

The key moral act is the act of casting attention. There’s a woman named Simone Weil, who died in World War II, who said: Attention is the ultimate form of generosity. Her idea was picked up by another philosopher, Iris Murdoch, who said: Most of the time, we look at the world through self-serving eyes; How can this person be useful to me? Is this person like me? Our goal should be to cast a just and loving attention on others. She says we can grow by looking. She gives the example of a mother-in-law who looks at her daughter and sees her as bratty and immature. But, she understands that she (the mother-in-law) has a tendency to be a bit of a snob. So, she says: I’m going to change the way I see her. I’m going to see her not as bratty and immature, but as vital and fresh. To me, that act of attention—the way we see people—If we see through the eyes of fear, we’ll see threat. If we see through hypercritical eyes, we’ll see flaws. But, if we see with generous eyes, we’ll see people doing the best they can. So, that subtle act of how you decide to see the world is a moral act—A powerful moral act.