Articles by this Author
How We Act From What We Know To Be True
How do you act from what you know to be true when you haven’t before, or it’s difficult, or you’re frightened of the consequences, or you’re not the kind of person who does? While each person’s process will be individual there seem be a number a characteristics present in most people’s experience.
Recommended Reading
A list of titles that unquestionably influenced Penny and James Lawley's thinking.
Clean Space Revisited
These notes:
- Describe a Clean Space 'Lite' version that contains only the central elements.
- Identify the main choices available to a facilitator within the Lite version.
- Note some of the ways facilitators have found to respond to the unusual.
- Document some of the common add-ons in the feature-rich versions practiced by experienced facilitators.
Embodied Schema: The basis of Embodied Cognition
Embodied Schema are
multi-sensory experiential patterns acquired pre-verbally which later
are used to both describe and proscribe our personal perspectives of how the
world works. They are so natural to us, like a fish
trying to describe water, we seldom notice them.
Those who cleanly model embodied schema from the words and nonverbals that represent how a person internally does what they describe, are privileged to join that person in their private, interior, subjective world. Modelling embodied scema will give you something like 'second sight' into the organisation of others' psychescapes. That in turn will lead to the more precise use of Clean Language.
Accepting Acceptance
What happens when people say they
accept, and when they actually do accept the ‘current
reality’ of their lives. We investigate what acceptance is, how we do it, and how we do not.
We also wonder what difference it makes to the potential for change
and transformation when people truly accept their current reality
from an authentic, deep and cellular state of being.
Attending to Salience
We have been self-modelling what we pay attention to in
a client session that: (1) guides our line of questioning, and (2)
gives the session its sense of directional flow. We call this process: Attending to (or selecting for / sorting for) salience (significance / importance / relevance / what is fundamental). These notes explore the nature of that process.
Joining Up the work of David Grove

This paper presents a model that ‘joins up’ the three main
phases of David Grove's work. Rather than trying to
integrate the phases into a single process I have maintained the individuality of each domain and language model. I used the metaphor of
‘join up’ because David was inspired by
The Horse Whisper, Monty Roberts.
Using Symbolic Modelling as a Reasearch & Interview Tool
Vectoring and Systemic Outcome Orientation
Whatever happens during a session, excellent facilitators and therapists always seem to know where to go next. They are also able to pursue a line of questioning and to navigate elegantly through the client’s information. To find out how they do this we undertook a modelling project. Our exemplars were David Grove, Steve De Shazer, Robert Dilts, Steve Andreas (and ourselves).
Maximising Serendipity
‘Serendipity’ is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary
as “the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by
accident.” However, this definition pushes into the
background a host of important features. In this paper we explore the six components which need to be in place for serendipity to have occurred, and ways maximise it's potential.