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.
4 January 2023
The case of a client who wanted to be able to ‘light the match’ and ‘decide and do’ at will.
Our answers to ten questions raised by a group of Ukrainian psychologists and psychotherapists in preparation for our first workshop with them.
A review of the key dates in the development of the cleanness rating used in Clean Language Interviewing
The history of the invaluable PRO model with explanatory diagrams.
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.
A leader in the field of NLP comments on the standard opening Clean Language question, and my reply.
I was asked: (a) what a modelling outcome should look like, and (b) what I mean by: Scope, Timescale and Presupposition.
An investigation of a vital aspect of modelling – the perspective adopted by the modeller when modelling an exemplar for an ability or behaviour.
Given Symbolic Modelling is an outcome orientated methodology, what if a client cannot identify a desired outcome?
When a client comes for coaching or therapy with a topic that presents a conundrum, what do you?
Double binds defined and why “Be spontaneous!” and “Damned if I do and damned if I don’t” are not examples of double binds.
‘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.
The opening question in an exemplar modelling interview is often hard to keep clean. I offer some tips on how to do it.
Attending more to the artistic aspects of Clean Space whihc contribute to the overall aim of encouraging conditions for creative emergence.
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.
The second of my four observations from supervision of trainee facilitators
How to model the pattern of facilitator/interviewer decisions from a session transcript.
How likely is it that a client will need to go beyond or outside the Symbolic Modelling Lite process?
What drives most innovation, both of knowledge and technology? Making use of Nassim Nicholas Taleb ideas.
We do not ask clean questions so they are ‘answered’, in the traditional meaning of that word. We ask them to envoke Ent-sprechen:
Some comments on Survival of the Sickest: The surprising connections between disease and longevity by Sharon Moalem.
In Survival of the Sickest, Sharon Moalem examines the role of disease in the survival of populations. In doing so he highlights a number of features of evolution: The system
New reserach show how we learn not to act like someone when they fail.
My thoughts on Dan Gardner’s Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear.
NN Taleb identifies the three ‘villains’ that make companies Black Swan prone. How do they apply to individuals?
“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.
“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.
“The problem with technology is that when it works, it is better; when it does not work, it is far worse.” NN Taleb
Are certain client populations not suited to Symbolic Modelling?
How to work with someone who can develop rich metaphors for their desired outcomes but later dismisses them as only fantasy.
‘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 study which concludes that weight-conscious individuals are likely to believe in “negative calories”. But do they really?
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?
If bodily states infiltrate cognition so often, why are we so seldom aware of this phenomenon?
My thoughts on ‘This Is Your Brain on Metaphors’ by Robert Sapolsky, Professor of Biology, Neurology and Neurosurgery.
If ‘eureka moments’ are very, very rare how do we progress? Rather than leaps it seems we take the next “adjacent possible” step.