Chapter 6 - Lines

Chapter 6 The Art of Reading People: Empathy

p 108  Researcher Daniel Stern calls the ability to read and respond well to someone's heart attunement. Relationally intelligent people are geniuses at it.

p 108 One dangerous aspect of this skill is that, generally, people who don't read others well aren't aware that they don't.  It is like being emotionally tone-deaf.

p 109 The good news is that relational intelligence can be learned. Develop this skill, get it right, an you will have opportunities to influence, comfort, challenge, and love people on a regular basis.

p 112  The New Testament writer James says, in one of the most often violated commands in all scripture, that everyone should be "quick to listen, slow to speak." Listening, writes Daniel Goleman, is the single most important relational skill a person can develop.

p 113  It is no accident that we speak of paying attention to people, attention is the most valuable currency we have.

p 113 ...one hunger is universal. You have never met a person who doesn't long for more joy. WH Auden wrote, "Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh."

p 115  A friend of mine says that one of the hardest things in the world is to be right and not hurt anybody with it.   (OOOOOOHHHH)

p 116  It's an amazing truth: Being fully right rarely brings as much life to people as simply being human.
People are hungry for joy bringers.

p 117  If you are part of a family, friendship, club, organization, department, small group, or church, you are part of what Daniel Goleman calls an "emotional economy".  Every single interaction we have with another person involves not simply exchanging information or performing tasks but also influencing each other's moods and attitudes.  The emotional economy is "the sum total of exchanges of feeling among us."

p 121  Deep in the heart of everyone you work with, play with, live with, is a sign, if only you will take the time to read it: "Inspire me. Challenge me to grow and then celebrate with me when I stretch. Help me shoulder whatever burden life throws my way."

p 123-124  You are a guardian of the human spirit.  You have the power to manipulate and coerce if you want to. You can avoid and ignore if you choose. But you can also ennoble and inspire. You can lift up and appeal to all that is good and honorable and holy. You can remind fallible and finite people around you that they hold their lives and calling as a sacred trust, that their best efforts matter, that their worst failures will one day be redeemed.
This is all because of the Crucified One who shouldered the burden of the whole human race, who rose again, will come back one day to honor all that is good and set right all that has gone wrong.