James Lawley & Penny Tompkins:- Me and my metaphor.
James and Penny gave us a brief overview of the work they have done "Modelling" David Grove, and the formation and use of "Clean Language".
Then it was going for broke!! They asked us to consider who we really are. On a scale of impotance of 1 - 10 this is at least a 10 !! How do we know who we are? What things can we not, not do? What is in our blood? What did we want to do all the time as a child? What do we find ourselves doing over and over again? We were asked to find 2 or 3 qualities, attributes or behaviours and notice what links them. This took some thinking and James and Penny used clean language to help with the elicitation of our key metaphor & symbol and then it was time for us to draw it. Once we had our own symbolic metaphor we split into pairs to ask "clean questions" and help each other to explore the symbols further. I was supposed to be an extra helper for Penny & James but found someone who needed a partner for the questions so got to play with my metaphor. I am always impressed by how fast the clean questions take me into unknown and interesting territory in my own metaphorical landscape, giving a new understanding and new information about who I am. With a little help I discovered a really useful symbol that changed my perspective on how I operate as a Therapist, and how that relates to me as a person.
2nd half:- we were asked to think of a recurring situation where we would like to respond differently. Again Penny & James helped with examples and with volunteers to give us a flavour of what we were looking for. Listening in on a clean language conversation is rather odd and can be uncomfortable if you try to make sense of the responses from the "client". If however you just go with the words they use and "mind your own business!" then clean questions move people at their own pace in a direction that is useful for them and that will often surprise them too. I had no trouble finding an interaction of this sort where I would prefer to be more resourceful. So when we split again into pairs and used our metaphor from the first half to help us be different in our "situation" I found the symbol was really useful not only for the "situation" in mind but for many others that I had not consciously chosen.

The evening flew by and was of great impact for several people there in making new discoveries or dealing with an oft repeated issue.
Thank you Penny and James for your time and your enthusiasm for the group.
Follow the link for more info on clean language and on trainings coming up from Penny & James and others they have trained.

CLEAN LANGUAGE.

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