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- Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
This book will teach you a new way to communicate which gets to the heart of things! By asking Clean Language questions to explore the metaphors which underpin a person's thinking, you can help people to change their lives in a way that intrinsically respects diversity and supports empowerment. Both you and they will gain profound new insights into what makes them tick. The approach was originally used to help clients to resolve deep trauma. It is now being used to get to the truth and to solve complex problems by some of the sharpest and most innovative people in the world - coaches, business people, educators, health professionals and many others.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009
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Praise for Clean Language
And What Happens Next …? Forged from the brilliant and original ideas of David Grove, Wendy Sullivan and Judy Rees bring their own professional experiences to offer the reader thought provoking and invaluable information to challenge everyday beliefs, thoughts and decisions made in business and personal development.
Cei Davies Linn, Former wife and partner of David Grove
So, in the world of Clean there’s going to be a change, a BIG change. A Clean Change! At the turn of the millennium, Penny and James with ‘Metaphors in Mind’ led us to the font of Clean. Now, in 2008 Wendy Sullivan and Judy Rees have given us the cup to drink from it! This book is guaranteed to become THE place to start with Clean Language. I know that with this resource at hand, attendees at training courses and clients around the world will have at their fingertips the essentials to become effective and proficient in the theory and application of Clean Language. Starting out with the basics and through simple, ‘easy to swallow’ activities the reader learns and experiences the nuances of this powerful technique. And as they continue to drink the depth and level of understanding consumed through the pages of this book, they will have learnt how to facilitate themselves and others in changing their lives. I would like to congratulate Wendy and Judy on a great piece of work! WELL DONE!
Matthew Hudson, Clean Language and Emergent Knowledge facilitator, former assistant to David Grove, www.powersofsix.com
Clean Language is one of the most fundamental and important tools available in NLP and coaching. This book stands out for the clarity of its explanations and makes Clean Language commonsense. This book is to be used as the communicators bible.
Toby McCartney, WestOne Training, Author of Mastering Memory
This book promises to transform the way we think about language and meaning. After reading Clean Language, the words and metaphor that seemed so throwaway yesterday become a vitally empowering tool for today, and tomorrow.
Psychologies Magazine
In their excellent book, Clean Language: Revealing Metaphors and Opening Minds, Wendy Sullivan and Judy Rees give an in-depth yet highly accessible route-map for understanding the metaphorical nature of human perception, and for developing powerful skills for working in the domain of personal metaphor.
While I expected the subject to be covered in masterful detail, what I didn’t anticipate was such a cogent and useful introduction to the role metaphors play in perception. Wendy and Judy present this material in a way that’s easy to grasp, and pull together understandings and realisations that you would otherwise have to piece together from diverse sources.
Of course, the core of the book is the application of the Clean Language questions. There are numerous exercises for developing intuitions about what to ask when, and for what purpose. If you’ve been wondering about what “Clean” is and how you can use it, or you’ve already got some skills in this powerful domain, Wendy and Judy’s book will provide you with new depths of insight, skill and effectiveness.
Jamie Smart, Licensed NLP Trainer, CEO of Salad
With this book, Clean Language comes of age. From the clear definition in Chapter 1, through the many transcripts of Clean conversations and activity exercises driving the learning home, to the informative case histories and appendices at the end, this book romps along in an easy to read style that keeps you turning the pages. By the time you get to the meaty technical stuff in Chapter 5, you are thoroughly hooked and ready to pay the attention required. Practitioners such as therapists, psychologists and coaches will glean a clear understanding of why asking people to create their own metaphors works better than leading them through guided visualisation scenarios, and how to do it. For business managers, the great learning will be that Clean Language proves invaluable during meetings with colleagues, staff, customers and the various interactions of every day life. An absolute must for anyone interested who needs to practise effective communication.
Carol Wilson, Creator with David Grove of www.cleancoaching.com
Towards the end of 2006 I decided to sample one of Wendy Sullivan and Judy Rees’ courses in ‘Clean Language’. Little did I know that this `taster’ would develop into a deep fascination, the start of a journey of learning that continues to unfold. Already I find I can use ‘Clean’ in coaching and mentoring, in supporting student learning in Higher Education, and as a research tool.
Until now, there has been only one book about ‘Clean Language’, James Lawley and Penny Tompkins’ excellent ‘Metaphors in Mind’. It is impossible, though, for a single volume to meet the needs of everyone who would like to learn about this exciting field (think of how many introductions to NLP are on the market!) so it is great to see Wendy and Judy increase the published literature by 100% at a stroke.
What Wendy and Judy provide in this volume reflects all the best qualities of their courses; clarity, practicality, fun and integrity, all presented in a way that is accessible, logically structured and great value. Phew. And with all that, it’s something that should sell like what? Hot cakes, if you ask me.’
Dr Paul Tosey, School of Management, University of Surrey
What a relief to be able to move on to something as well-written, as coherently organised, and as generally competent as Clean Language by Sullivan and Rees. I couldn’t imagine a much more thorough-going contrast. Some purists may wonder why I’ve reviewed books on Clean Language (see also Metaphors in Mind, Lawley and Tompkins). And the answer is, “For the same reason that I’ve reviewed books like Lakoff and Johnson’s book Metaphors We Live By. That is, because whilst these books aren’t directly about NLP, they contain a great deal of information which it is useful for NLPers to know in order to enhance their NLP skills.”
In the case of Clean Language (the book), the usefulness is particularly evident in chapters 3 and 7 - The Magic of Metaphor and Modelling Cleanly, respectively. It is certainly true that the ideas in this book are, as you might expect, to some extent out of sync with those of NLP. On the subject of modelling, for example, there is a clear intention in both approaches to keep the modeller’s ideas, values, opinions, etc. out of the way of the modellee’s processing. But whereas in NLP this is achieved (as far as possible) by collecting information at a subconscious level with no conscious evaluation of the model until the modelling process is complete, in clean languaging (if that is the right term) the whole process is conducted at a conscious level, but the facilitator’s thoughts are kept out of the developing model, as far as possible, by only feeding back to the modeller/modellee (they are the same person) their own words. Done correctly, the facilitator excludes from their feedback questions all interpretation or paraphrasing of the modeller’s words, hence the term “clean” language.
A further, and very important, aspect of this comparison is the difference between the two intended outcomes.
In NLP, the modeller is usually building a model to facilitate a transfer of skills between the modellee and one or more other people. In clean languaging the primary purpose, again if I have understood the process correctly, is to guide the modellee in their construction of an entirely personal metaphor from which they will gain information which will help them to better understand their own personality, behaviour, world-view, or whatever.
Obviously where there are differences in approach these can be largely attributed to the differences in the underlying intentions.
Back to this particular book, I’ve been wondering if there is any way that the authors could have given it greater appeal to a diverse audience. And I don’t really see how they could.
I found the writing clear without over-simplification; there are plenty of script fragments illustrating various points; and plenty of “Activities” so that readers can immediately practise and apply what they have been reading about.
There are also numerous cartoons, some of them little more than thumbnail sketches which reflect the words of a subheading and help (for the benefit of the more visually-inclined) to break up what might otherwise be an overwhelming flood of words. Others, such as the cartoon on page 148, clarify the meaning of the surrounding text in a way that will save some readers (including me) from having to read the text two or three time to be sure of getting the right message.
Finally, as far as this review is concerned, I was much impressed by the obvious expertise of the two authors. This came across, for me, in little comments which may read common sense, but which are only likely to have come from personal experience, such as this comment on page 88:
“And remember that when working Cleanly, it’s not the facilitator’s job to make change happen. Any change that occurs comes from within the client and happens at the client’s own pace, so that it fits them perfectly.”
That’s just one of the many things I enjoyed about reading this book, and why I’ve rated it:
Highly Recommended: * * * * * *
Andy Bradbury, Honest Abe’s NLP Emporium www.bradburyac.mistral.co.uk
Clean Language
Revealing Metaphors and Opening Minds
by Wendy Sullivan and Judy Rees
This book is dedicated to the memory of David Grove, creator of Clean Language— a creative genius and extraordinary healer
1 December 1950—8 January 2008
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction
Chapter 1 Getting Started
Chapter 2 Great Questions!
Chapter 3 The Magic of Metaphor
Chapter 4 Attending Exquisitely
Chapter 5 The Developing Questions
Chapter 6 Sequence, Source and Intention Questions
Chapter 7 Modelling Cleanly
Chapter 8 Transforming Metaphors
Chapter 9 Maturing Changes
Chapter 10 Putting it Together for Yourself
Chapter 11 Directing Attention More Precisely
Chapter 12 Beyond Words and Into Space
Chapter 13 Frequently Asked Questions
Chapter 14 Where Else Can Clean Be Used?
Chapter 15 Clean Success Stories
Chapter 16 Next Steps
Appendix 1: The Basic Clean Language Questions
Appendix 2: The Specialised Clean Language Questions
References
Index
Copyright
Acknowledgements
We have dedicated this book to David Grove, creator of Clean Language, in gratitude for his generosity in sharing this work with us and with the world. He offered his full support in the book’s creation and we are sorry he did not live to see it published.
We are also massively indebted to Penny Tompkins and James Lawley. They made the writing of this book possible by their many years of work in this field, by their book Metaphors in Mind, and by the training, facilitation and ongoing support we have both received from them. They have spent a huge amount of time and energy studying the text and providing detailed feedback on it. We are eternally grateful to them.
