First words

A woman introduces herself at a party. "Hello, I'm Winona." You talk about the weather, you slag off the host ... and you're just about to take the exchange onto a deeper, more meaningful level when you realize you've forgotten her name. It was only one word. It was only a few seconds ago. Winifred? Ramona? OK, you weren't listening, you were watching her instead, something about the way she tucked her hair behind her ears ... but one word? And while you're worrying about that you realize you've missed more information. What did she say about getting in touch? What exactly? Dammit, it was only a sentence.

Opening statements

In metaphor therapy we pay close attention to the very first thing a client says. Even before they think they've started. After all the client is demonstrating their pattern to you as they walk through the door - they can't help it. And we pay particularly close attention to their answer to the first question - typically

What would you like to have happen?

Often we write the answer down, verbatim:

I need to change my life.

This first reply will have immense structural significance. Whether it's short, apparently simple and about the way they process, or whether it's long, rambling and all about what happened at the supermarket. The statement will itself be a metaphor for the client's underlying pattern. And if it's recorded precisely it will be available as a reference at any time. Half-way through the session you might want to check the progress of your work against what the client actually said at the start, rather than trying to remember what they said, or guessing what you believe they may have said. And particularly when you're totally convinced you know what they said. All that stuff about connections, relationships ... what was it? I need to chain my wife?

Choices

Whatever the context (consulting room, office, bus stop) and whatever the other person's first words ('I can't go on like this', 'The photocopiers giving me a hard time', 'What lousy weather'), if they seem to have a problem and you want to be helpful, the chances are that your first interventions will be at a conversational level. Where do you start? You have infinite choice.

Limitations of Sleight-of-Mouth

My approach to teaching conversational change on Organisational Healing's Community NLP trainings had originally been based on the Sleight-of-Mouth model, Dilts' systematic way of challenging a person's limiting reality in order to facilitate change or to loosen a neuro-linguistic stuckness. I'd never been entirely comfortable with 'Sleight-of-Mouth'. My own trainers taught the model reluctantly (it seemed to me), and pleaded for it to be used with a light touch. The name is, of course, a play on 'sleight-of-hand', a phrase I'd always felt said more about manipulation than manual dexterity. Yet 'sleight-of-hand' derived from the French legerdemain, literally 'light of hand'. For a while I tried thinking of conversational change as '(S)l(e)ight of Mouth', but this gave only temporary relief.

Dilts' model is based on the Socratic method of leading the listener in a predetermined direction - one determined by the questioner, whose outcome is to change the listener's perception. The methodology can be very effective for the comprehensive demolition of Cause and Effect beliefs or Complex Equivalence statements, but I'm not sure if demolition experts are the right people to be designing and installing new structures.

There was another inhibition. Dilts' 1987 model has 18 categories of challenge with a clever, convoluted diagram of ladders and arrows and boxes and triangles to show how they all fit together. Not easy to follow. Sid Jacobson's 1993 version has an admirable list of 14 'patterns', or "challenges with attitude" as he used to call them, but I could never memorise lists. Hall and Bodenhamer (1997) offer 20 'directionalizations' or 'Mind-Lines', nicely thought out with Out-frames, Re-frames, Pre-frames, Post-frames, De-frames, Counter-frames and Analagous-frames (are you still with me?). It all seemed rather complex. My students are smart enough, but they're a varied lot - academics, therapists, hairdressers, rugby players - and what they need is a simple, practical, non-directive guide to conversational change which they can adapt to everyday use.

Frames

Hall and Bodenhamer's figurative notion of 'framing' appealed to me, so I made the metaphor literal and organised my thinking into 6 visual frames (see below), within which there are various sub-categories. Each of the frames contains a series of Open Questions. If you want to condense the model further you can forget the sub-categories. But hold on to the colloquial tone of the questioning, which is simpler than Hall and Bodenhamer's multi-level procedures and kinder (I like to think) than the Socratic method.

Seeking Socrates

Socrates may have tried to influence others for good, but if you've read Plato's account of the old man's methods you'll know that he did it by leading his pupils up the garden path to the only conclusions possible, his own. Not so much dialogue as dialectic.

Nowadays we say the pupil, not the teacher, knows best. Real change happens at an emotional and deep-structural, not a rational and intellectual, level - its a uniquely personal, internal experience. If you agree with Charles Faulkner that NLP at its best is an 'experiential philosophy' (ref. 3), then your role as Neuro-Linguistic Philosopher-facilitator is to keep pace with your pupil-clients as they track their own experience of already knowing what is good. Good in the sense of useful and valuable uniquely for them.

