Let me take you on a personal journey to explore the possibilities for clean questions and metaphor models and a process that I am coming to think may be a universal language of inquiry – thank you to TEDxmerseyside for giving me the opportunity to share these ideas

Our clever, bright and very lovely colleagues across in the Netherlands are running an introductory Clean Training – excellent for anyone who wants to take their interest in the subject to a deeper level. Suitable for leaders in business and community development as well as for coaches.

You can click on this link if you’re free on March 19 & 20th 201

Training info is at:

http://www.gewoonaandeslag.nl/trainingen/modules-zuiver-communiceren/module-1

Or their newsletter can be found here

ILM certificate qualification.
This is a comprehensive training course with extensive in-the-moment feedback, peer coaching and work-based practice. It is for you if you are an independent coach; work as a coach in an organisation; want to become a coach.

This course will give you the knowledge and skills you need to act as an effective coach and mentor. We teach coaching tools based on the Clean Question of David Grove and other leading-edge methodologies.
You will gain the motivation and support you need to achieve a nationally recognised ILM Level 3 or 5 certificate in Coaching and Mentoring.
You will also receive coaching for your own personal and professional development.

Course duration: 6 days over 4 months
Course dates: April 18, May 2, May 16, Jun 13, Jun 27, Jul 11
Costs: £895+vat – Level 3. £1005+vat – Level 5.

Our sister company Geniuw Within Ltd is live, launched and available for anyone who wants to discover their dyslexic genius within.
Building on the clean questions modelling technology developed by the clean language practise group – GeniusWithin takes these tools and uses them to help dyslexic adults uncover the advantages of their neuro-diversity. You develop models for your areas of weakness AND your areas of strengths and then cross-reference to allow one to enhance the other. I’ve personally benefited hugely from these processes and can’t recommend them highly enough.

I’m struggling with what’s the least people need to know about for the concept to make sense for the TEDx talk

http://www.trainingattention.co.uk/case-studies/business-case-studies/corporate-metaphor

We came along last week and were not very sure of what to expect. The big challenge was to inject new life and inspiration into a team that had been through many ups and downs together. The team were tired after a very busy Christmas period and also feeling dejected after losing the shop. There had also been a great deal of uncertainty in the business for a while.

I needed something to make the team think differently and try and make them look forward instead of looking at all the events that had taken place in the past couple of years.

I have noted some of the individual comments below, including my own. From my perspective, it is just so obvious that the team now have a much better understanding of each other.
We are all taking into consideration our own styles and those of each other and not trying to apologise for being different. It feels as if we now have a clear communication channel and can allow each other our idiosyncrasies in our working methods. It also feels as if we are moving forward with a clear steer instead of going round in circles.

Personally:

I feel that I can delegate tasks to the team with confidence. This confidence comes from understanding the individuals’ way of working. I feel assured that I have the right team with me and that we are all working together towards a common goal. The group is balanced in terms of creative and organisational skills. This has caused problems in the past where the two have been at loggerheads with each other. It now seems that the creative and organisational sides are enhancing each other. I feel calmer and focused as a result. I feel all of this comes from the time spent with the team in the session we had with you.

Rest of the team:

I found Caitlin’s session very interesting. It was really useful to be shown that we don’t all experience things in the same way – I think this will be helpful in gaining a better understanding of how we all work. I was very impressed with how Caitlin was quickly able to identify traits in us, without knowing us, just by how we described things and our hand gestures and body language.

I found the speech you gave really useful, it helped me think about my role in the business and how others think as well. I now feel I understand my colleagues a little better.
I came away feeling more optimistic than i was beforehand and think it was presented really well. You made it feel easy to share with you. It has helped me focus on the future instead of the past.
Sorry if it’s not more constructive but i can’t think of anything that could have been done better.

I really enjoyed working with Caitlin. She helped me think about my role in a different and much clearer way, and created an open and comfortable space for everyone. I think everyone benefited from what she had to say, and perhaps more importantly how she said it.

Bala Croman
www.thechocolatecellar.co.uk
0151 200 2202

If you have been wanting to find out more about Clean Coaching, now is your chance as we have some content-rich, no obligation taster classes taking place at the end of January and the beginning of February. Each class is provides one and a half hour of content rich, relevant material facilitated by Clean expert Angela Dunbar, who explains key concepts, answers your personal questions and demonstrates a live coaching session using Clean techniques.

Conducted using internet-friendly video-conferencing facilities, you can easily engage with this learning from anywhere in the world and enjoy visual as well as audio information. Connecting to the class is straightforward, with or without previous webinar experience and full guidance is provided. Plus, for those that prefer you can join the same class through an ordinary telephone landline, if you prefer.

Clean Language and the Power of Metaphor (Scroll down for alternative dates for Clean Coaching – Getting from A to B with EK)

· Tues 24th Jan, 7.00pm to 8.20pm UK time (19:00 GMT)

or

· Weds 1st Feb, 11.00am to 12.20pm UK time (11:00 GMT)

The class will cover:

How patterns of thinking shape our language
What is a metaphor and how to spot one
Key principles of a Clean approach to Coaching
Examples of Clean Language questions
A demonstration of Clean Language
Question and answer session

In this class you will learn how Clean Language can be used by coaches to enable clients to gain new perspectives and discover creative insights.

