Clean Language

How Many “You”s Could There Be?

Feb 19th

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I’ve been reading a couple of fascinating books which both draw attention to the idea that “we contain multitudes” – and seem to me to have massive implications for who we think we are.

You’re probably way ahead of me with The Biology of Belief by Bruce Lipton, already a classic of the personal development world.

“Imagine a population of trillions of individuals living under one roof in a state of perpetual happiness. Such a community exists – it is called the healthy human body.”

But it seems I’m ahead of the curve with Why Everyone Else Is A Hypocrite by Robert Kurzban – so new, it’s not even out in the UK yet.

One of the things I love about this book is that it still makes the point that we contain multitudes, but at a scale I can handle. I can’t really get my head round trillions! But I needed significantly more than the duality of “right brain, left brain” to explain what I was observing in my clients.

Kurzban convincingly argues that the mind can usefully be thought about More >

“I Can Make You Change”: The Universal Process

Feb 17th

Posted by Judy in Clean Language

2 comments

Do other people think like you? Up to a point!

One of the most interesting aspects of the coaching work I do is the opportunity it provides to notice the similarities and differences between the way my various clients think. I get to talk to people all over the world and help them to notice the metaphors that underpin their unconscious “thinking”, without trying to deliberately change them.

In the last few days, almost everyone I’ve worked with has been searching for a “higher purpose” to “give more meaning to life and work”. But for one person, that “higher purpose” was represented by a column of light, about two feet above his head; another, a golden ball around him which grew to the size of a house; for a third, the ability to explore a field of possibility without a map.

We share cultural metaphors like “higher purpose”, and superficially, it seems we’re all talking about the same thing. But ask a few Clean Language questions, and the differences emerge.

One of the reasons this matters is that there seems to be a strong human tendency to believe that everyone thinks like ourselves. And because that isn’t true, it can lead to all kinds More >

A Demonstration of Clean Space

Feb 15th

Posted by Judy in Body-Mind

6 comments

If you “collect” change processes, listen up! I’ve just uploaded a video demonstration of Clean Space – one of the most powerful processes around.

When I need the “big guns” – to help my clients change several things at once, or perhaps to sort out for themselves how to handle a bind – this is frequently my technique of choice.

The late David Grove, creator of Clean Language, devised Clean Space to help his therapy clients to make dramatic breakthroughs. He felt it helped them to “nail their history to the floor” so that they could move without it, enabling them to free up their thinking and come up with new insights.

Some people feel this process has similarities with various spatial anchoring processes from NLP, such as Robert Dilts’ SCORE model. However, others take the view that this process has some striking differences from NLP.

Indeed the (possibly apocryphal) story goes that when Dilts was facilitated through SCORE by someone trained in Clean Space, he didn’t put the spaces in that order, or in a line… but came up with something new.

After spending some time working with Clean Space, David Grove moved on to invent and use a group of processes called Emergent More >

How To Use Barnum Statements For Weight Loss

Feb 13th

Posted by Judy in Clean Language

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“You have a great need for other people to like and admire you. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them…”

Do you think so?

In a classic psychological experiment, Bertram Forer demonstrated that the vast majority of people would agree that the sentences above were (part of ) a very good description of their personality… if they were told it was an analysis which had been drawn up specifically for them.

It seems there’s a great persuasive magic in “Barnum statements” like these – statements that sound as if they’ve been tailored for you, but in fact are vague enough to apply to anybody.

I was reminded of the power of the “Forer effect” recently by Ben Wilson’s excellent new book, Change Your Thinking, Change Your Shape, because I think Ben uses it very well.

A large part of the book is made up of a series of short chapters about what he calls “blocking beliefs” which apparently prevent people from getting into amazing shape. Examples include “food makes me happy” and “being healthy More >

Exploring Mental Space

Feb 10th

Posted by Judy in Body-Mind

1 comment

If you’re interested in people, how they think, and how metaphor is involved, you’ll probably be curious about two links I was sent this week.

First up is a TED talk in which Prof Neil Burgess (of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London) explains how the brain figures out where you are – or where Homer Simpson parked his car. It’s fascinating!

Secondly, and perhaps even more exciting for metaphor enthusiasts like me, is new research that shows how metaphors are processed in the brain. It used to be assumed that when someone heard a metaphor, it was somehow “decoded” in the “language areas” of the brain (such as Broca’s or Wernicke’s areas) in order to be understood.

In the last 30 years or so most cognitive linguists – and Clean Language enthusiasts – have become convinced that metaphor goes much deeper than that. There are metaphors in language because there is metaphor in thought, at the most profound level.

This new research from Emory University in the USA seems to me to support that idea, by making it clear that when someone hears a metaphor relating to texture (“I’ve had a rough day”) it’s the areas of the brain relating to More >