James’ Blog

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.

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?

When to model a problem

27 situations when I consider facilitating a person or group to self-model a problem:

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.

How we came to Clean Space

Extract from Insights in Space: How to use Clean Space to solve problems, generate ideas and spark creativity by James Lawley and Marian Way.

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?

Nobody duped me

How we use a person’s language to model the way they self-deceive.

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?

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.

Surgery and Metaphor

A blog about the metaphorical roots and uses of the word ‘surgery’.

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.

Pointing attention

Part 2: A new metaphor for the perspective I adopt as a symbolic modeller.

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.

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.

Leading the witness

Implications for Clean Language of Elizabeth Loftus’s classic research.

Self-nudging myself

A report on how I have been doing in one area – running regularly – applying the self-nudge process.

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.

How DO you know?

Modelling criteria: the principles, values or standard by which something may be judged or decided.

Analysing transcripts

How to model the pattern of facilitator/interviewer decisions from a session transcript.

The role of identifying

Experienced Clean facilitators make maximal use of just four fundamental modelling processes.

Metaphor as mistake

How ‘mistakes’ can be an accidental authentic acts of symbolising.

The Other Therapeutic Relationship

As well as ‘the’ therapeutic relationship between client and facilitator, the relationship between the client and themselves is just as important.

Stochastic Tinkering

What drives most innovation, both of knowledge and technology? Making use of Nassim Nicholas Taleb ideas.

Mutual gaze

The neurology activated when sharing a client’s inner landscape from their perspective.

Ent-sprechen says it all

We do not ask clean questions so they are ‘answered’, in the traditional meaning of that word. We ask them to envoke Ent-sprechen:

Robustness and Fragility – Part 3

“After the crisis, people asked me what we should be doing. The logical conclusion is to stay as far away as possible from certain exposures that make you Black Swan prone.” NN Taleb.

Robustness and Fragility – Part 2

“There is an environment that creates Black Swan problems; a man made environment that I call ‘extremistan’ … where the exception plays a very large role”. NN Taleb.

Fear of who I would be

‘A victim’ is a perspective on a situation which can develop into a perspective on life. The question is, do we also have the choice to be other-than-a-victim?

A New Year’s gift

A ‘thought experiment’ to appreciate more or to be more grateful for someone or something in your life.

The dieter’s paradox

A new study which concludes that weight-conscious individuals are likely to believe in “negative calories”. But do they really?

Thinking is simulation

Cognitive scientists believe the brain simulates experience from the past in order to make sense of the world today, how does that influences who we think are?