X-Ray Listening
minds, metaphors and (ethical) manipulation
Six Degrees of David Grove
Oct 31st
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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. 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 >
Being Nice To Yourself
Oct 19th
Do you ever ask yourself things like: “Why did I do that? What on earth was I thinking?”
Do you ever get angry with yourself, and tell yourself off for your mistakes – in a way you’d never dream of speaking to another human being?
There could be a relatively simple explanation, according to Patricia Ridell in her talk at Richmond NLP Group last night.
Trish is an academic psychologist and neuroscientist, an expert in the science of the brain.
Apparently she was initially a bit reluctant to get involved with NLP
But she said that once she engaged with it, she discovered all kinds of ways in which neuroscience could explain how NLP techniques worked (and yes, she is working on a book).
And this nugget about why we find it so difficult to like – or love – ourselves.
Apparently, there’s no direct connection between the part of the brain that does “empathy”, understanding how other people feel about things, and the part of the brain which generates the stream of consciousness about ourselves, about what we ourselves have done and what we should do. They just aren’t joined up.
Hence, you will usually speak to yourself without empathy – and therefore without the care you’d More >
