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Printable page generated Sunday, 7 Aug 2022, 02:29
What can we learn by looking at our life, and our experiences, over time? How can this be helpful for the future?
Session 1 was about looking at yourself in your present situation. However, the person you are now is partly a result of everything that has happened to you in the past: who you were with, where you have been, what you have done and the outside events that have affected your life.
We learn from good and bad experiences and the ups and downs of life, but some people may have had extreme events in their life that would be distressing to revisit. If this is the case, you can choose to focus on areas of your life that you’re happy to spend time thinking about.
Your experience of caring is likely to have a strong influence over your present situation. Your caring role may be something that developed over time. Perhaps like Christine, the word ‘carer’ may not be the way you think of yourself, it’s just something that’s normal to you. For others, becoming a carer might have been a sudden event. Whatever your situation, you will know that circumstances can change quickly and sometimes things happen that you don’t have control over.
The value of looking at our roles and experiences, and recognising the influences on our lives, is that we can unpick what really interests and motivates us and start to understand our decision making: is there a pattern? For instance, what we consider important can change over time, or can differ at different points of our life. How we feel about these experiences can vary too.
So, how do we define high points and low points? Are there recurring themes in the choices we make? Can we see the difference between choices that we make and changes that happen that are out of our control?
In this session you are asked to look at your life experiences, including your caring experiences. The aim is to work out what skills and abilities you have built up, together with the qualities you have developed, particularly from caring, in addition to ones you have gained in other areas of your life.
In this section you will be asked to draw a timeline to plot your life experience. The actual time frame will be up to you – it can include your whole life since childhood, or you might want to focus on recent study or work experience, or on specific roles you might have (such as carer, volunteer or student for example).
The timeline creates a graphic picture of your life – or a period in your life – that will help you to identify the ups and downs, and also any patterns or recurring themes that you may not have been aware of.
It can be very difficult to look back over our life or our experiences; for some people, this may bring to mind some issues or memories that they would rather not confront. If you find this activity distressing, you may want to omit it or to discuss it with someone you trust. Remember, you can also select which areas of your life you want to focus on.
If at any point you feel the course has brought difficult emotions then you can visit Carers.org to find out where your nearest local support service is or to talk to someone online.
Before you try creating a timeline of your own life, we’d like you to look at a couple of examples and think about how they might relate to your own life and experiences.
Timing: You should spend around 10 minutes on this activity.
Look at the example timelines. Then try to answer the questions that follow.
Example 1: Claire’s timeline
Have a look at what Claire’s timeline might look like.
Example 2: Christine’s timeline
Have a look at Christine’s timeline.
Reflection and discussion
Consider the following questions:
- Have you had any experiences similar to Claire’s or Christine’s?
- Do you have anything in common?
- What is different about your life experience?
Make some notes on Activity sheet 2.1 provided.
OR
Go to Activity 2.1 of your Reflection Log. Once you have completed the activity, make sure you save the document again.
If you are working in a group, you might want to share your answers and discuss your notes with each other, or discuss with a friend or mentor.
Timing: You should spend around 15 minutes on this activity.
Having looked at the examples from Claire and Christine, try drawing your own timeline.
Use Activity sheet 2.2 provided.
OR
Go to Activity 2.2 in your Reflection Log. Once you have completed your activity, make sure you save the document again.
Remember, it’s up to you what you want to include and the time frame you want to focus on – your whole life, or a specific period. It doesn’t need to be to scale. Low points are on the bottom half of the page and high points on the top half, just as Claire and Christine have done.
If you are studying in a group, you might like to share your timeline with others.
We all experience ups and downs in life – good points and bad points. Whatever our experience, we are learning as we go. Learning is not something that stops when we leave childhood behind. Learning is lifelong. Some learning is about ourselves: the type of person we are and our strengths and qualities. Other learning is about skills, qualifications, understanding ideas and concepts, or the society we live in.
We’d now like you to move from plotting what happened, when, to thinking about what you’ve learned from these different roles and experiences, and how you’ve developed as a person over time.
Watch James, a carer and a support worker who works with carers, talk about the value of reflection.
Download this video clip.Video player: wam_intro_james_skills.mp4
James
From the point of view of being a carer, reflection…time to reflect actually, is often something that people have little of, and if they’re able to come along to a course such as the one that you’re providing today, it allows them that time to think about, ‘well, yes, my life might be full of domesticity and I might have to do lots of practical jobs everyday just in order to make sure that my loved one is warm, fed, clothed, clean, medicated, etc.’ but those are also areas of life which provide you with experiences that translate to skills that you can use in future employment opportunity perhaps. So, for example, organisation, communication… they’re all things that lots of carers do all the time with a diverse range of people, but perhaps wouldn’t think to be putting them down on an application for education or indeed for employment because it’s something they do at home so it’s something they see as just being themselves, a personal attribute as opposed to something with market value, and I think that’s very important for people to be able to broaden their horizons and think in terms of ‘well, I do have value; I have many skills or …strings to my bow, so actually I will be able to go out there and promote myself and believe in myself enough to be able to do well in a more academic or indeed employment capacity.’
