Judy Rees

Connecting people and ideas

Archive for Metaphor

Just one – short – thing

October 7, 2009 at 12:53 pm · Filed under Communication, Interviewing, Listening, Metaphor, Next step and tagged: , , ,

Call it an elevator pitch, a strapline, a meme or a tweet, the marketing men are all agreed: the business offering must be reduced to a single short sentence. That has been a huge challenge for me. I’m a generalist, and the stuff I do is very generally applicable. I hate the very idea of “finding my niche”.

But in the last day or so, I’ve had a realisation.

Focussing on just one thing right now doesn’t mean I’ll be focussing on that one thing forever.

I was listening to Seth Godin talk about the process of creating ten bestsellers. And I realised that at the point where he wrote and published Permission Marketing, he was already a very successful, well read and intelligent man. He could have written knowledgeably about a dozen or more subjects. But he chose one – the one he felt most passionately about, perhaps, or the one he thought would make the most difference, or the one that would make him famous. He chose just one idea.

The idea he chose could be passed on “virally” in a few sentences: the essence of the idea is in the book title.

I thought I had already cracked this with X-Ray Listening. “Better insights – better projects – better products.” Or “we help IT professionals to elicit customers’ real requirements – the stuff that they don’t know that they want or don’t know how to ask for.” But even that’s too complex for a tweet or a book title.

The killer meme for my business must be easy to transmit, and for that it needs to be:

  • short
  • easy to remember
  • compelling.

“Need to know what’s beyond ‘I don’t know’? Learn X-Ray Listening.”

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Clean and the language of influence

September 8, 2009 at 10:16 am · Filed under Change, Communication, Connections, Metaphor, Next step and tagged: , , , , , , , ,

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.

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The ‘goal-setting’ metaphor

September 2, 2009 at 2:45 pm · Filed under Coaching, Metaphor, Next step and tagged: , ,

Almost all transformation processes begin with some kind of goal-setting. But the fact is that I don’t like goal-setting! While I agree that having goals is a good thing in principle, I can’t easily answer the common NLP starter question, “So, what do you want?”

I’m still enjoying the effects of my new ‘gratitude game’ (see my last post here), which is helping me to have a sense of what my ideal life will be like. I know the kind of feelings I’ll be feeling, and from that I can infer lots of other things, such as who will be there, the kind of home I’ll have and the kind of work I’ll be doing. Honestly, it’s been a bit of a breakthrough for me.

And it’s got me thinking about the notion of ‘goal-setting’. What kind of goal have I been aiming to set, and has it actually been a helpful metaphor?

I have been thinking about a goal as a target – more or less like an archery target, with coloured rings.

I’ve only tried archery once. It was on my NLP Practitioner course, and the point supposedly being made was the value of immediate feedback – being able to see where your arrows landed made it easier to aim the next one. However, the target seemed so far away that I couldn’t see where my arrows were landing, and I didn’t seem to have the strength or dexterity to adjust where they would land anyway. So what I learned was that I was rubbish at archery, and I felt very embarrassed about it.

If I try to set goals which are like archery targets, then they feel daunting – unpleasant tests of skills I haven’t got. They seem very distant: there seems no chance of me hitting the bullseye, and lots of ways of ‘missing’. Even if I’m lucky and hit one of the rings, there’s every chance I’ll feel bad about not hitting the centre. No wonder my system is reluctant to set targets like these.

A metaphor like ‘jumpers for goalposts’ might be more helpful for me. The great thing about jumpers (for goalposts) is their flexibility: you can set them as far apart as you like, to make the goal so huge that even I can get the ball through. There’s no rule that says you have to shoot from miles away – it’s a good thing to get close first. The goal is still Specific and Measurable, but now it’s Achievable, too.

Of course, this kind of goal wouldn’t suit someone with a serious competitive streak. But it seems to ahve a good chance of working for me.

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