Mirror Session
A mirror session is a one-on-one chat to help a person explore what they think they know. The goal of the session is to reflect the explorer's self-image and worldview back at them at a slightly different angle, to reveal bits of context that might be hidden.
Getting the explorer to examine what they understand from fresh perspectives is like leading their eyes around the optical illusion below. When focus is nudged away from one dot, other dots appear like magic, but they were always there.
This process of discovery can get uncomfortable. If a set of dots have always been the center of focus and used to navigate the world all this time, they will be the most familiar and assuring. Adjusting the focus to reveal new details that were previously hidden can be unsettling, since these new bits might challenge the validity of the explorer's existing map and worldview. The explorer must be willing to persist through any resulting anxiety and disorientation for the session to be useful.
Also, the goal of a mirror session isn't to prescribe specific solutions to issues the explorer is facing. Any effective and enduring solution requires a thorough understanding of the problem's context, and only the explorer can unlock full access to their own context. A mirror session is simply a conversation designed to seek precision about the highest-order models the explorer uses to understand the world.
As the explorer's models are made more detailed during the session, they are scrutinized from a fresh external perspective, i.e. that of the chat partner. For a mirror session to work, the explorer's partner in the conversation should be someone who's genuinely curious and compassionate. If discrepancies appear in the explorer's explanations about the world, the chat partner must want to fill those gaps and figure out why they are there, without judgement.
While listening to the explorer, the partner might also be tempted to interject and place themselves into the conversation. Extra care should be taken to avoid inadvertently autocompleting gaps using the partner's personal experiences from a different context.
Pre-session reading
Before the mirror session, the explorer sends over some material for the chat partner to read:
- public social profiles & recent blog posts
- edges, glitches, domains & dominoes
- short-term & long-term goals
These give the partner an initial idea of the explorer's mental models, i.e. what they think about themself, where they want to be and how they plan to get there.
“Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.” — Bertrand Russell
Running the session
The chat partner starts from the pre-session reading material and asks a series of questions in a 3-part sequence:
- Take what is vague and make it precise: If the explorer has never had to make mental models legible, there might be spots that are vague because they've never been inspected. The chat partner asks questions to make these sections precise.
- Make assumptions explicit: The explorer's models are built on top of a set of assumptions. When previously vague models are made precise, hidden assumptions may come into focus for the first time. Some of these implicit assumptions may be central to the explorer's identity. The explorer and partner together outline the shape of these assumptions so they can be scrutinized.
- Reconcile mismatch of assumptions: Follow-up questions are asked to probe whether these assumptions are consistent with the rest of the explorer's worldview. They are also contextualized and tested against the chat partner's own mental models. If there's a mismatch, the conversation examines the part of the model that doesn't quite fit. Related details are made precise and thought experiments are run to see if other hidden assumption are causing the dissonance.
This sequence repeats throughout the session to give the explorer a new perspective on the models they use to achieve goals. The session closes with concrete next steps, that build on this fresh perspective, for the explorer to try out. Watch a live demo of a mirror session here.
Mirror sessions are most useful when they shed new light on foundational mental models. Updating these models will take time since they can recalibrate the explorer's self-worth or invalidate principles about the world that they hold dear. Patiently working through these changes can take multiple sessions. Untangling a particularly gnarly mismatch might require confronting it over and over again from different angles. All this time is well spent if it unblocks the explorer from getting to where they're trying to go.