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						<title><![CDATA[www.cleanlanguage.co.uk - Blog]]></title>
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					  <title><![CDATA[Leading the witness]]></title>
					  <link>http://www.cleanlanguage.co.uk/articles/blogs/69/Leading-the-witness.html</link>
					  <description><![CDATA[In a series of classic studies, Elizabeth Loftus (rated the most eminent female psychologist of the 20th Century by the American Psychological Association) and her colleagues demonstrated just how vulnerable witnesses are to leading questions. The results were summarized in Use Your Head: The inside track on the way we think by Daniel Freeman and Jason Freeman (John Murray, London, 2010, pp. 67-68, my italics):For example a video tape of a car crash was shown to several groups of people. When members of one group were asked, 'How fast were the cars going when they collided with each other?', their average response was 31.8 miles per hour. A different group were asked, 'How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?'. These participants reckoned the cars were travelling a full 9 miles an hour faster at 40.8 miles per hour. Each group's estimate of the cars' speed was heavily influenced by the particular verb used in the question.Similarly, when the questioners mentioned a stop sign, many of the participants remembered seeing it - even though no such sign had appeared in the video. Asking 'Did you see the broken headlight?' was much more likely to elicit an affirmative from the participants than the more tentative 'Did you see a broken headlight?'. And groups who'd heard the incident described as a 'smash' were far more inclined to agree that they'd seen broken glass than those for whom the incident had been described in less loaded terminology (again, there was no broken glass). Bear in mind that Loftus's experiments were carried out in a psychological laboratory. If people are so suggestible in a lab, one can only imagine how they are likely to perform in the intense atmosphere of a courtroom [or a police interview]. Moreover, many eye witnesses manage just a fleeting glimpse of an incident - it's not something they were expecting, after all. And where a weapon was used in a crime, it's often this feature of the incident that - for understandable reasons - drew most of their attention. (This tendency is known as 'weapon focus'.) This is not to suggest that eyewitness accounts are inherently unreliable - indeed, some studies show that people are often very good at remembering aspects of an incident that they see very clearly and face on. What they tend to be less proficient at is recalling peripheral details (a face seen in profile, for example, or an accomplice standing off to one side). And sometimes, of course, it's these peripheral elements that are the most important to the outcome of a case.These experiments further confirm that even a single word can make a big difference to how people recall events, reason and make decisions (see my blog Metaphors we think with for more scientific evidence). While these experiments were based on observing 'external' events, I suspect that the principles equally apply, if not more so, to 'internal' events. This is why we recommend facilitators stay ultra clean when a client is attending to experiences:- inside their private metaphorical world- inside their body- core to them (e.g related identity and who they are)- related to much younger, child-like metaphors- triggered by abuse or trauma- of a spiritual or religious nature- that are vague or ill-formed senses.There is also much to be learned from the different ways we respond to the center and the periphery of our attention. At times it seems like there is a parallel between 'weapon focus' and 'problem focus'. People can become hypnotised by their problems, or to use a different metaphor, magnetically pulled to focus on them.On the other hand, a person may only &#34;manage just a fleeting glimpse&#34; of a symbol on the periphery of their landscape or a change if is small and unexpected. We often say in our trainings that it's more important where a question directs a person's attention than which question is asked. We add that how long the person pays attention to any one aspect of their landscape is also crucial. Hence participants who are facilitating someone to develop a metaphor landscape will often hear us whisper in their ear &#34;stay there, stay there&#34;. This is our way of giving coaching in the moment and guiding the facilitator to increase what David Grove called &#34;the dwell time&#34;. That is, to attend to one aspect for longer, often much longer, than the person usually does.One of the great values of Symbolic Modelling is that we can facilitate a
 person to pay attention to those fleeting glimpses and peripheral 
details in a clean and naturalistic way. The primary clean question for 
doing this is:And when [symbol/event 1], what happens to [symbol/event 2]?David
 Grove occasionally used this question in his early 'child within' phase (up to 
the early 1990s) but not very often. We refer to this 'specialised' question 
several times in Metaphors in Mind (see
 the index on page 311). However, in the last few years Penny Tompkins and I have been trying 
to give this question more&#160; exposure. In our current trainings we have upgraded it from 'specialised' to join the exulted ranks of
 the 'basic' clean questions. 'And when ..., what happens to ...?' is such a versatile question. It can be used for example to invite a person to:Be
 simultaneously aware of aspects of their inner world that are 
separated in space &#8211; and time &#8211; and thereby widening the field of 
perception to include more of the person's experience (e.g. in Stage 3 of Symbolic Modelling Lite, Developing a Desired Outcome Landscape).Consider
 a relationship between two aspects of a landscape (an attribute, 
symbol, relationship, metaphor, pattern, etc.). If both aspects are within
 the current perceptual event this question tends to bring forth causal
 or contingent relationships. Otherwise it invites the awareness of 
relationships across space and over time (e.g. in Stage 4
 of Symbolic Modelling Lite, Exploring the Effects of a Desired Outcome Landscape).Discover what happens in one part of a landscape when there has been a change in another part (e.g. in Stage 5 of Symbolic Modelling Lite, Maturing Changes).I've
 also used 'And when ..., what happens to ...?' to good effect when working with couples and in groups to 
invite those present to consider their response when one person does or 
says something.
]]></description>
					  <author>James Lawley</author>
					  <pubDate>Sat, 14 Jan 2012 00:00:00 EST</pubDate>
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					  <title><![CDATA[Self-nudging myself - some results]]></title>
