Stories develop and change over time. Come back to the journal at regular intervals to extend your repertoire of stories that you can create. As you listen to speakers who inspire or entertain you, notice that their storylines are quite simple. Feel free to record interesting stories you hear others tell and put your spin on them to make them your own.
As you begin to create your own favourite stories, think about the following aspects:
✓ How are you going to start the story and how will you finish? Some great starts lose their way (and their readers) long before the finishing post.
✓ What happens in the middle to give the dramatic interest – what are the interesting landmarks, battles, dilemmas, or conflicts on the way?
✓ Who are the characters – who’s the hero and what about the supporting cast? How can you make them memorable?
✓ How can you make sure that you build the content around a strong framework?
Discovering more ways to flex your storytelling muscles
Effective storytelling is a fabulous skill that is worth developing – a well-told story captures the audience and remains with the people long after the other details of an event are forgotten. Here are some suggestions for you to hone your technique:
✓ Start with simple stories and then get more adventurous as your skills grow.
✓ Head for the children’s library for all sorts of examples of folk and fairy tales that you can adapt well to any context. One of our clients describes Alice in Wonderland as the best business book ever written.
✓ Remember that when you tell a story the focus is on you. Practise and live with your story so that when you perform, you can command the audience’s attention and take everyone with you. Know the first lines and last lines by heart and simplify the structure to a few key points.
✓ Tell a humorous story with a deadpan serious face and you can make much more impact than when you smirk all the way through. The element of surprise is powerful.
✓ Hold on to that essential ingredient of rapport to keep people listening (head to Chapter 7 for more details on creating rapport).
✓ Arrange the time, place, and setting in which you tell the story. Make sure that people are relaxed and comfortable. Campfire settings and flickering log fires make for perfect storytelling moments – as do seats under shady trees on a lazy summer’s day.
✓ Think of your voice as a well-tuned musical instrument. Notice how your breathing affects your voice and practise a range of sounds and volume.
Enjoy exploiting all your skills to perform to the full range of expression.
✓ See what you can discover from other people’s stories and the way they tell them. You may adapt part of their story to make it your own or notice how they work with their voice, the audience, and the stage.
✓ Speaking from the heart rather than reading from a book or script is more powerful . . . and people allow you to be less than word perfect.
✓ Stimulate your audience’s senses so that they can see vivid pictures, hear the sounds, get in touch with feelings, even smell and taste the delicious tale you’re concocting for them.
✓ Have a great beginning. For examples of memorable openers, head to the later sidebar ‘Hooking people in’.
Adding loops to your story:
And this reminds me of. . .
Have you noticed how, in a novel, a writer may open up a number of loops or storylines that run in parallel throughout the book?
In one of the greatest storybooks of the world, The Thousand and One Nights, a collection of a tales tells how King Shahriyar had an unpleasant behavioural problem. He’d got into the habit of killing a succession of his young virgin brides after their first night of marriage.
At the rate he was demolishing the female population, the source of potential brides began to run dry. Thanks to the cleverness of Shahrazad, the daughter of his senior statesman and the king’s potential next victim, the pattern was broken. Shahrazad is said to have collected a thousand and one books of histories and poetry, fascinated as she was by the lives of kings and past generations.
Hooking people in
Once upon a time. . . . Have you noticed how every great story intrigues the reader with its opening? Think about how you’re going to begin your story to attract attention and retain interest. Here are some introductory lines for starters:
‘Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.’ Charles Dickens, David Copperfield.
‘It might have happened anywhere, at any time, and it could certainly have been a good deal worse.’ Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Sea Change.
‘“Take my camel, dear,” said my Aunt Dot as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.’ Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond.
‘José Palacios, his oldest servant, found him floating naked with his eyes open in the purifying waters of his bath and thought he had drowned.’ Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The General in His Labyrinth.
‘In the beginning, there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.’ Ben Okri, The Famished Road.
‘I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice, not because of his voice or because he was the smallest person I ever knew or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God.’
John Irvine, A Prayer for Owen Meaney.
On her marriage night, she entertained the king with a tale that hung in the air unfinished at dawn. The king’s curiosity got the better of him awaiting the completion of the tale and he spared her life – again and again and again – as the thousand and one tales unfolded. And he broke the habit of killing his new brides!
You too can build story loops into your storytelling skill set. This advanced device can help with the stories you tell, whether in a presentation, training, or social setting.
You begin one story and then before you complete it, you say ‘ah that reminds me of. . .’, or ‘have I told you the one about. . .’. The stories hang in the air, incomplete; people are left uncertain, wondering what happened and how the story’s going to end. This technique enables you to keep the audience’s attention and concentration as they try to create order out of the confusion. You can build story loops naturally as you wander from subject to subject. Be sure to close the stories off eventually, however, or you simply end up annoying your audience.
