Theories and Intentions

PANNING FOR YOUR CLIENT'S GOLD

If you are a miner and you want to find gold, there are two ways to go about it. You can mine it, going deep in the earth to search for veins of it. With luck, you tap a primary vein: "hit the mother lode," as they say. The other option is to pan for it, to sift the gravel carried by a stream through a sieve to find what are usually small nuggets. Chance upon a large nugget or find enough smaller ones, and you can amass a wealth of gold.

As a helping or healing professional, you can assist your client in finding his gold, that valuable material that enriches his life by bringing understanding, new perspectives, and sometimes significant shifts and healing. To find it, you could invite him to go deeply into his past and present issues and his mind/body system, like a miner. Or you can guide him to pan for it: you encourage information from the subconscious to come to the surface, touching upon it lightly and briefly. This allows the individual to find his own answers at his own pace, using his expertise on the intricacies of his own self and situation.

Panning for our clients' gold with Clean processes is about:

• Where we as facilitators direct our clients' attention to look for information

• How many and what questions we ask

• How long we spend asking about any one specific detail

Sometimes it benefits your client not to go deeply but to hold his attention near the surface and see what rises to it. This book will give you the right tools and skills to help that happen.

Before we get to the lean Clean processes themselves, let me introduce you to David Grove, the original thinker and grand experimenter who pushed the boundaries of counseling and coaching into new frontiers.

DAVID GROVE

David Grove (1950–2008), originally from New Zealand, was a counseling psychologist by training. Among his early interests in therapeutic techniques were NLP (neurolinguistic programming), Eriksonian hypnosis, and the works of Virginia Satir and Carl Rodgers. Observing and experimenting with clients from his psychotherapy practice, he went on to develop his own theories as to:

• How people internally or subconsciously structure their experiences

• What needs to happen for people to change

• Innovative counseling and coaching processes to help them do it

Most of the 12 Clean processes we will cover are Grove's. A few were developed by others using his general Clean questioning approach.

To give you a conceptual framework to understand what these processes are intended to achieve, let me briefly present six concepts that informed Grove's work. They do not build in a strictly sequential fashion, and there is some overlap. I invite you to notice the concepts' common ground and consider their reoccurring aspects from different perspectives.

But first ...

THE SCIENCE OF EMERGENCE

Emergence attempts to explain how a collection of individual units become complex, self-directing systems. From evolutionary leaps in nature to the growth of cities, from busy ant colonies to sensitive stock markets, self-organizing systems and patterns emerge from innumerable small interactions of the system's parts in response to simple guiding rules, repetitions, and feedback.

When a system reaches a level of complexity for which the existing management structure is no longer adequate, a transformation occurs. Something new, something that is more that just a sum of its parts, comes into existence. By definition, emergent features are unpredictable; there will be characteristics of the new whole that do not exist among its component parts. Thus you cannot know in advance what the "new" will be. Nor can you predict precisely if or when a shift will occur.

Shifts in organizational patterns sift down through the system. In a process termed downward causation, the original component parts that made up the system are affected by the new structure. They change because the individual's system has a feedback loop: it learns from itself. The parts are no longer exactly as they were before.

To give you an example of something that demonstrates emergence, think of a rioting mob. A collection of individuals gather, certain influences are brought to bear — perhaps a speaker inciting hate or a small but critical mass of those present start to run — and individuals start to behave en masse the way they would not alone, often without making a conscious decision to do so. What emerges is a mob mentality. To use a more positive example, take a group of athletes. Individually, they have skills, strengths, and weaknesses and may play a certain way, etc. But something happens to the individuals when they bond as a team. The coach will know it when it happens, for a team is something more than its individual players. It demonstrates a collective, higher order of functioning.

From the microlevel of quantum physics to the macrolevel of the global economy, there are multitudinous examples of emergence at all levels when conditions give rise to some new structure of organization. Fundamental to this concept is that the reorganizing of the system happens naturally, without needing a structural organizer from outside the system. Over the long term, the system self-regulates.

GUIDING CONCEPT #1: We are self-organizing, self-correcting systems

David Grove applied emergence theory to the individual, regarding him as a system of interrelating parts with numerous bits of information, experiences, and coping strategies accumulated over the years. At any given time the system has an organizing structure, a modus operandi or way of functioning.

When the individual has a problem, a contributing factor may be that his system's organization is not optimized to resolve it. Healthy or helpful functioning is not a result of what the interrelating parts are; it is a matter of organization, of how the parts are interacting, which is why, for example, two soldiers with similar combat experiences may experience very different long-term effects.

According to the principles of emergence, with enough pieces of information relating to the problem, a system with a less-than-optimal way of organizing that information will eventually find a better way. This new structure of organization leads to the clients' having a different way of coping or managing, which can in turn, mean new choices and outcomes are possible.

For some clients, the shift filters through the system's parts rapidly. The old structure may have proved to be so inadequate that it collapses and spontaneously disappears entirely. Other times, the new...