ABSTRACT
One of the greatest contributions that neurolinguistic psychotherapists James Lawley and Penny Tompkins have brought into the field of Clean Language is the concept of ‘modelling’. They worked closely with Grove from the late 1990s and over a five-year period they scrutinised his client work, which at the time was his traditional Clean Language approach. Lawley and Tompkins developed Grove’s often spontaneous and fast-evolving ‘artfulness’ into a more replicable craft that others could learn and apply more easily. They used the NLP process of modelling to do this, distilling his overall style, technique and specific questions into a blueprinted ‘model’ that others could follow. They noticed that David’s use of Clean Language was in itself a form of modelling, through his questions he attempted to build his own working model of his clients’ patterns of thought and behaviour, as revealed through their use of metaphor. This developed into their own process: ‘Symbolic Modelling’ (Lawley and Tompkins, 2000).
