Starting some more Clean Language training today with the Clean Change Company's group learning remote course, module 1. So what IS 'clean'? Well, I like this clear explanation, taken from the course handbook....
'The ‘Clean’ of Clean Language is a metaphor. It represents the intention of the facilitator to minimise the impact of their own metaphors and presuppositions on the client’s ‘stuff’.
Clean Language questions are asked about the client’s own words or non-verbal signals, and nothing else. The facilitator asks only such questions as are justified by the logic of what the client has described – their ‘metaphor landscape’.
When what the facilitator does and says is as close as possible to the structure, content and style of the client’s symbolic world, the client is free to explore their metaphor landscape without interruption or interference from outside sources. This frees the client to explore further, faster and deeper than normal conversation makes possible.
As a person becomes aware of the world they are creating for themselves, that awareness feeds back into their system. As they learn, this prompts the landscape to evolve, re-organising itself naturally around the new information.'
- p.10, Module 1 Course Notes, Wendy Sullivan, Margaret Meyer and Rupert Meese, Published by the Clean Change Company.
The course will combine group skype sessions, paired practice calls, 1:1 phone tutorials, individual practice and reading etc, and has a moodle online course hub that seems pretty lear and useful, too. So far, so good, and I am very pleased to have this opportunity to develop practice with such a supportive and experienced team; looking forward to meeting the other newbies thisevening...
Cognitive science is finding that we are hardwired to think in metaphor (as speakers at the conference outlined). Thus metaphor and real life experience are isomorphic. Nice definition on wikipedia:
ReplyDelete'Informally, an isomorphism is a kind of mapping between objects, which shows a relationship between two properties or operations. If there exists an isomorphism between two structures, we call the two structures isomorphic. In a certain sense, isomorphic structures are structurally identical, if you choose to ignore finer-grained differences that may arise from how they are defined.'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isomorphism, accessed 8/11/10