Mining Your Client's Metaphors: A How-To Workbook on Clean Language and Symbolic Modeling, Basics Part Ii: Facilitating Change

By Gina Campbell

If you've completed Campbell's first workbook of this pair, you know without a doubt that personal metaphors matter. Resourceful ones can empower and sustain clients. Problematic ones can prevent clients from making the internal shifts they desire. Is there more you can do to help your clients when they want to change such metaphors? Absolutely!

As a helping or healing professional, you will find this second workbook a welcome continuation of what you learned of David Grove's Clean Language and James Lawley and Penny Tompkins' Symbolic Modeling in Basics Part One: Facilitating Clarity. Step-by-step, Basics Part Two: Facilitating Change teaches you how to help your clients transform the mind/body metaphors that color their perceptions and guide their life choices to support healthier and happier living.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Mar 29, 2013
• ISBN: 9781452571065

Gina Campbell

Gina Campbell, MEd Gina Campbell has led trainings in Clean Language and Symbolic Modeling since 2005. Drawing upon her decades of experience as an educator, developmental counselor, poetry therapy facilitator, and a certified Clean Language practitioner, she expertly guides her trainees to master and apply these profoundly powerful Clean processes. She resides in Baltimore, Maryland, where she trains helping and healing professionals and conducts private sessions for individuals engaged in personal development. [e-mail] 

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Copyright © 2013 Gina Campbell.

Published by Mining Your Metaphors, LLC

Book layout design and typesetting by M. L. Parks

Cover design by Kendall Ludwig

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ISBN: 978-1-4525-7105-8 (sc)

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Balboa Press rev. date: 11/15/2021

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Also by Gina Campbell

Mining Your Client’s Metaphors: A How-To Workbook on Clean Language and Symbolic Modeling, Basics Part One: Facilitating Clarity

Panning for Your Client’s Gold: 12 Lean Clean Language Processes

Hope in a Corner of My Heart: a healing journey through the dream-logical world of inner metaphors

Acknowledgments

As with the first workbook of this pair, I greatly appreciate the careful review and helpful suggestions offered by James Lawley and Penny Tompkins, the developers of Symbolic Modeling. Thanks also to Eleanor Haspel-Portner, Chaddie Hughes, Jill Rowan, Rosemary Scavullo-Flickinger, Johannes Walker, Zaba Walker, and Brett Welch for their feedback and contributions. I thank my trainees and my clients, who have provided inspiration and taught me well. Finally, I want to acknowledge the late David Grove, whose work with metaphors and Clean Language was the start of this all.

Welcome Back

So, you are ready for Basics Part Two: Facilitating Change? Terrific!

I am anticipating that some readers of this book will have just finished Basics Part One: Facilitating Clarity and be moving right on to Basics Part Two and the next phase of learning how to facilitate using David Grove’s ground-breaking technique Clean Language (CL) and James Lawley and Penny Tompkins’ Symbolic Modeling (SyM). If so, get ready for new questions and strategies that will widen and deepen what you can do with metaphors.

Others of you will be coming to Basics Part Two after a break, during which time I hope you have been putting the skills you learned in Basics Part One into practice. But if it has been awhile since you worked with the Clean Language questions, you may feel a bit rusty. I encourage you to go back and at least reread the text portions of Basics Part One and practice getting comfortable again with the basic questions. Adding new information, concepts, and Clean Language questions on top of a shaky foundation is not likely to be helpful. On the other hand, some people like to have a concept of the whole process before they dig in to really master the skills. If this is how you learn best, then on we go.

As with any other rich and complex skill, your mastery of Clean Language will come with practice, reflection, and more practice. The more you do it, the more some skills will become automatic, and the more attention you will have to notice what else there is to notice. The more you do it, the more experience you will have to guide your strategy for the next time, as you learn from what worked best.

If you are using this text for a self-study course, I encourage you to find a practice buddy if at all possible. Not only is it far better to actually work with a client, but the opportunity to be a client yourself will hugely inform your own facilitating. And, as you delve more deeply into the strategy of Symbolic Modeling, having a buddy to discuss what you notice, which questions you consider, and which you ultimately choose will greatly enrich your learning. And, it’s great fun!

Give yourself permission to be a novice, to be a bit uncomfortable at first, to make mistakes, to take chances and see what happens. Perfection is not required for wondrous things to happen.

Gina Campbell

Contents

About This Book

Section One

Overview: The Five Stages of the Symbolic Modeling Process

Metaphors Revisited

CHART: Sample Symbolic Modeling Session Progression

More About Metaphors

Before Our Session...

