This is a key for therapists and for friends guiding friends: Try to get to a more sophisticated story about your client’s or friend’s life. Aim for less obvious blame and for more compassion toward parents and other major figures. Learn that life is always more complicated and subtle than you have usually imagined it. Revise your stories, make them more mature and precise, and clear them of strong childish emotions.

When you’re talking to a child, you are an adult. There is a natural distance between you. Remember that speaking to children is an art and should not ever be a spontaneous, unconscious act. If you forget they are children, you will likely treat them from your unconsciousness. Listen to an adult trying to correct a misbehaving child. What is that tone? It is not normal or human. It is a complex rooted in the split archetype of parent and child. When you are with children, you may have to make a conscious decision not to speak from a parent complex.

If you wish to grasp a particular child’s soul for care, notice what he or she fears or finds joy in. Individual sensitivity is a key sign of soul. Look at the people she befriends, since friendship is a key element in a soulful life. What does he do when he plays? Play is like dreaming, a world within a world that the soul likes to inhabit or visit. Surely, you will see signs of a future career or lifestyle in a young child. You can nurture that seedling without pressure or demand. The soul does not respond well to force. It wants room to expand and blossom, and it needs understanding and support.

So here in one sentence (albeit dense) is what this life-restoring kind of question seems to do:

An incisive question, through a playful hypothetical construct, replaces an untrue limiting assumption with a true liberating one, and connects it to a desired outcome.

And here is why (even denser):

The key block to a desired outcome is an untrue limiting assumption lived as true that can be removed only by replacing it with a true liberating assumption inserted into a playful (because hypothetical) question using the subjunctive tense.

E.g. if you knew x, how would you do y? The mind can play inside that construct. And in playing, it embeds the new true assumption and decides on actions and/or changes its feelings. Everything. The brain likes to play, not obey. And the incisive question construct lets it do that. Playful because hypothetical. Wonderful to know.

The artist should never lose the spirit of play. It is curious how sometimes the biggest tasks are best approached tangentially, with a smile in the soul. Much has been written about the seriousness with which important work has to be undertaken. I believe that seriousness and rigour are invaluable, and hard work indispensable — but I want to speak a little for the mysterious and humble might of a playful creative spirit. Playfulness lightens all terrifying endeavours. It humanises them, and brings them within the realm of childhood. The

playfulness becomes absorbing, engrossing, all-consuming, serious even. The spirit warms. Memory burns brightly. The fires of intelligence blaze away, and self- consciousness evaporates. Then — wonderfully — the soul finds the sea; and the usually divided selves function, luminously, as one.

The play soon becomes its own sustenance. ‘I wonder how far I can take this?’ the smiling self asks. And the spirit of the encounter answers by taking leaps into the unknown, and creating terra firma for itself to land on. It answers by inventing roads where none exist, extending ones that do. In short, out of the place where playfulness and inspiration meet, come ideas and possibilities more astonishing, more solid, and more profound than can be pulled out of-a solemn and sententious disposition.