Judy

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Homepage: http://www.@xraylistening.com

Posts by Judy

Defining Clean Language In A Tweet

Apr 11th

Posted by Judy in Clean Language

9 comments

This week I was challenged to define Clean Language in 140 characters or fewer. Here’s my attempt:

#CleanLanguage = DIY brain imaging via x-ray listening. For change (esp coaching), research, persuasion http://ow.ly/aaUxN

The thing is, Clean Language really is deceptively simple. It’s relatively easy to define, and to describe.

But its implications are massive. Like Twitter, busy changing the world 140 characters at a time, Clean Language can change people and relationships with “just a few simple questions”.

Twitter used to proudly boast that “constraint inspires creativity”. It’s true.

The constraint of working with “just a few simple questions” can reveal the inner workings of minds – both the client’s and the facilitator’s – in a way that content-based methodologies obscure.

How would you define Clean Language in a Tweet (140 characters or fewer)? Please comment below.

The More I Find Out…

Apr 10th

Posted by Judy in Clean Language

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How much don’t you know? It’s an interesting question – and one I was reminded about when re-reading Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan this weekend.

He points out that the older and wiser we become, the more we know that we don’t know.

“You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books,” he says.

Taleb calls the unread books an antilibrary. And he hails the antischolar – someone who “focuses on the unread books, and makes an attempt not to treat his knowledge as a treasure, or even a possession, or even a self-esteem enhancement device.”

It’s certainly true that the more I work with coaching clients using Clean Language, the less I feel I know. Clients’ internal worlds are full of fascinating surprises.

Luckily, the system is robust enough to enable me to help change to happen even when I’ve no idea what’s going on. There’s no such thing as “out of my depth” when I know I can swim.

But what about when the client doesn’t know, and says so? When every Clean Language question you More >

The Rules Of Clean Language

Apr 5th

Posted by Judy in Clean Language

4 comments

Last night I was interviewed by James Tripp of Hypnosis Without Trance, for a live teleseminar about making Clean Language work in the real world. You can listen to the replay here.

One of the questions which was submitted struck me as particularly interesting. “In what context can I use Clean Language? Are there any hard and fast rules? Do you have a step-by-step manual?”

The short answer is no, there are no hard and fast rules about how, when or where you can use Clean Language. Where would such rules come from? The creator of Clean Language, David Grove, has passed away – and in any case he was happy for people to use his brilliant ideas in whatever way they wanted.

There are guidelines, developed over the years by noticing what typically works well, and what is less effective. There are heuristics – rules of thumb – which enable facilitators like me to get great results, more of the time. That’s what I’m sharing on LearnCleanLanguage.com. But they fall a long way short of a step-by-step manual.

What’s interesting me, though, is that the questioner clearly wants there to be rules. I can empathise with that. Rules make things predictable, and easy. When you More >

Awesome Curiosity

Apr 3rd

Posted by Judy in Clean Language

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When did you last consider the awesome power of curiosity? It’s an immensely valuable emotion – and probably one of the most important to me in my work as an X-Ray Listener (aka a Clean Language coach).

After all, if you were not curious about people, why on earth would you bother to listen to them?

My good friend Chris Morris recently attended a training with Nancy Kline, one of the world’s great listeners, and was captivated not just by her skill, and by her positive energy, but also by her curiosity about people and what they were thinking and feeling.

As Chris said, when you’re learning NLP and similar approaches, and developing your skill in predicting how people will behave, it’s easy to lose the magic. If it feels as if you already know what people are going to say and do, why bother being curious? People are all the same!

But they’re not all the same. People are subtle, complicated, fascinating. They have astonishing passions and surprising belief systems.

Ask a few questions and people turn out to be truly awesome!

As coachees, they’ll often reveal how they’ve woven amazing webs from the their thought-forms and managed to get themselves stuck… before coming up with even More >

The Quiet Revolution

Mar 28th

Posted by Judy in Clean Language

9 comments

If you’re reading this, you’re probably interested in listening and thinking. And that means… brace yourself… that you might be an introvert.

I’ve never been a big fan of personality profiling, or of definitions such as “introvert” and “extrovert”. To be honest, the main reason was that I always came out “wrong”. No matter how much the paperwork protested that these things had no right or wrong answer, it seemed quite clear from the responses of the people involved that my answers were not what was wanted.

Now I have a potential explanation: Susan Cain’s new book Quiet contends that there is a systematic societal bias against introversion.

The book has already created a stir in the US since it’s publication in January. Her TED talk was one of the hits of the TED 2012 event, and attracted one of the largest-ever waves of online viewers.

As Jon Ronson pointed out in the Guardian on Saturday, “It’s a genius idea to write a book that tells introverts – a vast proportion of the reading public – how awesome and undervalued we are… I’m not surprised it shot straight to the top of the New York Times bestsellers list.”

Now the book is out in the UK, and I More >