Words within Words

More About Clean Language Syntax

CHART: 9 Basic Clean Language Questions

More About Time

Section One Summary

Section Two

Reviewing REPROCess

More About Resources

More About Source

More About P/R/O

Metaphors’ Desired Outcomes Revisited

More About Explanations

CHART: Developing A Desired Outcome Landscape

Section Two Summary

Section Three

Specialized Attribute Questions

Specialized Location Questions

Specialized Time Question

Specialized Relationship Questions

Specialized Review Questions

Other Specialized Questions

CHART: Specialized Questions

Creating Your Own Specialized Questions

Section Three Summary

Section Four

Readiness for Change

Metaphors Facilitate Change

Clean Language Questions #10 and #11: Conditions for Change

Note-taking

Confirmation

Strategizing

Getting a Running Start

The Boat Trip Transcript

CHART: Conditions for Change

Section Four Summary

Section Five

Maturing the Landscape

Clean Language Question #12: Maturing Change

Maturing and New Metaphors

A Changed Self

Maturing with a metaphor map

Specialized Maturing Questions

CHART: Facilitating Change

Section Five Summary

Section Six

Scope of Practice

Differences Between Counseling and Coaching

When You Are In Too Deep

A Coaching Session

A Counseling Session

Symbolic Modeling at a Distance

Mixing CL and SyM with Other Approaches

Section Six Summary

Commencement

What’s Next?

Resources

References and Footnotes

Answers to Activities

Glossary of Terms

About This Book

If you haven’t already, take a moment to look over the Bird’s Eye View and the Contents to get a feel for what we will cover in Basics Part Two. You may be wondering...

How will what I learn here help me to help my client change?

A client rarely seeks help from a professional because they have a problem; they seek help because they have tried again and again to solve a problem, and their efforts have not been successful. Sometimes just getting really clear about what they want and what resources they have will be all your client needs. Other times, that is not enough. It is about those times that this workbook offers you basic Clean Language Questions (CLQs) and Symbolic Modeling (SyM) strategies to help you help your client. With the skills you will learn, you will be able to offer your client mind/body experiences to access their inner wisdom about:

• Who they are

• What they want or need to change

• How that change needs to unfold for the shifts to be comprehensive and lasting

When it comes to change, enabling your client to experientially engage with their subconscious wisdom through their metaphors can be the key to transformation, whether it is a physical, mental, emotional, behavioral, relationship, organizational, or any other sort of desired change. If that sounds very general, it is because CL and SyM are very flexible tools, which can be used to address most any issue that involves your client’s conscious and subconscious minds. You play a vital role as witness and tour guide to your client’s profoundly personal and unique inner exploration. The detailed picture that emerges will reveal:

• Inner strengths and resources

• Core beliefs and patterns

• Relevant conflicts and blocks

• Misconceptions and maladaptive solutions

With access to these, you can help your client fashion for themselves a more helpful, healthy way of being in the world while:

• Limiting the extent to which your personal issues, perspectives, biases, and assumptions influence your client’s determination of what they want and need

• Fostering your client’s sense of being truly seen, heard, and respected

• Enhancing your client’s self-awareness and self-development skills

• Working at your client’s pace and readiness for change

• Strengthening your connection with your client

CO-CREATING THIS TEXT

You will find numerous places in this workbook where you will be invited to add your answers and record your observations and questions. You can track your progress and mindfully identify which skills you want to hone. I encourage you to take the time to slow down and fill in all the spaces provided for you, taking an active role in creating a text that is tailor-made for you.

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Section One

"A large part of self-understanding is the search for

appropriate personal metaphors that make sense of our lives."

-George Lakoff and Mark Johnson

Overview: The Five Stages of the Symbolic Modeling Process

In the first workbook Basics Part One, you learned how to structure a session from start to finish, from situating to wrapping up. You learned some specific facilitating techniques and equipped yourself with 9 Clean Language Questions and the P/R/O modeling strategy. You attuned your ears to metaphors and resources, and you learned to be wary of your client’s explanations. You practiced how to stay clean, guiding your client’s process while staying out of their content. And you learned to question your assumptions. You are well-equipped for the next leg of our journey into your client’s inner world!

The Symbolic Modeling Framework for Change process, as conceived by James Lawley and Penny Tompkins, consists of the five stages described below. You will recognize Stages 1-3 from Basics Part One. Mastering Stages 4 and 5 will enable you to meet the challenges for which your practice with clients has likely primed you. Follow along with this next example that illustrates the basic conceptual structure of a Symbolic Modeling session. (Note: I’ve limited my repetitions of my client’s words in places to keep this concise.)

1. Entering the Symbolic Domain: As their attention shifts from everyday experiences to their symbolic world, clients naturally ease into a mindful, inner-focused trance state where their conscious and subconscious minds communicate through metaphor.

Example:

2. Developing the Symbols: By identifying the metaphors’ attributes and locations in their metaphoric landscape, your client learns more about them and their inner world.

Example continued:

3. Creating a Model: As information about their multiple metaphors unfolds, your client learns more about how they interact with one another. New symbols, problems, and desired outcomes may also emerge, multiplying the interactive elements in your client’s metaphor landscape.

Example continued:

4. Getting Ready for Change: If your client’s desired change does not occur spontaneously as they uncover new information in Stage 3, move on to Stage 4. Your client discovers what conditions need to be met in order for their desired changes to occur.

Example continued:

5. Maturing a Changed Landscape: When a change occurs, your client (1) learns more about the change, (2) revisits the previously existing metaphor landscape to see what else may have shifted, and (3) moves forward in time as their landscape evolves.

Example continued: