Nancy Kline, Time to Think: Listening to Ignite the Human Mind

Obvious but important stuff. These technqiues will change the way you are with people.

The good news is that Nancy Kline, Time to Think: Listening to Ignite the Human Mind presents an important concept and its implementation with the clarity that it requires. But it is only a single idea and a single technique, and neither of them are new. Not by a long chalk.

The basic idea is:

Everyone already has the resources they need to deal with almost any situation in which they might find themselves.

The technique has various names, amongst which "future pacing 'as if'" is as good as any.

In essence, the technique asks the subject to imagine a positive alternative to whatever limiting state or belief stops them dealing with a problem they face.

They are then asked what would be possible/what they would do/etc. if the positive statement were true. The question (which is arrived at using David Groves' "clean language" approach) is repeated over and over again until the "Thinker" runs out of ideas.

Far from being new or innovative, this approach can be traced back at least as far as the American psychiatrist/hypnotherapist Dr Milton Erickson and is just one of the many techniques featured in NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), as well as being closely related to the "Magic Question" that features in (Solution Focused) Brief Therapy.

On that basis, whilst appreciating the book's good points, if I had to recommend just one book on this topic, "Time to Think" would certainly not be my first choice, nor the second, nor the third.

(Note: I am not suggesting for one moment that the ideas in this book have been deliberately "lifted" from other sources. Only that this book contains few if any ideas that haven't already appeared elsewhere.)