What is self-positioning?

Self-positioning is a process for personal self-reflection; you can do it on your own, as a personal development exercise, or with a group of people who agree to work with you for the mutual benefit of all of you. It is based on the psychology of social skills development.

The principles of the process are that we are all in a position in a social space. The physical space may be important: our environment, our home, our workplace, our place of education, our hometown, our community. But physical spaces are always social spaces: there are always other people in them, and those people have their position in relation to us and we have our position in relation to them. That position is often how we think and feel about each other.
How we think and feel about another person is never the same as how they think and feel about us: it can be creative to explore the differences.

We also have a position in the river of our lives: we started out, usually with a family, usually in a community. We have moved on; we will be moving forward. The starting out, the companions, the road, the manner of our travelling, the stopping off points will all connect up with where we are now and where we are going.

Exploring all this can be fun, interesting, helpful to use personally and in working with other people.

It can also be useful where it originally started, as part of getting into and planning a new education or training course, or for a team in any organisation thinking about their development as individuals and a group.

It is an active process, which relies on your own creativity. It starts from stimuli. Any stimuli would do, and often change in our lives stimulates us to do just this kind of self-positioning thinking. However, I have created a website to help, based on my experience of working with people as a university and health and social care educator, and as a social worker in mental health, community work, child advocacy and end-of-life care.

The self-positioning website (http://self-positioning.tumblr.com) offers you a series of posts, called ‘oppis’. Oppi is short for opportunity. Every day there is a new picture and some questions which give you an opportunity to look at yourself. If you take a feed from the website (by clicking on the RSS button) or follow it (by clicking on the website button), you will get an oppi most days. Most of these are pictures + questions. Now and then, there are some diagrams + explanations about self-positioning.

The photos may click with you in some way, to reflect about something around yourself and your life. Some of them are of people and places, some of them are more symbolic. If you go to the blog, you’ll get the picture - literally.

The questions are loosely connected with the pictures and ask you some questions about yourself in relation to other people, your life experience or your plans. The questions are various. Typically, they are precise: they ask you to name a specific number of issues. The reason for this is to limit a confusion of creative ideas in your mind. Self-positioning tries to help you take control by assessing your priorities.

Oppi questions can never by answered by a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or by facts. They usually ask you how or why-type questions, so that you are oppied to look at the issues creatively.

Finally, oppis often give you the chance of changing or developing: they often ask you how you would change, improve, move things in your life.

So self-positioning is reflective, but also active, because you have to go through the exercise of thinking and you are invited to think about some action you can take. It’s also gentle: it gives you oppis not pushes, and only one a day. You can pick and choose: some will not be relevant to you, some will strike you like a hammer. Over time, you can build up by trying out different oppis.

Have a go, or just enjoy the photos: http://self-positioning.tumblr.com.