And finally, sit back, relax, and enjoy another story from the Sufi tradition
There was once a small boy who banged a drum all day and loved every moment of it.
He wouldn’t be quiet, no matter what anyone else said or did. Various people who called themselves Sufis, and other well-wishers, were called in by neighbours and asked to do something about the child.
The first so-called Sufi told the boy that he would, if he continued to make so much noise, perforate his eardrums; this reasoning was too advanced for the child, who was neither a scientist nor a scholar. The second told him that drum-beating was a sacred activity and should be carried out only on special occasions. The
third offered the neighbours plugs for their ears;
the fourth gave the boy a book; the fifth gave the neighbours books that described a method of controlling anger through biofeedback; the sixth gave the boy meditation exercises to make him placid and explained that all reality was imagination. Like all placebos, each of these remedies worked for a short while, but none worked for very long.
Eventually, a real Sufi came along. He looked at the situation, handed the boy a hammer and chisel, and said, ‘I wonder what’s inside the drum?’
Asking the Right Questions
In This Chapter
▶ Making your questions more valuable
▶ Revealing limiting assumptions that stop you being your best
▶ Heading straight to the heart of an issue
▶ Making tough decisions easier
When you know the ‘right’ questions to ask, you get the results you want much faster. Throughout this book, in the true spirit of NLP, we deliberately aim to be non-judgemental, and so you can quite legitimately say that no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ questions exist, only different ones.
So, we need to be more precise. When we talk about asking the ‘right’ questions, we’re looking specifically for incisive questions – those that put your finger precisely on the nub of an issue, those that have a positive effect in the shortest possible time. In this context, the ‘wrong’ questions are those that send you off-course, meandering down dead ends, and gathering interesting but irrelevant information.
In this book, we explain and demonstrate that your language is powerful;
it triggers an emotional response in you, as well as others. Therefore, you can make a difference as you begin to choose your language with increasing awareness. In this chapter, we bring together some of the most useful questions you can ask in different situations to make things happen for yourself and for others. Knowing the right questions to ask may make a difference for you when you want to do the following:
✓ Set your life going in the right direction
✓ Make the best decisions
✓ Help others to take more responsibility ✓ Select and motivate people
✓ Coach others to overcome their limitations
Question-Asking Tips and Strategies
Before rushing on to the critical question you probably want answered –
‘what are the magic questions that do make a real difference?’ – take a quick breather and consider how to ask questions when you’re working with people, which is just as important as what to ask.
In this section, we encourage you to challenge your personal style and assumptions and adapt your own behaviour in order to function at your best, whether you’re the client or in the coaching seat.
Cleaning up your language:
Removing bias
Have you ever wondered how many questions you ask that make assumptions based on what you want, and your personal map of reality, rather than what other people want? Human beings find that not projecting their ideas, needs, wants, and enthusiasms on to others is difficult – especially on to those closest to them. You influence other people all the time; you just can’t help it.
For that reason, most questions aren’t what we call clean – in the sense that they assume something, as in the famous ‘when did you stop beating your wife?’ question.
Even the one small word beating has different meanings for different people.
Did you think of beating in the context of physical violence, or in the competitive sense of winning at a sport or game, or something else entirely?
Therapists go through many years of training in order to work with their clients like a clean mirror, which can simply reflect the issues back to clients so they can deliberate on them. Some mirrors get to shine brighter than others! After all, you know how much you can communicate just through one raised eyebrow or a suppressed giggle. (This is the reason why Freud had his clients lying on a couch while he, as the therapist, sat behind the client’s head!)
If you want to be respectful of other people’s views, make a point of noticing how well you can avoid prejudicing the result of a discussion. Are you telling somebody else what to do based on what you would do yourself?
Beware of making the kinds of generalisations or limiting decisions that we talk about in Chapter 15. Listen to what you say, and if you hear yourself issuing instructions that begin with words such as you ‘must’, ‘should’,
‘ought to’, and ‘can’t’ – the time is right to stop directing the action and imposing your stance on others.
Imagine that you’re a manager coaching or mentoring a colleague or employee at work. In a coaching session, beginning with a clear aim in mind is essential. Therefore, you may quite reasonably ask ‘What do we want to work on today?’
The question is simple, direct, and focuses attention on the shared understanding that you’re working on something. Your words set out the intention for the type of interaction you’re sharing: this isn’t just a friendly chat, we have work to do today. This question is a ‘better’ opening in the context of this section than asking ‘Shall we work out why you haven’t finished the project as fast as Fred?’, because you’re giving the other person some space to think and bring real live challenges to the discussion.