Exercise steps

What follows is a sequential exercise for learning the SIX OPEN QUESTION FRAMES - not an end in itself, let me hasten to remind you, but a way of familiarising yourself with the idea of reflective questioning so that you can adapt the methodology to your own needs.

The disposition and content of the frames has been influenced by my work in Grovian metaphor, which itself provides a marvellous model from which to facilitate a client without interpretation or suggestion from the therapist. However the Grovian process has a deliberately ritualistic structure designed to help client and therapist communicate with the unconscious at a symbolic level, and that's hardly the stuff of conversation. Indeed metaphor therapy works best when it's not conversational.

Yet 'clean language' adapts exquisitely to any human endeavour, and some of the open questions in the frames come directly from the Grovian model. Others come from a variety of sources (ref. 4). You may have favourites of your own. If you don't find them here, please let me know.

I use the word 'client' throughout to represent anyone that you - therapist, manager or colleague - may have cause to support or reflect on their voyage of re-discovery.

a. Listen carefully to the clients statement of their problem or limiting belief.

b. Repeat it back to them.

Don't paraphrase it. And you kind of feel the need to change some things about your life. Use their exact words. If it's too long, repeat a part (usually the last part, because that's usually the most significant). This is not to give you time to think, though it does. It is to acknowledge the client without elaboration. Quite a rare event, for any of us. We're more used to responses like I know just what you mean, when the speaker has no idea what we mean, and might equally have said You just reminded me of something about myself.

The chances are that both you and the client will find simple repetition a positive experience. Often a client won't realise what they have said until they hear you say it. You might not realise what they have said until you repeat it. It's not only an affirming thing to do, it's an essential precursor to working effectively together.

c. Help the client clarify the statement. Write it down:

I need to change my life.

Recording the statement helps in three ways. 1. It's captured for all seasons - no guesses, disputes or post-suppositions later. 2. The words exist not only in time but in space - a visual aid for your study of their structure. 3. The speaker is more likely to regard the statement dispassionately, as something 'outside' them - even more so if you allow them to see the statement - therefore challenge is more likely to be experienced as a co-operative venture.

Before we go any further let's put aside this idea of challenge. A relic from our combative past. I shall henceforth trust you to work 'cleanly' with your client, shunning bias, opinion and suggestion, however nobly intended, your higher purpose being to help unfold what the client already knows as you both connect to the greater good. Reminding yourself that the client is the expert in their own perceptions. The only expert.

d. Add inverted commas

"I need to change my life."

There's a poem by Emily Dickinson:

A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.

While training in metaphor process I found myself using inverted commas to help a client's words stand out more in my notes. This simple act made a surprising difference. The words took on a life of their own. My client had not made a random selection of words from an infinite set of trivial possibilities, but conscious and unconscious choices which had deep structural, symbolic and systemic significance - of course. I already knew this at some level, but had thought no more about it. Inverted commas became my assistants, discreetly reminding me of something I had neglected. I began to take opening statements more seriously.

If you happen to have an emotional attachment to the speaker you'll find that concentrating on their exact words, separating these from their tone of voice and treating the words as a quotation (i.e. this is just what one person said), will help unhook you from unhelpful emotional responses - feeling blamed, for example, or fearful. Not an ideal place from which to ask, or hear the answers to, open questions.

e. Deconstruct

An optional entertainment for those who like the full Monty. The rest can skip along to 'Draw a frame around the statement'.

One of the fundamental tenets of Neuro-Linguistic Programming is that our utterances represent the partial, socially derived, heavily filtered, generalised, deleted, distorted, symbolic, verbal expression ('surface structure') of a complete sensory representation of our experience ('deep structure') (ref. 5).

When David Grove taught me to deconstruct a client's often quite complex surface-structure statements (they're not all as succinct as 'I need to change my life', you may not be surprised to hear), I started playing with three sets of inverted commas - one for my deconstruction of the Perceiver, another for my perception of the Perceived and another for the bit In-Between (ref. 6).

Crudely put, the perceiver is normally The One Who Wants or Doesn't Want, the perceived is What They Want or Don't Want, and in-between is the Way To Get It or What's Stopping Them.

Write out your deconstructions. With practice you can do it mentally, but it's a good discipline for complex statements and a useful check on over-confidence. Even apparently straight forward statements such as "I need to change my life" are ripe with distinctions.

Deconstructing the 'Perceiver' ("I") is an indicator that "I" can be questioned and developed quite separately from the 'Perceived' ("my life") and the In-Between ("need to change"). The three elements of this statement are distinct surface-structure codings for different, complex, deep-structure representations of your client's experience.

You can further deconstruct the In-Between. "Need to change" is a common phrase and in the flow of ordinary conversation or reading you could be forgiven for assuming it's one idea. But stop the flow for a moment.

