It’s been described as the ‘elephant in the room’ of Clean Language: metaphors elicited using the Clean Language questions can be used very effectively to influence the person they came from. Margaret Meyer and I will be tackling this subject head-on at the Clean Conference this weekend.
I caused a controversy in the Clean world a couple of years ago when I quoted hypnotherapist Eddie Miller in a newsletter. He said: “I’ve got a good way of using Clean Language as the set-up for a hypnotherapy session. When they come and see me for an initial assessment, I do a Clean Language session with them. Then, when they come back for the second session I take them into a nice deep trance using their own material, their own metaphors and their own language. It seems to be working really well – I’m seeing results really quickly.”
Metaphors have been used for many years by religious leaders, statesmen, salesmen, marketers etc as a fast-track to our wallets. Aristotle urged orators: “The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor.”
Entertainers use metaphor. Teachers use metaphor. Healers use metaphor. They do it because it’s a superbly effective way of getting a message across – our brains seem to be hardwired to respond to metaphor at both conscious and unconscious levels.
All the experts agree that to be effective, the metaphor used by the orator must be relevant to the person hearing it. There’s not much point using a metaphor based on American football with an audience of British women, for example.
As we learn Clean Language, we discover that the metaphors we had thought were shared across a particular culture are in fact unique to each individual. And to anyone accustomed to using metaphors to persuade, it’s soon apparent that the most persuasive metaphors of all are a person’s own metaphors for the specific context under consideration.
So, if you’re selling something face-to-face, one-to-one, why would you do anything other than use the customer’s ideas, words and metaphors? Increasingly, that’s what effective salespeople do – it’s called a “consultative sell” and is used in most high-value sales contexts. It’s the source of the definition of a consultant as “someone who borrows your watch to tell you the time”.
Similarly, why would a therapist use anything other than a client’s own metaphors to help them to change? Staying Clean is often more effective than introducing new content.
There’s a paradox at the centre of the thing: the more we seek to deliberately ‘influence’ someone, the less influential we may become. And the more we reduce our deliberate ‘influence’, the more we actually influence.
This is all ‘within limits’, of course.
And those limits connect back to the function of this blog – career transition. We are not influential when we are sitting at home watching daytime TV: we need to be ‘out there’, putting ourselves forward and inviting connection. Only once we have made a connection of some sort does the ‘influence paradox’ kick in.
Judy Rees 
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