New Column: Why Did a Participant Take the Costume Home?— What Immersive-Reality Training Revealed About Human Nature

One of the most common concerns we hear before introducing our Immersive-Reality Training™ is this:

“Our staff are not actors. Isn’t role-playing too difficult for them?”

Interestingly, that concern has never once become a real problem.

In this training, participants step into the role of “someone other than themselves” and face business challenges from that person’s perspective. Sometimes they are even asked to play characters completely opposite from their usual personality — such as an overbearing manager who refuses to listen to others.

At first, many people feel uncomfortable with the idea of acting.

But once the training begins, something changes.

Perhaps it is because people naturally possess a hidden desire to become someone else, even temporarily. After all, in everyday life, we constantly shift between different roles — employee, manager, parent, friend, or mentor — depending on the situation.

I still remember one participant from a past workshop.

Before the session started, he strongly resisted the exercise and said,
“What’s the point of this kind of role-playing?”

Yet once the program began, he immersed himself in the character more deeply than anyone else. By the end of the workshop, he carefully carried home the costume he had used, saying that he had grown attached to the role.

Temporarily letting go of yourself and seeing the world through another person’s eyes can create a surprisingly powerful sense of freedom.

People often say that workplace harassers are unaware of the impact of their behavior. But if such a person were to fully experience the role of the victim even once, they might never behave the same way again.

This is the unique strength of immersive learning.

The understanding gained through emotional experience stays with us far more deeply than knowledge learned through lectures alone.

Perhaps we all have far greater potential to become “actors” than we realize.