Hello Again

If the first meeting of the Practice Group was riding on a high from the original trainings then I think that the second meeting shows the growing importance of David Grove's work and the interest in it. Here are some personal reflections on our second meeting.

The exercise of limiting the number of questions (as practiced on our first meeting) was intriguing, stretching and fun. We decided to investigate this further and we limited our questions to the basic "and what kind of…?" and "anything else…?" and just one more "and what happened just before…?"

We took a positive state and then tracked back through time to explore its origins and its genesis. I worked with Mary who helped me find deeper and more profound metaphors for my state of 'curiosity', a fascinating exercise - talk about state elicitation, this goes far beyond.

We then watched a video of David Grove in action. We decided to watch the video earlier in the day so that we could use what we learned during the rest of the day.

Personally, I found one of David's descriptions to be enlightening, he described how the process of Clean Language is one of "interrogating the metaphor until it confesses its strengths and becomes a resource". Thought provoking stuff!

I have to confess that I can't remember the exact sequence of the events for the rest of the day. The sun came out at lunch time and so lunch took longer, but the conversation seemed more important and certainly more enjoyable.

We certainly covered two more topics, transforming metaphors and mapping metaphors. We had quite a discussion around transforming metaphors, taking them back before T and then evolving them and taking them to T+1. This lead us to the session on mapping (drawing) metaphors.

In pairs we launched into the familiar (dare I think that we're starting to get a little bit proficient with the question forms?) questions. As the metaphor developed the client drew whatever they wanted. I found it fascinating to draw (and to have my client draw) the metaphor as it developed stage by stage.

I made a comment to Morris "how does David Grove keep track of so much information?" Morris said "he trusts his intuition". This reminded me of a quote about Erickson, and so we proposed to start the next meeting with a session about intuition - whatever that may mean for each of us.

See you soon.

Simon