Archive for December, 2010

Frame control – the power of context

Dec 30th

Posted by Judy in Clean Language

8 comments

Great influencers have long recognised the power of setting the context of any conversation. For example, pick-up artists discuss “frame control” and assert that “In an interaction between two people, whoever has the stronger frame/reality wins”.

Of course, I don’t accept their win-lose frame! Influential interactions can be, and in my opinion should be, win-win, especially in the context of sexual relationships.

But I do agree that setting the context of any interaction is very important, and that once the frame is set, it can be very difficult for either party to escape from it.

A colleague said recently: “The first thing anyone wants to know when they visit a website is ‘what can I buy here?’” But that’s only true if the frame is “website = commercial resource”.

If, on the other hand, the frame is “website = research resource” then the instant question is more like “what can I discover here?” If the frame is “website = social resource” then the question is “who can I meet here?”

One of the most important ways people set frames is by using metaphors. I might want you to think of my website as like a shop, or as like a library, or as like a cafe. And so great More >

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School House in snow

Downhill all the way

Dec 28th

Posted by Judy in Metaphor

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I was lucky enough to have a fabulously smooth journey just before Christmas.

It was “downhill all the way” from North Yorkshire to London, in a van filled with my husband’s and stepson’s possessions as they finally moved their stuff in with me, six months after our wedding.

If you’re based in the UK you’ll know how lucky I was – we’ve had some unexpectedly severe winter weather and if we’d travelled when we’d originally intended, a few days ago, we’d have been caught up in heavy snow.

It set me thinking about journey metaphors, which are some of the most common metaphors in any language. It seems to me that they link two other universal metaphors; space and force.

So when it was an uphill battle to get the Yorkshire house clean and equipped for letting, it’s like we started at the bottom of a hill, and climbed to the top by applying our physical strength as the force to make it happen. (Oh, by the way, isn’t “elbow grease” a lovely metaphor?)

And when the journey home was downhill all the way, it’s like we moved from the top to the bottom of the hill, with gravity acting as the force to get us there.

What journey metaphors have More >

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Making People Fit

Dec 14th

Posted by Judy in Clean Language

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I heard a fascinating interview this morning with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of the best-selling books The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness.

His new book is called The Bed of Procrustes. And in that metaphor, as you might have guessed, lies a tale.

Procrustes is a character from Greek mythology who owned an inn and would abduct people travelling past. He had a special bed he kept for these travellers to use… as long as they fitted exactly. Gruesomely, he would force them to fit the bed by stretching the short ones and chopping off the legs of the taller ones.

Taleb’s beef is with economists and consultants. He says that like Procrustes, they are changing the wrong variable.

They try to fit human beings and human experience into artificial models and systems, instead of making the bed fit the man or living with the difference. Instead of being useful simplifications, their models end up forcing distortions of reality.

How does this connect to X-Ray Listening, Intelligent Influence or Clean Language, I hear you ask?

Well, apart from being a very illuminating metaphor (and I love metaphors!), it draws attention to the need to acknowledge the differences between people. And the Clean Language questions are a More >

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Who makes “your” decisions?

Dec 6th

Posted by Judy in Metaphor

1 comment

One of the most surprising scientific findings about the brain is that while we think we make our decisions rationally and logically, it can be proved that in fact, we don’t.

It’s the unconscious part of our mind that actually decides what we’re going to do.

That’s obviously vital information for anyone who wants to persuade people of anything.

In the experiments by Benjamin Libet (1985), people were asked to make a spontaneous movements of their fingers at will, while wired up to brain-monitoring equipment. About a second before the movement, the trace showed a blip of “readiness potential”… and about 0.2 seconds later came the conscious urge to move the finger!

As Iain McGilchrist writes in The Master and His Emissary, “The brain seemed to know in advance that its ‘owner’ was going to make a decision to carry out an action.”

He goes on (citing Julian Jaynes), “Very little brain activity is in fact conscious (current estimates are certainly less than 5 per cent, and probably less than 1 per cent), and we take decisions, solve problems, make judgements, discriminate, reason, and so on, without any need for conscious involvement.”

This research is well known to the scientific experts, perhaps less so to professional More >

What is it about metaphor?

Dec 4th

Posted by Judy in Metaphor

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In The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist explores the relationship between the right and left hemispheres of the brain. And it’s no accident that he’s used a powerful metaphor as the title of his book.

I’m still less than halfway through his book (after hearing McGilchrist speak at the NLP Conference last month) but already he’s helped me to make some important connections.

He really “gets it” about metaphor. Here’s part of what he says about the relationship between language, metaphor and thought.

“Language functions like money. It is only an intermediary. But like money is takes on some of the life of the things it represents.

“It begins in the world of experience and returns to the world of experience – and it does so via metaphor, which is a function of the right hemisphere, and is rooted in the body. To use a metaphor, language is the money of thought.

“Only the right hemisphere has the capacity to understand metaphor… Metaphoric thinking is fundamental to our understanding of the world, because it is the only way in which understanding can reach outside the system to signs of life itself. It is what links language to life.”

McGilchrist “gets” that metaphor is central to the More >

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