There’s probably an object within arm’s reach of you right now that knows you better than you’d like to admit. The mug you always reach for. The chair no one else is allowed to sit in. The guitar in the corner, gathering dust but never given away. If a friend walked in and really looked, these things would say something true about you — something you might struggle to put into words yourself.
I’ve spent most of my working life in the space where we stop talking about our lives and start stepping into them. My research and my practice keep returning to the same conviction: we don’t change much by analysing ourselves from the armchair. We change when we get up, put the pieces of our life out in front of us, and look — when the inner world becomes something we can see, move around, and stand beside.
That’s why I like to begin with objects. Choose a few everyday things that somehow represent you and place them out in the room — closer for what matters most, further for what’s fallen quiet — and you meet yourself at a gentle distance. It isn’t your whole history on display; it’s a guitar, a book, a worn armchair. And yet, looking at the arrangement, people say the most honest things. I keep that one close because it remembers who I used to be. I put that one far away, and I’m not sure why.
Something particular happens in that moment, and it’s what I’ve spent my career studying. You’re in two worlds at once — living the experience and, at the same time, quietly watching yourself have it. That doubled awareness is what lets us see ourselves clearly without being swept away: we can feel and notice, be in it and observe it. In my research I gathered the capacities behind it into a framework I call the 3Ms — but you don’t need the theory to feel it work.
Because the aim is never to judge what we find. Most of us are already expert self-critics; what we’re short of is the kinder, clearer eye. Seeing the shape of our life with curiosity rather than a verdict is, in my experience, where change quietly begins.
So here’s a small experiment for the week. Choose one object that somehow mirrors you. Sit with it a moment. Ask what it reflects — and whether that’s still who you want to be. You don’t have to do anything about the answer. Seeing it is enough to begin.
This is the kind of work we play with, in good company, every Monday night at the free Psychodrama Club in Coolum Beach — and it’s the heart of the deeper, one-to-one work I do at The Coolum Institute, both in person and by telehealth. If you’d like to see yourself with fresh eyes, come and take a look.
