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Why is ‘And what happens just before …?’ so underused?
‘And what happens just before?’ is such a useful question and has been part of Clean Language for 30 years, so how come it’s so rarely used to facilitate clients to make the changes they would like to make?
I go to bed, I just don’t sleep
How to work with ‘everyday’ language, acknowledging but not attending to topics outside the client’s desired outcome.
Pulling time back cleanly
Inviting a client to ‘move time back’ using Clean Language is a fundamental feature of Symbolic Modelling and there are more ways to do it than you might realise.
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Stick or Twist
Do I invite the client to stay with what and where they are currently attending to, or do I invite them to switch to something or somewhere else?
Resources, embodied metaphor and Clean Language
How we facilitate clients to recognise, access, develop and enhance personal resources – qualities that can be drawn on to respond more effectively to difficult circumstances.
Competence criteria Level-1
Criteria for assessing the competence of a Level-1 Clean Facilitator, version 1-8.
Guidance: competency criteria Level-1 Clean Facilitator
General guidance about how to understand the Level-1 Criteria for Certification version 1.8
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The Developing Group
A comprehensive list of all the topics presented between 2001 and 2022.
Coaching a client who felt broken from coaching
Coaching a client who was left in a vulnerable state after his previous coaching session.
Introducing Clean Language
How Clean Language questions embody the principles and spirit of a clean approach.
List of transcripts with Ukrainian therapists
Links to annotated demonstrations of Symbolic Modelling with Clean Language
10 minutes, 10 minutes, 10 minutes more
How exploring and fully acknowledging a client’s current reality can spontaneously lead to insight and change.
Modelling in the symbolic domain
Introducing David Grove, the field of Clean, modelling excellence, Symbolic Modelling, metaphor and a client case.
Context makes Clean clean
What makes a question contextually clean in coaching and therapy? What is the value of these questions? Under what conditions does it makes sense to ask them?
Evaluating Coaching
A full transcript of Clean Language Interviewing (CLI) in action. The annotation focusses on the process of interviewing with Clean Language, rather than the interviewee’s content.
The secret ingredients of AWWYLTHH?
Why, when we ask ‘And what would you like to have happen?’ does it have a different effect? What’s the secret ingredient?
I want the children to be alive
How we honoured and worked with a client’s desire for children who were killed during a rocket attack the night before to still be alive.
Publications using David Grove’s ideas
List of over 120 articles published in academic and professional journals that have incorporated the ideas of David Grove.
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Do we want agency over our inner signals?
The case of a client who wanted to be able to ‘light the match’ and ‘decide and do’ at will.
I am the Owner of my Head!
Working with a highly stable but unwanted symbol that has “the smell of hell” and spiritual aspects such as “soul” and a “previous life”.
When to model a problem
27 situations when I consider facilitating a person or group to self-model a problem:
A Fire that’s Good Enough
Annotated transcript of session with a Ukrainian psychologist
A Double Bind waiting for change
A complex session because the structure of the client’s inner world manifested as a double binding pattern.
I am freedom and I am independence
How to work with a symbol that prevents the client’s desired outcome from happening.
Finding Words in a Spiral Galaxy
How do you tell a chld his father has been killed in war?
From Pain to Calm Clear Sky
Even duing ongoing suffering, a valuable resource metaphor and several perspective-changing realisations emerge.
Starting to Feel the Movement of Life
Third annotated transcript of a demonstration of Symbolic Modelling using Clean Language with Ukrainian psychologists and psychotherapists.
Coping with Un-safety
Demonstration of how to use the Problem-Remedy-Outcome (PRO) model to facilitate a client to identify and develop a rich embodied experience of a desired Outcome.
Ten questions and answers about Symbolic Modelling
Our answers to ten questions raised by a group of Ukrainian psychologists and psychotherapists in preparation for our first workshop with them.
A Journey with Whales
A transcript of facilitating a client who is living through traumatic circumstances to develop a resource metaphor using Clean Language and Symbolic Modelling.
Origin and Development of the Cleanness Rating
A review of the key dates in the development of the cleanness rating used in Clean Language Interviewing
The evolution of the Problem-Remedy-Outcome (PRO) model
The history of the invaluable PRO model with explanatory diagrams.
I want a clean house
A transcript of Penny Tompkins facilitating with Symbolic Modelling using the Problem-Remedy-Outcome model and working ‘live’ with the client’s here-and-now embodied experience.
Becoming more mindful with Clean Language and Symbolic Modelling
What ‘mindfulness’ is, what it isn’t, and how Clean Language and Symbolic Modelling can support people to access, cultivate and sustain it.
It’s a matter of opinion
How do some of our opinions remain constant while others change without us noticing, and sometimes it is such a shock that we are left temporarily disorientated?
Going live
When a client is aware of what they are experiencing ‘in the now’, they get direct, high-quality information for self-modelling as it is happening.
The ‘When … what happens to …?’ question
Why is ‘And when X, what happens to Y?’ such a versatile question?
Steve Andreas on ‘What would you like to have happen?’
A leader in the field of NLP comments on the standard opening Clean Language question, and my reply.
Learning from transcripts
Two ways we use transcripts for professional development: To model experienced facilitators; and to provide supervisory and developmental feedback to self and others
It’s about time
Why it is vital to model the timeframes, structures and evidence of a client’s desires.
Questioning Clean Language questions:
Examining what happens when small variations are introduced into the ‘standard’ Clean Language question set
Extending Clean Space
A series of activities to create entirely new processes based on Clean Space principles.
Saying ‘No’ to Self
How to cleanly facilitate people to self-restrain – when they have the desire to act in a way they would rather not?
It takes two to tango
From a systemic perspective both parties in a relationship (often unwittingly) perpetuate recurring patterns. What needs to happen to initiate and maintain a new behaviour?
Getting to ‘it’
How do experienced symbolic modellers use the information embedded in a client’s first words to guide the direction of a session?
Foreword to ‘The Life and Work of David Grove’
Our endorsement of Carol Wilson’s book honouring David Grove’s contribution to the field of Clean.
Embodying others’ metaphors
Metaphor is a prime vehicle for the acquisition of knowledge, tacit or otherwise. But how do we ‘acquire’ or ‘take on’ or ‘incorporate’ metaphors that are not our own?
Polishing the mirror of reflective practice
A model of effective reflective practice including both physical and perceptual contexts.
Learning from a Master
Reflections on David Grove’s mastery published in Carol Wilson’s The Work and Life of David Grove: Clean Language and Emergent Knowledge
Calibration and Evaluation – 3 years on
As a coach, how aware are you of how your client and an expert would evaluate a coaching session? Does knowing your client and an expert’s opinion affect your own evaluation?
The leader-follower dynamic
Leader, leading, leadership. Follower, following, but not follower-ship; why not?
Choosing a modelling project
I was asked: (a) what a modelling outcome should look like, and (b) what I mean by: Scope, Timescale and Presupposition.
A modeller’s perspective
An investigation of an under-reserached aspect of modelling – the perspective adopted by the modeller when modelling an exemplar for an ability or behaviour.
I don’t know what I want
Given Symbolic Modelling is an outcome orientated methodology, what if a client cannot identify a desired outcome?
Facilitator choices
A conversation with Maarten Aalberse about ‘The Tree of Wisdom’ video in my last blog.
The Tree of Wisdom
When a client comes for coaching or therapy with a topic that presents a conundrum, what do you?
Solution Focus through a Clean lens
Identifying similarities and differences between SFBT and Symbolic Modelling enabled each approach to be enhanced by the other
Macabre Metaphors
“And what would you like to have happen now?” “I want to go back down the hole and pick up the dead bodies there.” Bob’s affect was at once intense and deeply sorrowful. What would you do next?
Pointing to a new modelling perspective
Examines why physical and attentional pointing is a perfect metaphor for Symbolic Modelling. Published in ‘Acuity’.
What do you say before you say goodbye?
How to use the end of a coaching or therapy session to maximise the benefit to the client.
Nobody duped me
How we use a person’s language to model the way they self-deceive.
Deconstructing Feedback
This paper raises awareness of both the complexity of the feedback-giving process and the range of information that can be included in feedback.
Difficulties Modelling David Grove
Answers to: 1. How long after you started modelling David Grove did you start training others?; 2. What were the main difficulties modelling Grove?
He does not think the coaching he received was of any use
A blog that questions whether “Client feedback is … one of the least reliable measures we have.”
Applying cross-domain thinking
Domain dependence and it’s inverse, cross-domain thinking, occur in many different guises. We have collected ideas from a range of contexts.
What are Double Binds?
Double binds defined and why “Be spontaneous!” and “Damned if I do and damned if I don’t” are not examples of double binds.
What constitutes Clean Language?
‘Clean Language’ has been used in many ways since David Grove coined the term in the early 1980s. This is my attempt at defining and contextualising it.
Maximising Serendipity for Personal Change
First published in the SerenA newsletter whose aim is “to transform research processes by proactively creating surprising connection opportunities.”
Foreward to ‘Clean Approaches for Coaches’
Our endorsement of Marian Way’s book about how to create the conditions for change using Clean Language and Symbolic Modelling.
What’s the ‘Co-’ in Cooperating, Collaborating and Co-Inspiring?
What does it mean to collaborate, cooperate or co-inspire? What does a clean approach add to the mix? And how do we do them?
REPROCess: Modelling attention
A new, simple, way to model where people are placing their attention. Published in ‘Acuity’.
Surgery and Metaphor
A blog about the metaphorical roots and uses of the word ‘surgery’.
Between a rock and a hard place
Defines three kinds of problem, and describes how to work with client problems involving ‘binding patterns’.
What’s in a Name?
All words are labels for experience, and every label slants our thinking in some way, we examine the effect of labelling on experience.
Modelling Shared Reality
Introducing Modelling Shared Reality, a new qualitative research methodology which is rooted in Clean Language and Symbolic Modelling. Published in Kwalon.
How Clean is How Far?
Why we now consider ‘How far?’ to be a mildly leading question and have removed it from the summary of ‘specialised’ questions
More good DEEDS
My second blog about DEEDS delves deeper into the ideas which pose an alternative to the standard computational theory of mind.
DEEDS: Putting minds back together
A cognitive science in which brain, body and world intertwine “beyond-the-skin”.
Inhibition
Nine functions of inhibition, how it affects learning and the body, and 12 activities exploring the value and problems of inhibition.
How to start a modelling project
The opening question in an exemplar modelling interview is often hard to keep clean. I offer some tips on how to do it.
Accessing transpersonal states
I was asked: I wonder if clean could help in getting conceptually the experience of no-self?
Pointing attention
Part 2: A new metaphor for the perspective I adopt as a symbolic modeller.
Making complex decisions rapidly
How do humans sum up a complex situation and rapidly decide what action to take?
Setting up Clean Space
Attending more to the artistic aspects of Clean Space whihc contribute to the overall aim of encouraging conditions for creative emergence.
The point of pointing
A new metaphor for the perspective I take when symbolic modelling:
What do you know about Symbolic Modelling?
15 questions to assess the degree to which.participants have acquired our model of facilitating.
The chaotic nature of the reorganisation process
Does emergent change always create a desired rather than a less desired result?
What is self-modelling?
A process whereby a person constructs a model of the way their system operates and in so doing provides feedback to the system from which it can learn.
Anchoring symbols in time/space
Investigating the ‘anchor’ metaphor in relation to a client’s inner landscape.
Imagine your life in full color
How Clean Language helped Debbie Happy Cohen write her book.
Leading the witness
Implications for Clean Language of Elizabeth Loftus’s classic research.
A Clean framework for change
A fully-formed stand-alone clean coaching process we used up to 2010.
The Clean Community
The clean community is a ‘community of practice’. Such communities are created by people gravitating to like-minded people who have a passion for something they do, the desire to learn how to do it better, and the motivation to interact regularly.
Tracking where clients perceive from
An important question-to-self when modelling symbolically is: Where is the client perceiving from?. Tracking changes to the ‘point of perception’ is a sophisticated skill.
Not making decisions for the client
The third of four parts of my general feedback to advanced facilitators.
What facilitators tend to do too early
The second of four parts of my general feedback to advanced facilitators.