					  <link>http://www.cleanlanguage.co.uk/articles/blogs/68/Self-nudging-myself---some-results.html</link>
					  <description><![CDATA[I've been testing Penny Tompkins and my ideas about self-nudging with myself. Self-nudging is a way to encourage yourself to take &#8216;the road less travelled&#8217; more often until it becomes &#8216;the road mostly travelled&#8217;. It doesn&#8217;t do this by solving problems, nor by eliminating incongruence, nor by setting a &#8216;big hairy audacious goal&#8217;. It does it by regularly engaging in a do-able behaviour which means that in those moments of choice, the coin is biased to turn up heads rather then tails so that we are nudged to take the path we know is good for us. There is no battle of wills and therefore no willpower is needed. All you are committed to is doing the biasing behaviour, monitoring the effect of the self-nudge and if necessary trying different biasing behaviours ('trial and feedback', as we call it).The theory behind our idea comes from the continual discovery of more and more &#8216;cognitive biases&#8217;. At the last count Wikipedia listed over 100. We thought, if we acquire so many biases without knowing, why don&#8217;t we add a few by design? (For how to do this see our article, Self-Nudging: unconscious decision-making and how we can bias our future self.)Below is a report on how I have been doing in one area - running regularly.For many years I was an avid recreational runner. But that was over twenty years ago. Then I got injured and ... blah, blah, blah. Since then I've started running again many times but I never maintained it for any length of time. Last December I decided to try again, only this time I decided to do two things differently (i.e. belatedly apply the old adage, 'if what you're doing isn't working, do something else').&#160;First, I defined evidence of success as 'a run' &#8211;regardless of how long or how fast or how good I felt.&#160;Secondly, I decided to minimise my chances of getting injured or ill. (I have had a strong pattern of 'forgetting' I am not 30 years old anymore and&#160;upping my mileage too soon and over doing it.) I started with a 15 minute walk/run and have restricted my runs to a maximum of 20 minutes. After six months I was still running but only in stretches of one, two or three weeks. These were followed by gaps where I would not run for four, five or six weeks before the cycle started again. I was pleased I hadn't given up entirely, but clearly I wasn&#8217;t running as consistently as I would like. Also I recognised there was a high probability I would keep extending one of my not-running phases until I wasn't running at all.At the time, Penny and I were developing our model around self-nudge, and I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to test our process.&#160; I was using a running log as a motivator during my first six months but it obviously wasn't working that well. So I decided to make a very small change. I instituted a new rule &#8211; something I had never done before: I would add something to the log&#160;everyday &#8211;&#160;whether I ran or not. After a complete year I can report that I ran 54 times in the first six months and 83 times in the second. &#160;The latter is equivalent to running three times a week &#8211; every week.I think all three changes played their part. The self-nudge daily log had the effect of reminding me that I hadn't run for a day, two days, three days, and so on. In the past I had managed to 'forget' I hadn't run for a week, then two, then three, then ... &#160;Every extra day increased the incentive to not run &#8211; hardly setting up the self-reinforcing feedback loop I was aiming at. By presenting myself with undeniable evidence of 'current reality' daily I didn't let the breaks build up. Only once did I go for more than a week without a run.My assessment is that overall there has been a shift. I feel better physically and mentally, the old urge to go out running is back, and I'm not over-doing it. I am also aware that six months is not long enough to be sure. The next six months will provide more quality feedback. If I keep running for about 50% of days for a whole year I'll count that as excellent evidence ... and let you know how it goes.]]></description>
					  <author>James Lawley</author>
					  <pubDate>Wed, 21 Dec 2011 00:00:00 EST</pubDate>
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					  <title><![CDATA[Tracking where the client is perceiving from]]></title>
					  <link>http://www.cleanlanguage.co.uk/articles/blogs/67/Tracking-where-the-client-is-perceiving-from.html</link>
					  <description><![CDATA[The fourth and last part of my general feedback to advanced facilitators. (See here for the other parts.)&#160; 4. Tracking where the client is perceiving fromAn important question to self when modelling symbolically is: &#8216;Where is the client perceiving from?&#8217;. Since the perspective available to a perceiver can shift every time the perceiver moves, it is doubly important to be able to track those changes. This is a sophisticated skill that takes some getting used to. It is worth learning because some clients&#8217; landscapes will make little sense unless you can follow the locus of the current perceiver&#8217;s attention.Imagine a client says:The black heart of the problem is in front of me about an arms length away. I&#8217;d like to move through the black heart and move beyond it so there is space between me and it. Then the space really opens up. Using the PRO model we can categorize each of the client&#8217;s statements:1. The black heart of the problem is in front of me about an arms length away. [Problem]2. I&#8217;d like to move through the black heart [Remedy]3. and move beyond it [Remedy]4. so there is space between me and it. [Remedy]5. Then the space really opens up. [desired Outcome]Note that the first four statements all indicate the perceiver has his/her attention on the problem, &#8220;black heart&#8221; &#8211; albeit to a lesser and lesser degree. My modelling of where the client is perceiving their landscape from, looks like this (time increases from 1 to 5):There are three named &#8216;spaces&#8217; :1. The space (in front) that is an arm&#8217;s length 4. The space (behind) between5. The space (in front) that opens up(There is possibly a space &#8216;inside&#8217; heart in #2, and another &#8216;little space&#8217; between heart and Perceiver in #4, but we don&#8217;t know for sure.)The client may be able to move around this landscape at lightening like speed and when they speak about a &#8216;space&#8217; they will know exactly which one they mean. As the facilitator you will need to have your wits about you to keep track. As you learn to do this, the client will feel like you are in their landscape with them and you will have a deep rapport with both.The next step is to ponder two questions that are effectively equivalent: Where in the landscape, and when in the sequence, would be most useful for the client to attend to? If we consider all the options, and not just go for the desired outcome, we can invite the client to attend to any one of the five space-time frames listed above. [There are at least two others &#8212; before #1 and after #5 &#8212; but we&#8217;ll ignore these for the time being.]Whichever we decide, we need to choose our words carefully. We will need to set the appropriate frame by using the context-defining part of the Clean Language syntax, &#8216;And when/as ...