Coaching is about exploring and challenging clients, leading them on to take responsibility and commit to action. Clean questions help you achieve these aims. Any suggestions you include must be phrased in such a way that people think for themselves, instead of being influenced by your own bias.
So, an even cleaner opening question that directs a client to think carefully for themselves may be: ‘What would you like to have happen?’
Curiosity may have killed the cat, as the saying goes, but a different perspective may be that curiosity is the pathway to understanding. You choose which saying suits you best.
Fishing for answers
A therapist was working with a client who told her that she’d had a dream. All the client was able to remember was that it was raining and she’d been to a restaurant. Then she woke up feeling hot and anxious:
Therapist: ‘Oh, so your dream was about fish, was it?’
Client: ‘I don’t know.’
Therapist: ‘But you know that you were in a restaurant?’
Client: ‘That’s right.’
Therapist: ‘And it’s likely fish was on the menu?’
Client: ‘Yes, most restaurants have fish on the menu.’
Therapist: ‘And it was raining, so that could represent water and fish swimming in water?’
Client: ‘Well, yes, you’re right.’
Therapist: ‘Sounds like we’re getting closer.
Perhaps you were feeling like a fish that had been caught and then cooked, even? What’s that all about?’
Of course, this story is fiction and reality is quite different. But the story shows how easily you can find yourself listening to one point and then leading somebody into your subjective interpretation of the facts.
Discovering Clean Language questions
The counselling psychologist David Grove created a body of knowledge known as Clean Language, in which he perfected the art of asking clean questions. This work continues to be developed and now forms part of some NLP practitioner training modules. (You can read more about David Grove’s work and the people who patiently modelled him for a number of years, James Lawley and Penny Tompkins, in Chapter 19.)
Grove created a set of questions that can be used in a variety of applications;
in psychotherapy and coaching, of course, but also in health, business, and education. The questions come in three types and work in different ways:
✓ Current perception questions: Expanding the client’s understanding of a situation.
✓ Moving time questions: Working with the client’s sense of time.
✓ Intention questions: Concentrating on the outcome the client wants.
Making decisions with Clean Language
A student was having great difficulty trying to describe why making decisions was such a problem for her. Penny Tompkins shared this dialogue of working with Clean Language ques- tions with the student:
‘“And, making decisions is like what?” I enquired.
She thought for a moment and replied: “You know, it’s like going to the dentist. I’m in the waiting room and I’m dreading going in.”
After a couple more clean questions, I could tell she was deep inside her metaphor by the amount of time she took to answer and in the way she finally said, “I really need courage.”
“And what kind of courage is that courage?”
was my next question.
“A courage that will help me go through it rather than delay any longer.”
“And when courage will help you go through it;
where is that courage?”
She touched her chest with her right hand and said, “Inside me. In my heart.”
I continued asking Clean Language questions so she could develop her resource metaphor for courage, “a strong energy filling my heart”.
At the end of our time together she said, “If you had told me when we started that a comment like ‘going to the dentist’ could link so directly with my decision making, I wouldn’t have believed it. In fact, you couldn’t have told me, I had to experience it for myself.”’
Thanks to Penny Tompkins and James Lawley for providing this anecdote.
The overall aim of Clean Language is to remove the bias inherent in the questioner’s language by exploring people’s model of the world from their own perspective. Although the questions can look strange out of context, just consider the subtle difference between asking a really clean question such as
‘And is there anything else?’ compared with ‘What are you going to do now?’
The latter question clearly includes the expectation from the questioner that the person must do something.
Starting the Clean Language process
Penny and James suggest that one way to begin the Clean Language
questioning process is to put the client into a resourceful state, by developing a resource metaphor. You can start the process of developing a resource metaphor by asking the following question:
And when you’re at your best, that’s like what?
You can ask this question generally, as it stands above, or you can make it more specific by placing it in a specific context, as we do by adding the following words in square brackets:
And when you’re [working] at your best, that’s like what?
And when you’re [collaborating] at your best, that’s like what?
And when you’re [focusing] at your best, that’s like what?
Or try adding a personal quality:
And when you’re most [patient], that’s like what?
And when you’re most [loving], that’s like what?
And when you’re most [content], that’s like what?
When the person has created a resource metaphor, you can then ask the following clean question that begins the process of developing a desired outcome (goal, objective) metaphor:
And what you would like to have happen, is like what?
When the person has spoken, written, or drawn a metaphor in answer to these questions, you can ask the first five developing questions listed in the next section, so as to bring the metaphor to life. We want the person to be living in their personal metaphorical landscape (to use several metaphors!).
Developing current perception questions
Here are some examples of asking clean questions that increase a person’s understanding of a situation: