Penny Tompkins – cleanlanguage.com

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.

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.

The Developing Group

A comprehensive list of all the topics presented between 2001 and 2022.

Introducing Clean Language

How Clean Language questions embody the principles and spirit of a clean approach.

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.

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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?

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

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?

Solution Focus through a Clean lens

Identifying similarities and differences between SFBT and Symbolic Modelling enabled each approach to be enhanced by the other

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.

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.

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.

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’.

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.

Inhibition

Nine functions of inhibition, how it affects learning and the body, and 12 activities exploring the value and problems of inhibition.

A Clean framework for change

A fully-formed stand-alone clean coaching process we used up to 2010.

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.

Clean evaluative interviewing

Using Symbolic Modelling and Clean Language as a research method to gather information through interviews about how coachees evaluate being coached.

Symbolic Modelling Lite

Introduces the ‘lite’ version of our general method. Published as Chapter 4 of Innovations in NLP.

Self-nudge

Part 1 reviews theories about how we make (or take) decisions. Part 2 is a practical process for how to ‘nudge’ ourselves to beneficial behaviours.

When science and spirituality have a beer

Video of a Symbolic Modelling session in English & French, and annotated transcript with seven Indicators of a binding patten.

Calibrating whether what you are doing is working or not

How facilitators calibrate when “it’s working” and when it’s not. Definitions, considerations, assumptions and an annotated transcript.

Metaphor, the body, and healing

Working with physical symptoms. the body as metaphor and a case study. Published in The CAPA Quarterly, 2011.

What did Improv ever do for us?

The cross-overs between improvisational theatre and facilitating a Symbolic Modelling session.

‘If only God would give us a sign’

The vital role of clients’ meta-comments (verbal or nonverbal expressions refering to what has just been experienced) in Symbolic Modelling. Published in ‘Acuity’.

Modelling the written word

How to model text with a clean and metaphor perspective.

Huh? – Shifting frames

We examine what happens when someone is asked a question within one frame and their answer appears to come from a different frame.

Modelling Robert Dilts modelling

This report describes both the product of our modelling ‘Selecting what is essential’ and the process by which we arrived at our model.

Appendix to Modelling Robert Dilts modelling

Source material for the modelling project.

Modelling how to act from what you know to be true

How to act from what you know to be true when you don’t know how to, or you’re frightened of the consequences

Cognitive dissonance and creative tension

What is cognitive dissonance? How does it relate to self-deception, double binds and the creative process?

Clean Space revisited

With the benefit of hindsight and seven years of experience and experimenting, we thought it was time to revisit our first 2003 model.

Embodied Schema

A window into the organisation of a person’s subjective world and a doorway into precise Clean Language.

Accepting Acceptance

What difference does it makes to the potential for change when people truly accept their current reality from an authentic, deep and cellular state of being?

Attending to Salience

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.

Vectoring and systemic outcome orientation

How excellent facilitators and therapists know how to navigate elegantly through a client’s information.

Maximising Serendipity: A systemic approach to change

A six-stage model of how to benefit by utilising unexpexted, unpredictable and random events.

Coaching in the moment

A model of Vivian Gladwell’s method of in-the-moment directing of trainee improvisational clowns, adapted for developing Symbolic Modelling skills.

Iteration, Iteration, Iteration

Explains why this special kind of nonlinear process is so important in therapy and coaching – and life.

Proximity and Meaning

The significance of adjacency, next to-ness, how to recognise it and how to work with it for ourselves and our clients.

Modelling Conflict

How to think about and model the systemic nature of this kind of relationship

Coaching with Metaphor

Together metaphor and Clean Language are ideal for working with out-of-the-ordinary problems and high-level goals. Published in Cutting Edge Coaching Techniques Handbook

Using Symbolic Modelling as a research and interview tool

Reviews how Clean Language has been used in research and interviewing and details the Minewater Project as an example

How to do a modelling project

A summary of our 25 years experience conducting full-scale modelling projects.

Modelling: Top-down and Bottom-up

Examines two types of modelling and lists some principles for applying bottom-up modelling

Thinking Networks II

Part 1 of how to think about the emergence of networks,, what they look like, and how they evolve.

What is Therapeutic Modelling?

The similarities and differences between therapeutic and product modelling. Published in ReSource 8

Becausation

Using Aristotle’s four causes and a Cognitive Linguist metaphorical perspective to model causation.

Paying attention to what they’re paying attention

How we came up with our ‘Perceiver, Perceived, Relationship between, in a Context’ model – and its multiple uses.

Coaching for P.R.O.’s

How to recognise and respond with Clean Language to a client’s Problem, Remedy or a desired Outcome. Published in ‘Coach the Coach’.

The Ethics of Change Work

John Grinder discusses what’s ethical in NLP and what’s not. We add our comments from a ‘clean’ perspective.

When the Remedy is the Problem

How attempts at solving a problem can perpetuate or exacerbate that problem or create another problem.

Learning from relationship

Applying Gottman’s research plus five exercises.

Tangled spaghetti in my head

Making use of metaphor in counselling and psychotherapy. Published in ‘Therapy Today’.

Clean Conversations

How to use Clean Language in everyday conversations.

Feedback Loops

10 principles to support you to think systemically rather then linearly – an advanced mindset for working cleanly with human self-organising systems.

Preferences

What and how we like: Distinguishing between different kinds of perceived preferences.

When and How to Use ‘when’ and ‘as’

Investigating how ‘when’ or ‘as’ (and other words) can be used to enhance the effectiveness of questions by framing the context

Body Awareness

Exploring the mind in the body and the body in the mind with Julie Driver

The Jewel of Choice

Annotated transcript of two sessions using Symbolic Modelling
and the client’s view of changes that occurred. Published in ‘NLP News’

Clean Language Revisited

How our model of David Grove’s Clean Language has undergone revisions since our first article in 1997.

Thinking Networks I

Part 1 of how to think about networks: their emergence, what they look like, and how they evolve.

Learning to act from what you know to be true

Guidance on what you can do once you acknowledge you have been self-deceiving

BIG FISH in a small pond

Scaling – How people use metaphor to assess the relative size or extent of an experience – how to model it, and what happens when you change the scale of things to come.