&#8217;, before we ask the question. Thus:1. And when black heart of the problem is in front of you about an arms length away ......2. And as you move through black heart ......3. And as you move beyond black heart ......4. And when there is space between you and black heart ......5. And as that space really opens up ......And then we can consider:Within that where and when, what would it be most useful for the client to attend to?e.g. 1. ...... is there anything else about that arms length?2.&#160; ...... what kind of move through is that?3.&#160; ...... where is that beyond?4. ...... how much space is there between you and black heart?5. ...... what kind of space is that space that really opens up?The five questions are just examples, others could be asked. Chances are that as long as the question maintains the same time-space frame (i.e. it is a developing question), it will not matter much which question you ask since the client&#8217;s attention will be in the appropriate time and space to access the information they need.By modelling where the client perceives from, and the time and space characteristics of their landscape we not only acknowledge the client&#8217;s inner realty from their perspective, we are able to invite them to attend to salient aspects with much greater precision. The result? The client will access places and discover things that they never knew they knew.- 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 -If you would like to know more about how to model metaphors see Penny Tompkins and my articles:A Model of Musing: The Message in a MetaphorSymbolic Modelling and the Emergence of Background KnowledgeEmbodied Schema: The basis of Embodied Cognition]]></description>
					  <author>James Lawley</author>
					  <pubDate>Mon, 12 Dec 2011 00:00:00 EST</pubDate>
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					  <title><![CDATA[Not making decisions for the client]]></title>
					  <link>http://www.cleanlanguage.co.uk/articles/blogs/66/Not-making-decisions-for-the-client.html</link>
					  <description><![CDATA[The third of four parts of my general feedback to advanced facilitators. (See here for the other parts.)&#160; 3. Not making decisions for the clientSuppose a client says: I can either stop and stay there or move on through the feeling.What question would you ask, and what would you ask it of?Whether you ask about &#8220;stop&#8221;, &#8220;stay&#8221;, &#8220;there&#8221; or &#8220;move on&#8221;, &#8220;through&#8221; or the &#8220;feeling&#8221;, you will have made a choice to attend to one &#8216;side&#8217; of the client&#8217;s &#8216;either/or&#8217; rather the other. Whichever you don&#8217;t choose could be more important. Since going back takes extra effort, many inexperienced facilitators take the path of least resistance and keep going in the direction first chosen. But then the client does not find out about the other side of their story.There is an alternative &#8211; and it&#8217;s much easier. Don&#8217;t decide. Why choose when you have so little to base it on? Better to let the client decide. To do this you can simply ask:And when you can either stop and stay there or move on through the feeling, is there anything else about either stop and stay there or move on through?This way you facilitate the client to consider both sides together. Then you notice whether they go one way or the other. If they do, always note the option the client didn&#8217;t choose, and later in the session come back and check the choice not taken &#8211; the road not travelled.There are other questions you could ask which don&#8217;t choose for the client, and here are two:a. And when you can either stop and stay there or you can move on through the feeling, what would you like to have happen?I would consider this question if it seemed the client didn&#8217;t know which choice to take and that gave them a dilemma (i.e. a Problem in the PRO model). If you choose one or the other, you may &#8216;solve&#8217; this particular dilemma for the moment, but what will they have learned about handling dilemmas? Probably not much. Better to ask WWYLTHH? of the dilemma.b. And when you can either stop and stay there or you can move on through the feeling,&#160;then what happens?This is a clever question because by moving time forward the client finds out what happens next. We know they &#8216;&#8220;can&#8221; do either, but what do they actually do? I have a slight concern that, depending on how the question is asked, it may be seen as favouring &#8216;moving on&#8217; rather than &#8216;staying there&#8217;.]]></description>
					  <author>James Lawley</author>
					  <pubDate>Sun, 11 Dec 2011 00:00:00 EST</pubDate>
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					  <title><![CDATA[What facilitators tend to do too early]]></title>
					  <link>http://www.cleanlanguage.co.uk/articles/blogs/65/What-facilitators-tend-to-do-too-early.html</link>
					  <description><![CDATA[Following on from yesterday's blog, my second of four muses produced a table of things facilitators tend to do too early &#8211; and what to do instead. (See here for the other parts.)&#160; 2. Things facilitators tend to do too earlyThe beginning of a session is all about &#8216;preparing the ground&#8217; for the unexpected change that happens &#8211; well, unexpectedly &#8211; when conditions are right. At the beginning you have little or no idea what those conditions are for this particular client. So the rule is, stay with the basics: facilitate the client to identify a desired outcome, find the locations and names of symbols, and develop a metaphor landscape. The value of preparing the ground in an emergent process is commonly underestimated by a facilitator who feels the need to make something happen, or get things moving, or to get to the point quickly, etc.&#160; In the desire to be helpful, novice facilitators commonly do the following too early. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with doing any of them, it&#8217;s all a matter of timing.




