Personal Reflection - Getting a different perspective

That is a really good question. When one is in one institution twenty-five years or thereabouts, you begin to take many things for granted. What it has done for me is to help me listen all over again, and to do something that I have always held fast to, but maybe over time in one institution, you need to do less and less of it because you already know the institution very well, and that is to “climb into other people’s shoes and walk around in them”. It is a line that I take from Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird”. I have  known that line since I was fifteen, and I believe in it very firmly. Coming here has made me recall and remember how important that is. That certain perspectives that you take for granted, that you have thought but of course that’s the way to do it, and that’s the way we have to approach it, well, hold on a sec. Climb into somebody else’s shoes from a different context, a different university, development path and think about why it has been done in a different way. So, I am delighted that I’m reminded of a favourite line from a favourite book from many, many years ago.