1.3 How it might be possible to get another perspective?
The idea of starting on a process of personal change is that it will enhance your life – it will make your life better. So it is important that you take good care of yourself. Part of doing this is to be careful about your decisions on who will give you helpful and supportive feedback. If you decide that you do not know anyone who could provide you with this sort of feedback, then you will be happy to know that this course suggests alternative ways to learn from the perspectives of other people.
There are some well-established approaches that do not need someone else to be present and which are intended to help us think about what other people might have to say about us.
Perhaps the best known is the ‘empty-chair’ technique. This involves imagining that someone is sitting in the ‘empty chair’ and then imagining what they would have to say to us if they were actually present. In therapy, this is intended to make up for things that were not discussed in the past, but which should have been.
In the context of Learning to learn, you could adapt the empty-chair technique to imagine what feedback on your skills and qualities someone you trust would give you. As you are imagining what someone might say, you have unlimited scope to decide whom your mentor might be. You could, for example, take one of the case-study subjects, or one of the animation characters, and imagine that they are giving you feedback. Alternatively, you could choose someone for whom you have great respect or affection – even if you do not know them.
Of course, this ‘imagined’ feedback may be very different from what Shehnaz, or even someone like Nelson Mandela, might actually say to you. The point is that the empty-chair technique can help you explore ideas from a perspective that will be different from perspectives you may usually use. If the idea of imagining what people would say to you sounds second best to actually getting feedback from someone, remember that students who do get this type of feedback still have to decide how to interpret and make sense of it.