Developed by NZ Psychologist David Grove whilst working with victims of trauma, Clean Language provides a safe route into a client’s own internal wisdom contained within their non-conscious mind.

This is achieved through the exploration of the client’s own (often unconscious) use of metaphors to express their situation, self and goal.

Places are limited, please register now by completing by emailing angeladunbar@cleancoaching.com with your preferred date. Or for more information go to http://www.cleancoaching.com/#/free-teleseminars/4534172732

Clean Coaching – Getting from A to B with EK

Weds 25th Jan, 11.00am to 12.20pm UK time (11:00 GMT)

or

Thurs 2nd Feb, 7.00pm to 8.20pm UK time (19:00 GMT)

The class will cover:

What is EK (Emergent Knowledge) and where did it come from?
How networks work and how neurons ‘think’
The coachee’s mental picture as a ‘small world’
How the tangible space around a coachee provides access to different ways of thinking.
A demonstration of Clean coaching with EK

In this session, Angela will briefly cover some of the theory on this technique explaining how it evolved from David Grove’s work in Clean Language and subsequently Space. We’ll look at how networks work in nature and consider our minds as a network. Then we’ll look at how the process of Emergent Knowledge and the principles of repeating certain questions in a certain fashion enable a new network to form, allowing a higher level thinking pattern to emerge.

Then, you will have the opportunity to listen to a live demonstration of one EK technique. You’ll be able to hear for yourself the key stages that a client is likely to move through before reaching a point of transformation, when the old way of thinking no longer applies.

You can ask questions along the way and get a real sense of how and why this technique works in an almost magical way, and witness the benefits it can bring to a client. And for you as a coach a simple, but amazingly effective, technique for helping a client shift perspective.

Places are limited, please register now by completing by emailing angeladunbar@cleancoaching.com with your preferred date. Or for more information go to http://www.cleancoaching.com/#/free-teleseminars/4534172732

The way that clean questions and systemic modelling create such transformation in groups can seem to be like magic. Like magic there are strict rules to the rituals that allow that magic to emerge. There is the spontaneous and the well-thought out. If you falter at one step then the whole network can drop and you need to start again.

As I’ve started writing the Inspiring Capability book which explains the reasons behind the rituals, I’ve come to see all kinds of other disciplines that follow similar principles and strive for similar results such as Agile, Collective Trust and Social Capital.

What is lovely about Systemic Modelling is that it has emerged from a modelling perspective rather than from a theoretical perspective. By taking a naive stance with my work and using nothing but clean questions and NLP modelling to build the main body of the work, I feel I’m better able to serve real groups of people right across our society.

The clean conference 2012 should be a fantastic event. Last year I particularly enjoyed the cognitive linguist perspectives on clean questions and metaphors for time.

I look forward to finding out what other people in our community are up to.

You don’t change the hearts and minds of the nation by making demons of public figures – that just allows everyone to distance themselves from Terry or to create more drama about how PC has no place on the pitch. The very way this is being dealt with and reported is likely to result in no real learning, no acknowledgement of our own prejudices and acts of discrimination and no real shift in the way we do things around here.

One major mistake across the whole Diversity field is to put enforcement over play, curiosity and learning.

3 things are necessary to shift embedded racist thinking:

1. A curiosity, personal inquiry and small group acknowledgement of what actually is stereotyping, prejudice and how it leads to micro and macro discrimination
2. A curiosity, personal inquiry and small group discussion around stereotypes or prejudices that individuals used to have but lost and the processes by which they lost or updated their own prejudice
3. A discussion across the group, in the light of the previous 2 inquiries, into what are a couple of changes that the organisation could make to policy and procedure that would mean that more prejudices were being updated more of the time
That is:

1. We all make hold stereotypes, have prejudices and engage in discrimination, during almost every interaction we have. What are some of yours? What are some you hold about other people?
2. What are some prejudices you used to have, no matter how outrageous, and how did you update them?
3. What would have to be happening in this organisation so that more of you were updating your prejudices more of the time?

Repeat steps 1 – 3 regularly until there is a tipping point in the organisation – usually at around 60% of individuals having gone through this inquiry.

For more information about the kinds of changes that come from this process visit my training website: http://www.trainingattention.co.uk/case-studies/community-case-studies/police-national-search-centre-%E2%80%93-reducing-prejudice-amongst-police-trainers

The processes developed from 2 sources:
1. I had taken the groundbreaking work of Maori/English psychotherapist David Grove and developed it into an application for creating collective trust and inspiring capability for a group to re-learn their own thinking and to develop new ways of doing things around here
2. Patrick Weekes, a respected Police Diversity trainer, and I, spent a long time inquiring into our own prejudices, those we still held, those we’d updated and considered what was it that kept us from allowing our prejudices to cloud our thinking

We took the process and our personal inquiry into other small groups as a ‘modeling’ exercise to find out “What is the difference that makes the difference.” To systems that ARE able to work really effectively within a diverse culture.

Much to our surprise we found that the nature of the inquiry in and of itself was creating the very changes we were hoping to effect!

So if FIFA.com – Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) really want to shift the way we think around here, a series of small, non-judgemental inquiries, consisting of groups of around 15 individuals drawn from diagonal slices across the organisation: management, players, administrators etc. in order to get curious about what is happening, what could happen and what people want to have happen next.