Too early

Instead



Decide on a direction at the very beginning of a session.

Get to know the essence, or nature of the material presented. My most common second question is: And is there anything else about that? 



Go down a rabbit hole focussing on one bit of the landscape.

Develop the breath of the metaphor landscape. To start with, think span over depth.



Pursue a single rabbit by always asking a question of the last thing the client says.

Ditto.



Choose between a number of options when there is insufficient information to say which is more salient (e.g. The client says &#8216;I want A and B and C.&#8217;)

Let the client decide (see example #3 tomorrow).



Ask And then what happens? or And what happens next? when the client has just identified a desired outcome.

Develop the original desired outcome landscape before moving time forward. If you do move time forward remember to go back and check against the original statement.



Ask a Where? question of something that does not obviously have a perceptual location.

Pick something where the client is highly likely to answer with a perceptual location, rather than answer &#8216;I don&#8217;t know&#8217; or with a real life location (such as &#8216;at work&#8217;). 



Ask And that&#8217;s like what? (a) before the client is ready to move into the symbolic domain(b) for an undefined abstract concept(c) of too big a chunk of information.

Prepare the client by identifying a number of attributes for the description before asking for a metaphor, e.g. see David Grove&#8217;s &#8216;From a Feeling to a Metaphor&#8217; vector at cleanlanguage.co.uk/articles/articles/29/.



Ask And what needs to happen for [.....]?(a) without a clearly stated desire for something to happen(b) of conceptual outcomes

(a) Make sure the client has specifically said they want &#8216;[.....]&#8217; to happen.(b) Identify the desire within the metaphor landscape first.



Ask the And is there a relationship? question between abstract concepts.

Ask it of symbols embedded in a metaphor landscape. This will reduce the likelihood of the session becoming &#8216;ordinarily conceptual&#8217;. These days, in the early part of a session I prefer to ask And when [X], what happens to [Y]? 



