minds, metaphors and (ethical) manipulation
Archive for October, 2011
Who Was David Grove?
Oct 31st
It’s just over six years since I first met David Grove, creator of Clean Language.
I can date it easily because we met at NLP Conference in 2005 – and this year’s Conference is a couple of weeks away.
I had the job of interviewing him for an article in Resource magazine, and ended up, as I put it at the time, “dangling upside-down in a dark, sub-zero November car park on a psycho-active fairground ride”.
It was the beginning of a fantastic voyage which led to me co-authoring the book “Clean Language” – now available in Japanese and shortly in Russian – and having a great many other adventures, including hundreds of hours of training and coaching using David’s Clean processes.
Six years may have passed, and David’s death a couple of years ago changed many things.
But when I re-read the article recently, I noticed that the central themes have stayed with me. Only this morning, I was writing about the fact that the more powerful the process is, the greater the possible danger: “Accidents with chainsaws are rarely trivial” as Neil Scotton puts it in the article.
And my understanding of what’s really going on has barely changed. The other night I was talking to More >
Six Degrees of David Grove
Oct 31st
By Judy Rees
First published in Resource Magazine April 2006
Copyright Judy Rees 2006
It was always going to be an adventure — the first interview maverick therapeutic genius David Grove had given since 1996. So maybe it wasn’t surprising to find myself dangling upside-down in a dark, sub-zero November car park on a psycho-active fairground ride.
Maybe I should have expected another result, too: massive personal change at the deepest level. That’s what I got.
David is the creator of Clean Language, a set of simple questions which help clients explore their own metaphors. The facilitator’s ideas stay as far in the background as possible, the client’s words and gestures take centre stage.
But his new work is causing an even bigger buzz. A packed house at his Saturday-night demonstration at the London NLP Conference in November was spellbound — but confused. We could see that big things were happening for the demonstration subjects. But what was really going on?
Executive coach Neil Scotton, of Redhill, Surrey, was one of the demo subjects that evening, and experienced something deep. He found it hard to put into words, though, even weeks later. “I have learned something, but I am not quite sure what. It was a More >
Should You Follow Up With Coaching Clients?
Oct 25th
Why do people become coaches, NLP practitioners, therapists, hypnotherapists… communication skills trainers… or even business consultants?
I suspect it’s often because we want to do something “meaningful”, something “worthwhile”, something that “matters”. We want to help people, and to make a difference in the world.
And I’m beginning to suspect that if that’s what we want, some of us may be shooting ourselves in the foot.
I’m currently reading Dan Ariely’s The Upside Of Irrationality, which includes details of experiments which show just how much the “meaning” in our work motivates us. It’s far, far more than you might expect.
Ariely says: “If you take people who love something… and you place them in meaningful working conditions, the joy they derive from the activity is going to be a major driver in dictating their level of effort. However, if you take the same people with the same initial passion and desire and place them in meaningless working conditions, you can very easily kill any internal joy they might derive from the activity.”
He continues: “If companies really want their workers to produce, they should try to impart a sense of meaning – not just through vision statements but by allowing employees to feel a sense More >
How To Get The Picture
Oct 20th
Anyone else disturbed by the recent Facebook changes? As my friend Andy Smith put it, there’s been a shift from “banal quotes in text to pictures of banal quotes”.
It seems that the powers that be have decided to prioritise pictures over text, and so everyone’s frantically photoshopping to attract attention. And it works!
I ran my own test the other day. I’d appealed a couple of times in text for ideas on how to find a copywriter, and had very little joy.
Then I tried posting the work of art you see here: a scrawled “notice” advertising for a copywriter. Within a few minutes, I had several possibilities to explore.
You can see why Facebook’s done it. Pictures attract more attention, and are more emotionally engaging, than pure text. Pictures appeal to an older part of the brain than words, and so affect us more viscerally.
And that’s one of the reasons that metaphor is such an effective tool for coaching and therapy: research has demonstrated that the metaphors in our minds exist as “images” before we describe them with our words.
But what’s the best way to “get the picture”? What’s the best way to come up with imagery that represents what you want to More >
