Judy Rees

Connecting people and ideas

Archive for Metaphor

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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Niches and cloudspace

August 19, 2009 at 9:55 am · Filed under Change, Metaphor, Next step, Website, Writing and tagged: , , , ,

The metaphors we use in our language both influence, and are influenced by, the metaphors we use in our thinking. That’s obvious to a Clean Language enthusiast. So I have been mulling over my own metaphors for the process I’m going through at the moment.

My Clean colleague Angela Dunbar runs courses called ‘Finding Your Niche’ to help coaches clarify their market proposition. I admit to hating this metaphor: it seems to me to imply that there are only so many niches (in a wall), that most of them are already filled, and that as the ‘newcomer’ you should settle for a niche in a dusty or damp corner. And that once you’ve found your niche, you are stuck there – niches aren’t flexible things.

The metaphor I used to start this blogging process, of ‘finding my next step’, is fine as far as it goes. But it doesn’t fully capture the essence of this process. There is more to it than trying a step in this direction, then a step in that direction, then another step. I’d like to have things a little more definite.

As I facilitated myself I realised that I was looking for a place where I ‘fitted’. It was as if  all my skills, knowledge etc. made me a certain shape, and I was searching for a Judy-shaped hole in the world’s jigsaw, into which I would effortlessly slot. Again, fine as far as it goes – but with a few unattractive entailments.

Then, doing some tidying up of my fiance’s website (www.armadilloatlarge.com) I came across a ‘category cloud’. Not a list of categories, but a ‘cloud’ of categories. When I added a new category, the others shuffled up, almost imperceptibly, to make space for the new one.

This struck me as useful here in two ways:

  • I could chart my skills, knowledge etc in a ‘cloud’, rather than a list. Doing this gave me a useful new perspective – of which more in another post.
  • I could think of the current process as simply placing myself ‘in the cloud’. What if I don’t need to search for the perfect space for me, but instead can simply to say: “I’m here, this is the kind of stuff I do”? What if the world is actually abundant, and there is enough space (and other resources) for everyone? I like this a lot.

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Ups and downs?

August 14, 2009 at 8:24 am · Filed under Change, Coaching, Metaphor, Next step and tagged: , , , , , , ,

In my blog so far, I’ve been putting a positive spin on the experience of deciding on my next step. And I do believe that overall, the process is positive – that the end result will be something new and different, exciting and useful.

But the truth is that the process isn’t all sweetness and light. There’s a lot of emotion for me in all of this – and in the last few days, that has meant plenty of frustration and tears. I’ve been raging at my computer and its iffy wireless connection, raging at late buses, raging at the weather. But the truth is I’m angry with myself and angry about the situation. I’m frustrated with the time the process takes.

A conversation with a friend helped me to notice that I was thinking of myself as ‘trapped in the house’. From a metaphorical point of view that’s an interesting one because it seems to combine two of the most common metaphorical structures, ‘container’ and ‘journey’, in one. I am in a container, when I want to be moving on my journey.

Of course, the truth about journeys is that they do have stopping-places. Sometimes these are forced pauses, such as hanging about at airports. Sometimes they are attractive places to stay like country pubs, with good company, warm fires and comfortable bedrooms.

I suppose I’m thinking about where I am now as a forced pause, and what I ‘ought’ to be thinking is how wonderful and interesting it is here. There is certainly wonder and interest – my friends, for example, are being absolutely fabulous, and I’m already discovering new opportunities from the conversations here.

How can I keep my attention on that from now on, without ‘rushing off’ in some random direction? What I know I don’t want is to accidentally find myself at Gate 101 again!

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