]]></description>
					  <author>James Lawley</author>
					  <pubDate>Sat, 10 Dec 2011 00:00:00 EST</pubDate>
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					  <title><![CDATA[Questions I frequently ask facilitators]]></title>
					  <link>http://www.cleanlanguage.co.uk/articles/blogs/64/Questions-I-frequently-ask-facilitators.html</link>
					  <description><![CDATA[I recently listened to a dozen participants on the Clean Change Company Module 5 by Skype program use their Symbolic Modelling and Clean Language skills to each facilitate a 20 minute client session. After each session I gave 10 minutes of feedback/coaching/supervision. Whether that involved a series of questions or a detailed exploration of an sample segment from the session, my aim was to offer each facilitator a signpost to his or her next developmental step. On reflection I have realised that while some of my feedback was specific to the particular client session, much of it was more general. I therefore collated it, and I present it here in the form of:1. A list of questions I frequently asked of the facilitators2. A table of things facilitators tend to do too early &#8211; and what to do instead3. How not to make decisions for the client4. How to track where the client is perceiving fromSome of my questions and in particular the two examples (#3 and #4) are quite sophisticated and may (hopefully) require thinking about, rather than just reading. But then this was an &#8216;advanced&#8217; module!I'll post the other three over the next few days.1. Questions frequently asked of the facilitatorsWhat is the client&#8217;s current desired outcome? What is your evidence that X is related to their desired outcome?How can you find out if that is related to the client&#8217;s desired outcome or not?Where are you heading (with that question)?&#160; Is there a compelling reason for you to move the client&#8217;s attention from where it is currently?Where would it be useful for the client&#8217;s attention to be right now?How could you invite the client to attend to that/there/then?&#160;&#160; If that&#8217;s where you want to direct their attention, what question would you ask?Where does that question go to (in their landscape)? Where else could your question go to?Which do you think would be most useful for the client?&#160; Where did your last question come from?How did you know to ask about that?What is your desired outcome for that question?What are your signals for [any of R.E.P.R.O.C.ess categories]?What is your body trying to tell you?What is your signal for whether that kind of question gets more or less response than other kinds?What&#8217;s the central issue for the client?Where/when in the landscape does the client have choice and where/when don&#8217;t they?Where are the boundaries? (The most interesting places are usually the transitions of space, time, form, perceiver, context).How can you invite the client to attend to what is problematic for them before asking 'And what would you like to have happen?'Did the client answer your question?What did you think was the likelihood of the client being able to answer that question?How do you assess the client&#8217;s response to your last question? So what does that tell you about the question?What question will likely bring X to the client&#8217;s attention?How do you know that is true for this particular client?Do you need to choose a direction? How could you invite the client to set their own direction?How is the nature of the client&#8217;s landscape guiding your choices? If you take their metaphors literally where is the action?Is part of the client&#8217;s pattern happening now?&#160; How can you utilise that to go live?]]></description>
					  <author>James Lawley</author>
					  <pubDate>Fri, 09 Dec 2011 00:00:00 EST</pubDate>
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					  <title><![CDATA[Foreword to The NLP Professional]]></title>
					  <link>http://www.cleanlanguage.co.uk/articles/blogs/63/Foreword-to-The-NLP-Professional.html</link>
					  <description><![CDATA[My foreword to the just published The NLP Professional by Karen Moxom (Ecademy, 2011):I remember as a young man going for an interview and being asked &#8220;What comes to mind when you think of the word &#8216;professional&#8217;?&#8221; I was taken aback by the question and mumbled some trite answer. The truth was, I had never thought about it. I wish I had read Karen Moxom&#8217;s The NLP Professional before that interview. Not because I knew anything about NLP back then, but because it would have helped me understand what it means to be professional. While this book is aimed at the NLP practitioner, much of it could apply to being professional in any field.The word &#8216;professional&#8217; derives from the Latin, profiteri, meaning &#8216;to declare publicly&#8217;. Being professional means recognising what we publicly say and do reflects on who we are. Furthermore, as practitioners of NLP our behaviour reflects on the whole field. In terms of Robert Dilts&#8217; Logical Levels model, the lower levels (Environment, Behaviour and Capability) represent the higher levels (Beliefs and Values, Identity and Larger System). In some quarters NLP is at best mocked and at worst held in contempt. If enough people follow the guidance in this book we can support the efforts of the growing numbers attempting to change those perceptions and make NLP a recognised, credible and respected subject.I make a distinction between &#8216;a professional&#8217; &#8211; a role &#8211; and &#8216;being professional&#8217; &#8211; a process. If Carl Rogers, one of the grandaddies of the human potential movement, had decided to write a book on this subject I guess he would have called it On Becoming Professional. We don&#8217;t become professional by getting a certificate. &#8216;Becoming&#8217; is an ongoing and developmental process that never completes. We are always en route. &#160;The NLP Professional contains lots of practical tips on how to set up and run a professional business, but for me the heart of the book is how Karen breaks down the complex process of becoming professional into seven easy-to-understand themes. Karen says that integrity and trust are the two most important values that guide professionalism.Integrity has two meanings: being honest and acting from moral principles; it also means&#160; whole and coherent. Integrity is not something we can have in one sphere of our life and not another, it&#8217;s not something we can do some of the time. In my experience, integrity needs to be demonstrated consistently because opportunities to cut corners, over-sell, be &#8220;economical with the truth&#8221;, manipulate, turn a blind eye, etc. are ever present. The other important value, trust, has a counterpart &#8211; trustworthy. Being professional means being worthy of trust. Over the last twenty years, many of my clients have said they want to trust more; never has a client said they want to be more trustworthy. Now why is that? I suspect a &#8216;cognitive bias&#8217; is involved. My guess is that like many other &#8216;self-serving biases&#8217; most people would consider them self above average when it comes to trustworthiness &#8211; which of course is statistically impossible. Tellingly, when people hear about self-serving bias they often smile and remark that they know others who have that problem! There are two ways to counter such a bias, and both of them depend on recognising that we might have a bias and not know it. We can either honestly re-evaluate our own behaviour and intentions (in 12-Step Programs this is known as &#8220;a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves&#8221;); or we can seek feedback from people we admire. I recommend doing both. What we do with the information is what counts &#8211; not just in the short-term flush of feeling free, but in the months, years and decades that follow.If we combine integrity and trustworthiness we get the impeccability that Carlos Castaneda acquired from the teachings of shaman don Juan Matus. Being professional means delivering quality service and performance &#8211; even when we are not at our best, or the situation is not making it easy. Finding a way to be as prepared as we can and then giving our best, whatever the circumstance, is a hallmark of professionalism.By establishing ANLP International as a community interest company with its multitude of services, magazines and journals, and by writing this book, Karen is not only demonstrating her professional credentials, she is helping others to do the same.James LawleyLondonJuly 2011]]></description>
					  <author>James Lawley</author>
					  <pubDate>Sun, 04 Dec 2011 00:00:00 EST</pubDate>
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					  <title><![CDATA[Aristotle got there first]]></title>
					  <link>http://www.cleanlanguage.co.uk/articles/blogs/62/Aristotle-got-there-first.html</link>
					  <description><![CDATA[I was running on Hampstead Heath this morning when into my consciousness popped two familiar ideas placed side by side. It was one of those times when something that had never occurred to me before suddenly became laughably obvious &#8211; affectionately known as 'a duh! moment'. I instantly realised that Penny Tompkins' and my notion of 4 Fundamental Modelling Processes and Aristotle's 4 Causes were complementary, if not equivalent.Aristotle proposed that everything came into being by one of four means: material causes; formal causes; efficient causes; and final causes. There have been many interpretations of Aristotle's causes but my take is very simple, causes originate from the internal workings; external circumstances; past events; and imagined futures.When you think of the 4 causes like that it is very easy to map them on to three of the four modelling processes:Thus:



Aristotle's 4 Causes

Fundamental Modelling Processes



Material (internal)