Check 'need' within yourself.

What's your experience of your need for a cup of tea, say? Right now. Compare that to your need to 'phone Justin or Melissa. I'll go out on a limb here and guess you had two quite different experiences of 'need'. (If you know Justin and Melissa you may well have had three.)

Thus your client's "need" in:

"I" "need" "to change" "my life."

may look and sound familiar, but you can bet it has a meaning unique to your client and at this stage you would be foolish to make any assumptions whatsoever about it.

The same goes for "to change". A couple of almost inseparable syllables. Pull 'em apart:

"I" "need" "to" "change" "my life."

The word "to" can now be seen as evidence of a certain need in your client in their relationship to "change" that is almost certainly different from the need that would be expressed in a statement such as "I need change in my life".

Why deconstruct the 'Perceiver', by the way? Isn't the Perceiver always 'I'? Well, yes and no. There's no 'I' in the statement "Things have to change", for example. And yet there is - it's just that it's been deleted by the speaker and you may have to rummage around a bit to retrieve it. Your client might actually be saying "I can't change things".

When you find the 'I' don't assume it's the only one.

For example, I (surface-structure symbol for a deep-structure representation of my complete experience of a present me writing this) remember about a year ago (a past me has been deleted here) working with a client of mine (a relational me, situation-specific), when I (a part of me) discovered that my client could identify at least four 'I's in her metaphor - one behind watching her have the experience, one seeing through her eyes, one in a cloud hovering overhead and another stuck in a tunnel below. Which of those 'I's (eyes) did she mean when she said "I see myself..."?

Etcetera. You can go on. Whether you're in conversation or process you'll have to make choices about where to concentrate your attention. To help you make them, next:

f. Draw a frame around the statement.

I began drawing frames when I wanted to locate client statements more easily in my notes. The frame gave me another perspective. There was additional information there, symbolised by the space surrounding the statement.

David Grove used to draw 3-dimensional boxes around his deconstructions. I give mine a shadow effect. Do whatever helps. I think of a client's statement as the label on a container. The label is a summary of the contents. The container contains 'inside information'.

And as you and the client are about to embark on conversational 'reframing', you will have the first frame as a literal and figurative frame-of-reference against which to check subsequent reframes.

Serious deconstructors, of course, will wish to draw three (or more) frames:

g. Label the frame 'Present' to represent the client's present frame of mind. And only now you have come this far in your understanding of the client's process may you intervene.

Interventions

With a sense of the neuro-linguistic structure of human communication, you will appreciate that any verbal intervention at the level of surface-structure may have powerful echoes throughout the system. It may result in a change to the clients deep-structure representation of a problem, which in turn may prompt the client to feel better or worse about their situation. At the very least it will enable more information to rise to the surface.

Shifts

As new information feeds back into the system, the system moves on. It cannot stay the same. Jack Stewart, discussing how we determine who we are, observes that "Constant updating and effective tracking are prerequisites for the highest levels of our functioning as creative human beings."(ref. 7)

In relation to metaphor process Tompkins and Lawley say, "Through a heightened awareness of our own patterns new levels of complexity emerge. In other words, the system starts to self-correct." (ref. 8)

Of purposeful dialogue Faulkner has said, "If you can reflect a clients problem undistorted, the client is relieved of the responsibility of holding it alone. The problem shifts and the system will spontaneously re-organize." (ref. 9)

There's a common thread of quality here: effective tracking ... heightened awareness ... undistorted reflection. The value to your client of having their process reflected without distortion, enabling them to track their patterns with heightened awareness, will depend on your skill and sensitivity. Your leger-de-main, or lightness of touch. If you're clumsy the client's experience may be less valuable.

Questions

There is an infinite number of ways of questioning what someone says. As you explore a particular statement with open questions within limited frames not every question or frame will seem equally appropriate. The point of the exercise is to familiarize yourself with a discipline that usefully limits your choices and stays respectful of the client's unique process. Rapport is important. Your voice tone in particular. Curiosity without disquiet.

First examine the statement from within the Present frame using the categories below. The sample questions apply to "I need to change my life" and are meant to be illustrative, not definitive.

SPECIFICALLYs

William Blake said 'To generalize is to be an idiot', but don't quote this to your client unless you've trained in Provocative Therapy. We all over-generalize.
• How specifically do you need to change your life?
• What specifically do you need to change?
• And more specifically?

WHAT KIND OFs

• What kind of change?
• What kind of need?

'What kind of..?' is a beautiful question, classically 'clean'. It helps the client return to their deep-structure representations with minimal interference. You can use the question time and again for any part of the statement, but as this is a conversational model you risk straining your credibility if you ask too many.


