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Reader question: Please explain “put yourself in their shoes” in this sentence: The best way to understand someone is to put yourself in their shoes. My comments: “Put yourself in someone else’s shoes” is an idiom that means if you imagine yourself to be in another person’s position, good or bad, you may understand how they feel, good or bad, or why they have done what they’ve done. This idiom derives from the fact that a pair of perfectly fitting shoes for someone may not fit another person as perfectly. So, literally, only if you put on another person’s shoes can you feel how it is to walk in them. Metaphorically speaking, “their shoes” stands for other people’s position or plight. A local boy is detained by the police for a petty theft, and one of his pals might privately say to himself: “I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes now”. That is, he doesn’t want to be jailed for stealing. By trying to “put on their shoes”, we try to imagine ourselves in their situation, by seeing things from their point of view, by thinking about how we would want to be treated if we were them. Harper Lee, of course, expressed this idea best in To Kill a Mockingbird: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view – until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” Alright, here are media examples of how other people’s shoes feel: | 