Develop form



Formal (external)

Relate across space



Antecedent (past)

Relate over time (before)



Final (future)

Relate over time (after)



Interestingly, the one left out, identify is the most fundamental of all of the modelling process in that all the others require something to be identified prior to its form being developed or related to across time or space. Similarly, causes have to be identified before they can be known. Although we highlight four modelling processes, there is a fifth that is equally important: relating across levels of organisation, i.e. relating up or down a hierarchy. At each level a different kind of something can be identified: e.g. an 
attribute, a symbol, a relationship, a pattern, a context. And these will have influence upwards and downwards.Funny enough, I think Aristotle's 4 Causes implicitly include levels. Material causes mean a thing comes into existence as a result of its parts, constituents, substratum or materials (i.e. bottom-up). Formal causes result from the 
definition, form, pattern, essence, synthesis, or archetype of a thing in other words how the whole influences its parts (i.e. top-down).If you have read Metaphors in Mind, you may by now have realised that the 5 modelling process also map on to the first four of what we called Six Approaches (pp. 192-200):





4 of the Six Approaches

Fundamental Modelling Processes



a. Concentrating attention

Identify and Develop form at a level below



b. Attending to wholes

Identify and Develop form at a level above




c. Broadening attention

Relate over space



d. Lengthening attention

Relate across time (before and after)




'So what?' you might be thinking. Well, I find these kind of links between different domains of knowledge exciting and (to some extent) mutually validating. It also reminds me that causes are always relationships. Modelling relationships from a systemic perspective requires considering the three parts &#8211; the two 'ends' and what 'links' them &#8211;  as a package, mutually sustaining. That helps me to not take sides and to wonder what else those symbols might be able to do and what role they might be able to play, if they related in a different way. NOTESFor more on 4 Fundamental Modelling Processes see our article, REPROCEss and the First Principle.

For more on Aristotle's 4 Causes and how we language and think of causation see our article, Becausation. 

