I recently listened to a dozen participants on the Clean Change Company Module 5 Advanced program use their Symbolic Modelling and Clean Language skills to each facilitate a 20 minute client session. After each session I gave 10 minutes of feedback / coaching / supervision. Whether that involved a series of questions or a detailed exploration of an sample segment from the session, my aim was to offer each facilitator a signpost to his or her next developmental step.
On reflection I have realised that while some of my feedback was specific to the particular client session, much of it was more general. I therefore collated it, and I present it here in four blogs:
- Questions I frequently ask facilitators.
- Things facilitators tend to do too early – and what to do instead.
- How not to make decisions for the client.
- How to track where the client is perceiving from.
Some of my questions and in particular the two examples in parts 3 and 4 are quite sophisticated and may (hopefully) require thinking about, rather than just reading. But then this was an ‘advanced’ module!
1. Questions I frequently ask facilitators
- What is the client’s current desired outcome?
- What is your evidence that X is related to their desired outcome?
- How can you find out if that is related to the client’s desired outcome or not?
- Where are you heading (with that question)?
- Is there a compelling reason for you to move the client’s attention from where it is currently?
- Where would it be useful for the client’s attention to be right now?
- How could you invite the client to attend to that/there/then?
- If that’s where you want to direct their attention, what question would you ask?
- Where does that question go to (in their landscape)?
- Where else could your question go to?
- Which do you think would be most useful for the client?
- Where did your last question come from?
- How did you know to ask about that?
- What is your desired outcome for that question?
- What are your signals for [any of R.E.P.R.O.C.ess categories]?
- What is your body trying to tell you?
- What is your signal for whether that kind of question gets more or less response than other kinds?
- What’s the central issue for the client?
- Where/when in the landscape does the client have choice and where/when don’t they?
- Where are the boundaries? (The most interesting places are usually the transitions of space, time, form, perceiver, context).
- How can you invite the client to attend to what is problematic for them before asking ‘And what would you like to have happen?’
- Did the client answer your question?
- What did you think was the likelihood of the client being able to answer that question?
- How do you assess the client’s response to your last question?
- So what does that tell you about the question?
- What question will likely bring X to the client’s attention?
- How do you know that is true for this particular client?
- Do you need to choose a direction?
- How could you invite the client to set their own direction?
- How is the nature of the client’s landscape guiding your choices?
- If you take their metaphors literally where is the action?
- Is part of the client’s pattern happening now?
- How can you utilise that to go live?
