Description

‘CONVERSATIONAL CHANGE’ is a seminar subject dear to the heart of many who wish to affect or direct others. What do we meanby ‘conversational’? What kind of ‘change’? Is it possible for anyone to use the same kind of transformational language as a therapist orcounsellor and get away with it? Which of these questions are open and which are not?Most NLP trainings teach the ‘meta-model’ of language as a tool for the direct elicitation of specific, high quality information, and theunspecific ‘Milton-model’ to communicate indirectly with a person’s unconscious resources. These are sophisticated language patternsfor use in structured, largely therapeutic, settings.Some trainings also teach a conversational reframing model called ‘Sleight-of-Mouth’. Robert Dilts developed his dialectical patterns ofguided conversation in 1987 by applying Bandler and Grinder’s meta-model to the dialogues of Plato and Socrates. Many students findSleight-of-Mouth hugely complex. They promise themselves they’ll get round to it again after their training, and never quite do.Meanwhile the world is changing. The ancient Greeks may have expected their moral philosophers to have the right answers, butmodern teachers are increasingly required to come up with the right questions. I believe the time has come to up-date our dialecticalapproach to conversational change and to work from a less directive, more reflective, model.’Reflective questioning’ is a use of language that respects one of our fundamental freedoms – the right to make our own mistakes. Itneither interprets nor seeks to replace a person’s meaning or belief, but rather aims to highlight it. David Grove’s ‘clean language’, asused in metaphor therapy, is an excellent example (ref. 2). But what we might call the ‘metaphor-model’ of language, with its ninebasic questions delivered in a particular rhythm and with a certain syntax, is a highly structured therapeutic technique. Conversationalit isn’t.My aim here is to present a colloquial variant on the metaphor model which organises the principles behind several counselling modelsinto a simple framework which can be used by anyone anywhere. If NLP is a philosophy of experiential constructivism, the’Mirror-model’ deconstructs experience and reflects it in such a way that it returns ready-reconstructed. Change is inevitable. Read on.All shall be revealed.