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Now, think again about Claire. She had her share of ups and downs. What did she learn from these experiences?
Example 1: Claire’s learning from experience
Look at what Claire says she learned from her experience:
- Struggled to put specific times on certain points.
- Yes I did recall feelings and memories.
- I’ve learnt that however negative a situation that you can learn from it.
- A positive in every negative.
- From losing my mum, to not worry over trivial things, embrace everyone and moments – life is too short.
- That I’m stronger than I thought as I’ve been through so much and achieved so much.
- That I am going in the right direction now, even if I wasn’t before.
Claire reflects on how, although certain points were a struggle, she realised she is stronger than she thought and that no matter how negative a situation, you learn from it.
Here are some key phrases from Claire’s comments:
- stronger, learn, struggled, achieved, right direction
By reflecting on her past experience, Claire has learned she is a strong individual who can learn from even negative and difficult situations, and that she believes she is moving in the right direction.
Reflection
Take a moment to think about the following questions:
- Was some of Claire’s learning unexpected?
- Did Claire learn from bad experiences as well as good ones?
In the next activity we’d like you to think about your past experiences and try to identify what you have learned from them.
Timing: You should spend around 15 minutes on this activity.
Look at your own timeline again and think about what you have learned from your experience. Looking over the ups and downs, does it help you to recall how you felt at each point? What did you learn from each situation? Perhaps you found out more about your individual qualities and the type of work that suits you: a quality such as ‘hard-working’, ‘good-humoured’ or ‘resilient’, perhaps? Or maybe you discovered that you need a change of direction?
Everyone’s experience will be different. There is no right or wrong answer.
We can see that learning is ongoing throughout our lives, through the ups and the downs.
Add your thoughts on this to your timeline in a different colour or use Activity sheet 2.3.
OR
Go to Activity 2.3 in your Reflection Log. Once you have completed your activity, make sure you save the document again.
If you are working in a group, either online or face to face, you may want to share this.
In Session 1 you started to look at your own roles, skills and qualities. The key point here was that by reflecting on our experiences, we learn something from them that helps us to move forward.
Session 2 has shown how drawing a timeline is useful in terms of plotting what happened and when, and how we feel about these experiences; what we’ve learned from them and how they’ve helped to shape us as a person.
You have been looking back at your experiences of life, or a period of your life. Claire’s and Christine’s timelines illustrated that there are ups and downs, and that other factors have influenced their timelines.
Timing: You should spend around 15 minutes on this activity.
In the next session you will be looking forward, and exploring the factors that influence the choices you make about your future. To start you thinking about the factors that influence your life, have a look at Figure 2.7. This spider diagram is a graphic way of illustrating connections.
Figure 2.5 Spider diagram of what the main factors in Claire’s life might look like
Thinking about the range of factors in your life that influence your choices about the future, try drawing a spider diagram for yourself on Activity sheet 2.4 provided.
OR
Go to Activity 2.4 of your Reflection Log. Once you have completed the activity, make sure you save the document again.
The aim of this session was to get you thinking about your life and everything you have learned from your experience so far. By thinking about your past life you discover how your experiences, both good and bad, have helped you to grow and how much you have learned from them. Have these activities been useful? Did you learn anything new from this that you hadn’t noticed before?
You have now completed Session 2; you’ll explore these ideas further in Session 3.
If you would like further guidance on any issues these activities have raised for you, you may find some helpful contacts in the Find out more section at the end of the course or you can visit Carers.org to find out where your nearest local support service is or to talk to someone online.
Session 3: Identifying my skills, qualities and abilities
What about me? was developed by Carers Trust Wales and OU in Wales. It is based on and adapted from content developed by Lindsay Hewitt and Christine McConnell of The Open University in Scotland in collaboration with Bridges Programmes.
We are hugely grateful to the carers and staff from North East Wales Carers Information Service (NEWCIS) for sharing their stories and testing out the course activities. We hope you find something in their experiences that speaks to you as well.
Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence.
The material acknowledged below is Proprietary and used under licence (not subject to Creative Commons Licence). Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this course:
Images
Figure 2.1: © Ivan Bastien/iStockphoto.com
Figure 2.2: © Open University
Figure 2.3: © Open University
Figure 2.4: © Ivo Gretener/iStockphoto.com
Video/audio: © The Open University
Every effort has been made to contact copyright owners. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.
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Next: Session 3: Identifying my skills, qualities and abilities