minds, metaphors and (ethical) manipulation
Posts tagged Clean Language
It’s All About You And Me
Nov 3rd
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Here’s something I bet you never realised. Apparently, the pronouns you use can reveal your personality.
Not only that, but your use of pronouns changes depending on how stressed you are, or where you’re sitting in the hierarchy of your social group – among other factors.
That’s the amazing claim by James Pennebaker in his fascinating book, The Secret Life of Pronouns.
He points out that pronouns are often invisible to the “naked ear”. They’re hidden in plan view. As with other hidden metaphors, we’re just not programmed to notice them.
But he and his colleagues have discovered that computer analysis of written materials reveals surprising differences in the way people use pronouns (words like I, you, me, we etc).
For example, in any interaction, people lower in the social pecking order will use more “I” words than more dominant individuals.
Want to see where you fit? If you’re on Twitter, you can use his online Analyze Words tool to compute your own personality, and those of your friends and colleagues. (While you’re there, feel free to follow @xraylistening!)
- David Grove, creator of Clean More >
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 >