For more on how me make use of levels of organisation and hierarchy see our article, Levels: all the way up and all the way down. For more on the six approaches see our article, Iteration, Iteration, Iteration.]]></description>
					  <author>James Lawley</author>
					  <pubDate>Fri, 18 Nov 2011 00:00:00 EST</pubDate>
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					<item>
					  <title><![CDATA[The illusion of validity]]></title>
					  <link>http://www.cleanlanguage.co.uk/articles/blogs/61/The-illusion-of-validity.html</link>
					  <description><![CDATA[Daniel Kahneman, emeritus professor of psychology and of public affairs at Princeton&#160;University and a winner of the 2002 Noble Prize in Economics has written a fascinating article for the New York Times.*Kahneman describes a story from early in his career when he was part of a team&#160;evaluating candidates for officer training&#160;in the Israeli army. His team were in the fortunate position that they received regular feedback on the actual performance of the soldiers. As a result he came to these conclusions (in his own words):Our ability to predict performance at the school was negligible. Our certainty about the potential of individual candidates [was] largely useless.Other events [not present during the assessment] &#8212; some of them random &#8212; would determine later success in training and combat.We had made up a story from the little we knew but had no way to allow for what we did not know about the individual&#8217;s future, which was almost everything that would actually matter.The statistical evidence of our failure should have shaken our confidence in our judgments of particular candidates, but it did not. It should also have caused us to moderate our predictions, but it did not. We knew as a general fact that our predictions were little better than random guesses, but we continued to feel and act as if each particular prediction was valid.Kahneman called this phenomenon &#34;the illusion of validity&#34;. Later research confirmed his observations and revealed other &#34;cognitive fallacies&#34;:People who face a difficult question often answer an easier one instead, without realizing it. The
 exaggerated expectation of consistency is a common error. We are prone 
to think that the world is more regular and predictable than it really 
is, because our memory automatically and continuously maintains a story 
about what is going on, and because the rules of memory tend to make 
that story as coherent as possible and to suppress alternatives. People come up with coherent stories 
and confident predictions even when they know little or 
nothing.&#160;Overconfidence arises because people are often blind to their 
own blindness.Confidence is a feeling, one determined mostly by 
the coherence of the story and by the ease with which it comes to mind, 
even when the evidence for the story is sparse and unreliable. The bias 
toward coherence favors overconfidence. An individual who expresses high
 confidence probably has a good story, which may or may not be true.When a compelling impression of a particular event clashes with general knowledge, the impression commonly prevailsFacts
 that challenge basic assumptions are simply not absorbed. The 
mind does not digest them. This is particularly true of statistical 
studies of performance, which provide general facts that people will 
ignore if they conflict with their personal experience.This
 last finding shows why there is often little point in wasting your breath 
giving advice. Either it will not challenge a basic assumption and 
the person could probably have come up with the idea themselves (and 
probably did). Or your advice will challenge a basic assumption and it will
 therefore be ignored.The research of Kahneman and others confirms Penny Tompkins and my observations. Our ability is to self-deceive is universal and has its own built-in preservation mechanism (see our article, Self-Deception, Self- Delusion and Self-Denial). One of the drivers of this ability is the impulse to reduce the difficult feelings  that arise when events and evidence are incompatible with our ideas and beliefs (see our article, Cognitive Dissonance and Creative Tension &#8212; the same or different?). In both cases explanations come to our rescue.&#160; Explanations are both pervasive and seductive. So much so that many people cannot live without them (notice what happens, both to them and to you, when you ask someone to do something without giving any explanation). Because we get caught up in the content of explanations we fail to notice just how much time we devote to giving, seeking or listening to them &#8211; most of which are little more than stories we are somehow able to believe (see our article Becausation).Finance and investmentNowhere are these cognitive fallacies more evident than in the field of finance and investment. I was first made aware of this by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and his masterful exposure of the inherently unpredictable nature of economics. (See my summary of Taleb's brilliant analysis Black Swan Logic: Thinking outside the Norm). Kahneman cites research, based on the trading records of 10,000 brokerage accounts of individual investors over a seven-year period, that shows:The results were unequivocally bad. On average, the shares investors sold did better than those they bought, by a very substantial margin: 3.3 percentage points per year, [and that's not including trading fees].The most active traders had the poorest results, while those who traded the least earned the highest returns. Men act on their useless ideas significantly more often than women do, and that as a result women achieve better investment results than men.OK, so if individual trading sucks, obviously we need 'expert' advice. Except the fact is: &#8220;At least two out of every three mutual funds underperform the overall market in any given year.&#8221; An achievement that a dart-throwing chimp could not match. And, a study of wealth advisers' performance year-on-year for eight consecutive years showed zero&#160;consistency. The analysis strongly suggests that skill was not involved in their successes. Kahneman remarks that the results were more reminiscent of a game of dice, than a game requiring skill.You will probably not be surprised to know that when Kahneman reported back to the company that employed the wealth advisers, the &#34;findings and their implications were quickly swept under the rug and that life in the firm went on just as before&#34;.True intuitive expertiseKahneman confirms that &#34;True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes&#34;. Therefore, he recommends asking two questions before you trust a particular intuitive judgment: Is the environment in which the judgment is made sufficiently regular to enable predictions from the available evidence? The answer is yes for [medical] diagnosticians, no for stock pickers. Do the professionals have an adequate opportunity to learn the cues and the regularities? The answer here depends on the professionals&#8217; experience and on the quality and speed with which they discover their mistakes. Anesthesiologists have a better chance to develop intuitions than radiologists do.A British TV program where three experts had to identify people who had been diagnosed with a severe mental disturbance from a group of &#8216;normal&#8217; people spectacularly failed to do so even when the experts were able to devise a series of activities designed to reveal the participants frailties [I&#8217;m not making this up!]. This suggests that psychological diagnosis is about as accurate as financial forecasting.After decades of research Kahneman concludes that,&#160;&#8220;in general, you should not take assertive and confident people at their own evaluation unless you have independent reason to believe that they know what they are talking about. Unfortunately, this advice is difficult to follow: overconfident professionals sincerely believe they have expertise, act as experts and look like experts. You will have to struggle to remind yourself that they may be in the grip of an illusion.&#8221;And Kahneman wirily notes that we are all prone to this way of thinking and hence even after reading his paper he predicts &#34;The confidence you will experience in your future judgments will not be diminished by what you just read, even if you believe every word.&#34;Confidence and congruence gone awryI&#8217;ll end this blog by linking it to my research into &#8216;how facilitators know if what they are doing is working for the client &#8211; and more importantly, if it is not. (For the background to this topic see our article, Calibration.)

The research of Kahneman and others should raise some warning signals about facilitators of all persuasions &#8211; but especially those who base their behaviour on being confident and congruent. In the 1990s I attended a Design Human Engineering training with Richard Bandler, co-originator of NLP, where he suggested that NLP practitioners should imagine themselves as a ten-foot panther with the internal dialogue about their clients: &#8220;Your ass is mine&#8221;. Kahneman's research would suggest that people who took Bandler&#8217;s advice would be highly susceptible to &#34;the illusion of validity&#34; and so would their clients. And that is the whole point. Persuasion partially works because of the confidence and congruence the practitioner projects, but rarely if ever are the potential downsides  of the approach discussed. In a way they can&#8217;t be, because this would undermine the whole philosophy. And we have seen what happens to challenges to basic assumptions &#8211; they are often ignored.Bandler might be a one-off, but he is certainly not alone. Here is the posting of an experienced hypnotherapist on a public forum:Hypnotherapy Works !Everybody that comes to see me.....goes away feeling better...........Doesn't everybody get that result ?!!!!Any talk of FAILURE I'm sorry, is alien to me !Well, I'm sorry too ... for this therapist&#8217;s clients. How many clients are going to tell him that what he did didn&#8217;t work for them? What are the chances of a client telling him during a session that what he is doing isn&#8217;t working? And if they did, what are the chances of him listening?Fortunately, some trainers recognise that the importance of tethering confidence to competence. In 1995&#160;Penny Tompkins and I were asked by Cricket Kemp to be assessors 
on an&#160;NLP Practitioner certification for&#160;NLP North East. We were well 
impressed when we saw that one of Cricket's assessment criteria given to students was: &#34;Balance your level of 
confidence with your level of competence&#34;. I don't know whether Cricket was aware ofn Kahneman&#8217;s research but she certainly understood the dangers 
of over- and under-confidence when compared to demonstrable performance.Unfortunately, it is the unknowingly overconfident professionals that &#8220;sincerely believe they have expertise, act as experts and look like experts&#8221; that are most likely to &#8220;be in the grip of an illusion&#8221;; and not only not know it, but actively deny it, telling plausible stories and quoting believable statistics &#8211; anything but challenge their basic assumption.Of course, I'm not sure about this.

