Guided Mastery

At work, we had a workshop on Design Thinking that got me thinking :)

The speaker began by relating that most analytical people do not see themselves as creative, and how one famous Psychologist, Albert Bandura, uses a method to help people overcome their fears/phobias/assumptions. He began to describe this method:

For example, if someone had a snake phobia he would tell them there was a snake in the other room and that in 4 hours they were going to touch it. (most people left at this point). Then he went through incremental baby steps to gradually get closer to the goal: looking through a window at the snake, standing in the doorway, standing near the snake, etc. until the person was actually holding the snake with big leather gloves.

This was called "Guided Mastery".

*lightbulb*

This is exactly what I've been doing with a certain 6yr old: