Using Metaphors with Coaching
As a tool for coaching, the client's metaphors give you an insight
into their unique perception of their situation and their goals. When
the client tells you that they can 'see light at the end of the
tunnel', that is what they are experiencing. There is light for them,
and they are in a tunnel. They will unconsciously 'know' much more
about their situation from this metaphoric viewpoint.
Many therapists and counsellors work intuitively with their clients' metaphors -- without knowing there is a language model and a process for doing so. Clean Language is the basis of the appoach and it can be encorporated into most therapeutic modalities.
How to create a 'clean' company
 I ran a workshop at the 10th International Anti-Corruption Conference held in Prague in October 2001: "How to create a 'clean' company" i.e. one run in such a way that the risk of corruption is prevented. The workshop was designed for the strongly multi-cultural setting, and the metaphors generated were sometimes much richer than those one might meet in a workshop with UK nationals.
This is the second part of a two-part article:
Part 1 explained that underlying every theory of management or
organisation is a metaphor. It described eight commonly used metaphors
and Gareth Morgan's method for analysing and facilitating organisations
to change.
Part 2 shows how Symbolic Modelling uses client-generated metaphors to
facilitate individuals to understand and change themselves and their
organisations.
Healings: 7 case-studies
Seven summary examples of cases where metaphors were involved in producing inner healing using Grovian Metaphor Therapy.
Figurative Language Examined: Metaphors, Symbols and Related Concepts
Metaphors, symbols, metonymy, simile, emblems, images, analogies and icons; what difference does it make for the therapist to recognise these variations?
Here are some definitions and a chance to recover the original definitions and reintroduce the reader to the special variances of figurative language.
- Use of metaphor in coaching, therapy and healing
- Development of Symbolic Modelling and Clean Language
- How and why Symbolic Modelling works
- Unique elements of Symbolic Modelling
- The structure of a session
- Case history
- References
A Moment in Metaphor
The only information we have about the
client at any given moment is symbolic information. What happens when we respond to that
information in the moment using clean language, and
what happens when we do not?
Due to emotional
sensitivities, traumatized individuals will often (unwittingly) choose
metaphors in place of literal language to describe their traumatic
experiences evident in post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD). We can help individuals recover from traumatic events by
learning to communicate with them using metaphorical language.
Healing Embodied Metaphors
This article describes a structured approach to working with
embodied metaphors. The approach is based on Robert Dilts' (1990)
method of combining problem states with resource states to create a
desired state. When working with metaphors the process can be
rewritten as follows: problem metaphor + resource metaphor = desired outcome
metaphor.
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