* Don't Blink! The Hazards of Confidence by Daniel Kahneman, New York Times, October 19, 2011.&#160; 
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/dont-blink-the-hazards-of-confidence.html &#8211; The article is adapted from his new book Thinking, Fast and Slow.]]></description>
					  <author>James Lawley</author>
					  <pubDate>Thu, 27 Oct 2011 00:00:00 EDT</pubDate>
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					<item>
					  <title><![CDATA[Pathological altruism]]></title>
					  <link>http://www.cleanlanguage.co.uk/articles/blogs/60/Pathological-altruism.html</link>
					  <description><![CDATA[A recent New York Times article* reviewed a subject that is beginning to gain credibility in the psychological sciences, pathological altruism. Natalie Angier reports how Dr Robert Burton, author of On Being Certain and A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind, saw an oncology colleague's &#34;zeal to heal could border of fanaticism, and how his determination to help his patients at all costs could perversely end up hurting them.&#34; Burton says &#8220;If you&#8217;re supremely confident of your skills, and if you&#8217;re certain that what you&#8217;re doing is for the good of your patients, it can be very difficult to know on your own when you&#8217;re veering into dangerous territory.&#8221;A new book called, unsurprisingly, Pathological Altruism is according to Angier &#34;the first comprehensive treatment of the idea that when ostensibly generous 'how can I help you?' behavior is taken to extremes, misapplied or stridently rhapsodized, it can become unhelpful, unproductive and even destructive.&#34;Interestingly, Barbara Oakley, editor of the book said that when she first started talking about pathological altruism at conferences &#8220;people looked at me as though I&#8217;d just grown goat horns.&#34; Oakley suggests this &#8220;epitomized the idea &#8216;I know how to do the right thing, and when I decide to do the right thing it can never be called pathological'.&#8221; The article is a timely contribution to the debate I have been having with Steve Andreas, Nick Kemp and others about how facilitators know when what they are doing is not working (see Calibrating whether what you are doing is working). Many years ago Shelle Rose Charvet coined her own term for people who are overly keen to help, she called it 'healitis'. Eric Berne's brilliant Games People Play has a description of a game called 'I'm only trying to help'.&#160; In it the would-be Rescuer becomes a Victim when the original Victim turns Persecutor. Charvet and Berne both nailed the tendency (compulsion / pathology) that some of us have to want to help solve other people's problems &#8211; whether they want us to or not. (Yep, I own up to playing this one more than a few times.) On the surface it looks altruistic but underneath is expresses a deep desire to be needed. Pathological altruism may be a description of some facilitators' behaviour I have witnessed, and I think there are other motives too. Perhaps there is something called 'pathological magician-ism' or 'pathological guru-ism' or even 'pathological Napoleon-ism' &#8212; the desire to be seen to have the power to make people change. It is rife within some segments of NLP and hypnosis and is typified by a story about Richard Bandler.** To 'help' a person who had volunteered for a demonstration on a training change, Bandler apparently pulled out a gun and said &#34;I don't 
      have to kill you, I just have to wound you&#34;. (Note, I am not questioning whether the threat had the effect Bandler wanted, I'm suggesting it is an example where the action may have been motivated more by the therapist's needs than the client's.)When asking therapists and coaches to discuss sessions that haven't worked out well for the client I haven't been met with a you've-got-goat-horns look, but I have seen plenty of blank stares and very few of them willing to discuss any of their own cases. Contrast this with the number of clients who have contacted me to describe their personal story of therapy that was more than unhelpful and unproductive, even if it didn't go so far as to be destructive. From this I surmise that there are either a small number of therapists doing a lot of bad therapy or, more likely, a larger number that have the occasional session that goes badly awry (from the client's perspective) which the therapist doesn't notice, chooses to ignore, or deceives them self into thinking it never happened (Reframing is great for this). Since I am certainly not immune from badly misjudging a therapeutic intervention I have reviewed those cases which meet the criteria. I have found two of my ex-clients who have been willing to describe in detail their experience of what happened between us. Using their accounts, and the accounts of clients of other therapists, I have started to put together a list of the conditions which give rise to client's feeling therapy was invasive, an imposition or abusive. While prevention may be the best policy, therapy often requires both parties to take risks, and prevention is not always possible. In these cases early detection and a shift of direction is the next best option. I also asked these clients what they would have liked to have happen, once it was clear that they were not benefiting from the therapist's approach. From this data I hope to be able to make some suggestions about how to 'recover' such a situation.I shall describe my findings in later blogs.

* Natalie Angier, Selflessness Gone Awry, and the Damage It Can Cause, New York Times, 3 Oct 2011. www.nytimes.com/2011/10/04/science/04angier.html

** The Bandler Method by Frank Clancy and Heidi 
      Yorkshire, Mother Jones Magazine, 1989. www.american-buddha.com/bandler.method.htm

]]></description>
					  <author>James Lawley</author>
					  <pubDate>Wed, 19 Oct 2011 00:00:00 EDT</pubDate>
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