• What sort of change?
• What do you mean by change?

are alternatives. 'What sort of..?' and 'What do you mean by..?' can be used for any part of the statement. Or


• How change?
• In what way change?

'How..?' and 'In what way...?' are not generally suited to nouns (nominalisations are a special case), but can help mobilise most other parts of speech, particularly verbs.

PARTs

Usually only a part of the situation is a problem, though applying 'part' to the Perceiver may be taken as an invitation to construct a metaphorical part of themselves, which may not be appropriate. Faulkner uses 'aspect' - general enough for many, if not for the highly visual. 'Element', 'component', 'particular' (used as a noun) may be OK depending on the context.


• What part of your life needs to change?
• What aspect of you needs to change in order for your life to change the way you want?
• What is the smallest change you could make that would improve your life?

SYNONYMs

Prudent use of synonyms may help the client open up present content into immediate Context (frame no. 2). The least reflective category of the lot, but it's not the same as paraphrasing the client, or loosely substituting a word of your own for one of theirs. (All too common, even among therapists.) Your tone of voice is crucial - hint only at your ignorance and desire for clarification as you prompt a search around a selected word in the statement.


• You want to change your life...?
• You seek to change your life...?
• You need to vary your life...?
• To alter your life?

Offering a couple of variations with an open-ended inflection or gesture will help the client continue to scan their own data base for the pertinent word and prompt a concomitant deep-structure search for the experience the word symbolizes. Thus the quest might extend into frame no. 2.

h. Draw a Context Frame around the Present Frame.

HOW DO YOU KNOWs

Could be a Present frame question too. The frames are not meant to be mutually exclusive.

• How do you know you need to change your life?
• How would you know if you didn't?

The client may see the answer, a voice may tell them, they may have a feeling ... As you track their visual / auditory / kinesthetic experience of knowing you'll find more avenues opening.

WHAT ELSEs

The system always knows more than it first lets on.

• What else is there about changing your life?
• Is there anything else?
• What's another aspect of this?

CONNECTIONs

There are always connections to other things in the client's life and to the greater scheme of things.

• What's related to your need to change your life?
• How would you experience changing your life in relation to your family / work / community etc.?
• What connections are there between (any / all elements)?

And a gentle prompt which allows the possibility of a connection between elements without presupposing one:

• What kind of change (i.e. new or present element) when you've already won the Lottery and had the operation (i.e. other known elements)?

PROMPTs

• What could have prompted your need to change your life?

Rather than 'caused'. Some people use the word 'cause' to mean a negative- (or positive-) impact external event for which they have no responsibility and over which they have no control. A belief in cause-and-effect relationships supposes some kind of hierarchical logic to the universe, in which orders get passed down the line in a causal chain of command. I prefer the word 'prompt', in the sense of a neutral, even benign, instigation from within the system of which the client is a part, for which the client has as much responsibility as anyone else, and in which the client's thoughts and behaviour have influence. As in "Whispering Angels prompt her golden dreams." (Alexander Pope)

JUST BEFOREs

The present problem is almost certainly part of a pattern - a repeated sequence of similar events with a recognisable past and a predictable future. The moment a client recognizes a pattern they're half-way to changing it.

• What happened just before you needed to change your life?
• And what happened just before that?

EFFECTs

• What would be the effect of changing your life?
• When you have changed your life then what happens?
• And what happens next?

Questions with intrinsic value, and in the context of those in Present and Past frames may help the client recognise a pattern-over-time to the problem.

k. Add a 'Higher' Frame.

IMPORTANCEs

• What is important for you about changing your life?
• What is more important for you than that?

(An elision point into Core Transformation if you want to move from conversation into process (ref. 10).)

MEANINGs

• What is the meaning of your need to change your life?
• What else could it mean?

Note this is the 'significance' sense of 'mean' rather than the definition sense of 'What do you mean by...'? in the Present frame.

PURPOSEs

• What would be your purpose in changing your life?
• What other purpose could there be?

LEADING QUESTIONs

• What needs to happen for you to change your life?
• What makes it possible for / enables you to change your life?
• What determines when you change your life?

Majestic questions, not strictly reflective, but you may ask them in all innocence. They might be asked in any frame, but because of their potential power I locate them here.

l. Finally add a 'Metaphor' Frame.

Be creative. Relate a story or an analogy that opens up the frame. Constructing a genuinely therapeutic metaphor, however, requires great skill and practice. It must relate to your client in every particular (ref. 11). If you need to construct an outcome for your client (to which the metaphor leads), the outcome cannot be truly reflective. Even if the client has articulated an outcome for themselves you cannot be certain that your metaphor will lead them there if the elements in the metaphor are not client-generated.