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How to Show People You Care in Every Conversation
David Brooks helps us understand if we have illuminator or diminisher tendencies and how it affects how we connect.
Read time: 6 minutes
Hi Proactive Professional,
Maybe you relate to this—When I spend time with people (for the first time or the 100th), I typically walk away feeling one of two ways:
Their mind was already made up on who I am or what I do, and that's probably why they spoke so much about themselves and seemed uninterested in anything going on with me. Why did I bother speaking with them?
Wow, they were really interested in me…they just seemed to get me. I'm excited for our next conversation.
It's not always one or the other, but the way I feel typically favors one of these sides.
If I feel this way, others probably feel similarly. What can I do to fall more into category 2 than 1? What can I do to have people leaving conversations with me feeling like we truly connected instead of like I forced my experience on them and constantly brought conversations back to me, me, me?
The last thing you want is someone reacting like this:
David Brooks talks about this concept in his book How to Know a Person, where he describes people as either diminishers or illuminators.
“Diminishers make people feel small and unseen. They see other people as things to be used, not as persons to be befriended. They stereotype and ignore. They are so involved with themselves that other people are just not on their radar screen."
A conversation I recently had with a diminisher went something like this:
Diminisher: What do you do?
Me: I’m working on a few things to help people connect meaningfully to others.
Diminisher: Cool. I don’t really think it’s that big of an issue. I just reach out to my professional contacts when I need something and I stay in touch with personal contacts through group texts we’re in. But if you found a way to make money with it, I’d be interested in learning more.
Me: I’ve been playing around with some ideas,...
Diminisher (cutting me off): I think you could…(proceeds to list his ideas to better the business I didn’t get to tell them about).
"Illuminators, on the other hand, have a persistent curiosity about other people. They have been trained or have trained themselves in the craft of understanding others. They know what to look for and how to ask the right questions at the right time. They shine the brightness of their care on people and make them feel bigger, deeper, respected, lit up."
Meanwhile, a conversation with an illuminator I had went something like this:
Illuminator: Have you been working on anything exciting lately?
Me: Actually, I’ve been working on ways to help foster deeper connections with key relationships through habit-building.
Illuminator: That’s so interesting, is it tech or bringing people together in real life? What got you so focused on this concept?
Me: It’s early stages and could be a bit of both! Meaningful relationships have always played an important role for me and after I started reading about the loneliness epidemic and how loneliness is at an all time high, I wanted to find a way to help people feel more connected.
Illuminator: That sounds like an important problem to work on. Was there a particular part of your background that made it resonate so much?
The conversation would go of for 15 more minutes
None of us can show up as illuminators all the time, but we can be aware of the tendencies of each and focus on leaning into illuminator tendencies.
Connecting Better by Shifting from Diminisher to Illuminator:
Diminisher
Showing up as a diminisher is deciding not to see a person. It's sizing them up without even getting to know them. Here are a few of the things you may be doing that are diminishing:
Egotism: You’re too focused on yourself. You default to your stories, your opinions and don’t show any curiosity for the person across the table. Many people just can't step outside of their own point of view.
Anxiety: You’re too concerned on how you come across rather than just listening to what the other person is saying:
What do I say next?
Does what I'm saying make sense?
Did they find that point interesting?
When you’re focused on internal chatter, you aren't paying much attention to what is said.
Naïve Realism: You assume the way the world appears to us is the objective view, that we are all seeing the same reality. This just stops us from seeing any perspectives but our own. Sometimes we genuinely don't believe there is another.
The Lesser-Minds Problem: You have constant thoughts running through your mind, and as a result, you view yourself as a very deep, complex, interesting being. But then you look to your left and right to see only a sliver of what someone else is. You really only have access to what they say or what they post. As a result, you view yourself as better and act accordingly.
Objectivism and Essentialism: This is the thought that certain groups have an "essential" and unchangeable nature. You tend to bucket people into a certain group and then make assumptions about the individual based on what is broadly accepted by that group (people from New York are up-tight, while people from California are laid back) instead of seeing their individual subjectivity that makes them unique (desires, imagination, creativity, emotions, and more).
The Static Mindset: We often form a certain view of somebody early on. Even if it may have been accurate at one point, people grow and change, as should our views of them. Allow your view of others to grow with them.
Illuminator
"When you are practicing Illuminationism, you're offering a gaze that says, 'I want to get to know you and be known by you.'… It conscientiously answers the question everybody is unconsciously asking themselves when they meet you: 'Am I a person to you? Do you care about me? Am I a priority for you?"
Here are some tendencies we can focus on to be Illuminators:
Tenderness: This is a deep emotional concern about another being. Brooks even points to two great examples of where you can see it: Mister Rogers in how he interacted with children and Ted Lasso in how he interacted with his players.
Receptivity: This is when you resist the urge to project your own viewpoint and instead open yourself up to the experience of another. It's difficult to do because, by nature, we are so focused on ourselves that we default to "what would I do if I were in your situation?" Instead, this is understanding their experience without judgment.
Active Curiosity: This is curiosity without your opinion involved. It's wondering what it would be like to believe things that you don't currently believe or live a life that you don't currently live.
Affection: Not everything should be approached from a purely intellectual standpoint. You need to think about the qualities that you are fond of in another.
Generosity: Approaching situations with a spirit of generosity and a focus on giving are some of the best ways to connect meaningfully with another person.
A Holistic Attitude: We often only see a small piece of what makes someone truly themselves. But people are not just one thing. They aren't their job, or their favorite hobby, or the tragically bad or monumentally good decision they made some time ago. They are a unique package of it all…try to view them as such.
"One of the commonest and most generally accepted delusions is that every man can be qualified in some particular way---said to be kind, wicked, stupid, energetic, apathetic and so on. People are not like that."
It's impossible to be an Illuminator 100% of the time. But when it comes to the people that matter most, the best way to show them they matter is practicing these Illuminator tendencies.
Sometimes it feels easier to display Diminisher tendencies to the people you are most comfortable with. Maybe it's something about how we perceive we know them or that we perceive they know exactly what's going on in our head.
Whatever it is, all the more reason it's important to actively be an illuminator with those meaningful connections.
Content I’m consuming this week:
Everything, Everywhere, All At Once (2 hours 19 minutes): What begins as a Chinese-American immigrant being audited by the IRS turns into a movie masterpiece that emphasizes the importance of taking a holistic view of others and emphasizes the most important things in life are the people you find in it.
Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success by Adam Grant (250 pages): Wharton’s top rated professor examines how success today depends on how we interact with others. The research shows that giving has a huge impact on success.
What I’m committing to this week for building relationships:
⚽ Co-hosting Pitch on the Pitch: Soccer Networking for Tech, on Thursday at 7pm ET. Sign up here! (~2 hours)
📞 Catching up with a friend I used to be neighbors with
☀ Spending some quality time with family in Florida
🤔 Reflecting on my week this Friday: What’s one Illuminator tendency I do a poor job of?
What are you committing to this week? Reply to this email!
Helpful links:
Best of luck building,
Devin