We are also grateful to the wider Clean community within which we work and live. Individuals such as Cei Davies Linn, Phil Swallow, Caitlin Walker and Marian Way have made a considerable contribution to the development of the field and to our understanding of it.
We would like to thank the following people who offered feedback on the text: Judy Barber, Gina Campbell, Scott Downs, Charles Faulkner, Maggi Gilson, Nigel Heath, Annemiek van Helsdingen, Barbara House man, Margaret Meyer, Violetta Nowak, Rob Sullivan, Hans-Peter Wellke and Sue White.
A big ‘thank you’ is also due to the individuals and organisations who have allowed us to use their stories as examples in the book. Some are named in the text, others are not—whether named or not, we are very grateful.
We also thank our friends and colleagues for their support during the process of completing the book, Crown House for publishing it, Les Evans for his illustrations and Tom Fitton for his beautiful cover design.
Finally, thank you for picking up our book. We invite you to enjoy it, and any effects it may have!
Foreword
Our understanding of people is changing. According to Steven Pinker, and many other cognitive scientists, ‘The Stuff of Thought’ is fundamentally metaphoric. No longer do we believe metaphor is only the province of poetry and prose. No longer do we believe metaphor is a rare add-on to ordinary speech. No longer do we believe abstract concepts are the way people make sense of the world. Why? Because metaphor is deeply embedded in, and essential to, language and thought. Whether we realise it or not, daily speech is peppered with metaphors, often several per minute.
We can’t think, reason or interact without metaphor. Consider the internet for a moment. How could we understand it without metaphors such as the worldwide web, with its pages, links, home, forward and backward navigation, pop-ups and drop-down menus? The more complex the world becomes, the more we need to ground our ideas in embodied metaphors.
Slowly, people working in psychology, education, health and especially business, are waking up to the importance of metaphor. As examples of the latter, Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organization (1986) and Imaginization (1993) were landmark books. More recently, Anne Miller wrote Metaphorically Selling (2004). Note that these books focus on the consultant’s, or salesperson’s, metaphors. By contrast, Gerald and Lindsay Zaltman’s Marketing Metaphoria (2008) explains how consumers’ metaphors count just as much. James Geary’s forthcoming I Is An Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor will go further and show how metaphor is at work in all aspects of our personal, professional and social lives.
The significance of metaphor is being studied by academics working in the field of Cognitive Linguistics. This subject has been expanding since the launch of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By in 1980. Coincidentally, at about that time a New Zealand counselling psychologist was embarking on a quest to help heal the minds of individuals using their personal metaphors. David Grove noticed his clients commonly used metaphor to describe their painful emotions, traumatic memories and deepest sense of who they were. He discovered that, once these metaphors were examined, they rapidly became idiosyncratic—there were elements and meaning that only applied to the individual. Furthermore, Grove noticed that each individual’s metaphors had a structure and an internal logic that remained coherent and consistent over time. Rather than people having metaphors, it’s as if they were their metaphors. And when these changed, they did too.
Grove was faced with a conundrum. If language is inherently metaphorical, how could he work with others’ metaphors without bringing his own into the conversation? His solution, Clean Language, was a brilliant innovation—a simple set of questions that make use of only the most basic elements of human perception: space, event, category, attribution and intention. The combination of Clean Language with client-generated metaphors will be one of his enduring contributions.
Grove’s early ideas were published as Resolving Traumatic Memories: Metaphors and Symbols in Psychotherapy (1989). The book was based on recorded conversations edited by Basil Panzer. It was another 11 years before we published our formulation Metaphors in Mind: Transformation through Symbolic Modelling (2000). More than a quarter of a century has passed since Grove embarked on his creative journey and it is a surprise that Wendy Sullivan and Judy Rees’ book is only the third about his pioneering work.
While the Clean approach will be instantly valuable to therapists and coaches, Clean Language: Revealing Metaphors and Opening Minds also shows how it can be taken into conversations between parent and child, teacher and pupil, manager and staff, doctor and patient, researcher and subject; into team meetings, organisational development and many other areas. Along the way, the reader is made aware of how their own assumptions and intentions influence the systems in which they live, work and play.
This book is part of a rising wave of interest in, application of and research into metaphor. We applaud Wendy and Judy’s willingness and enthusiasm to make this work available to a wider range of people by the publication of such a practical book.
James Lawley and Penny TompkinsJuly2008
Introduction
We needed to find a snappy story to open the book.
“What kind of snappy?” we wondered.
• Snappy like a smiling cartoon crocodile? • Snappy like a game of cards? • Snappy like the snap of fingers, instantly attracting attention?
When you think of a snappy story, what kind of snappy is your snappy story? We’ll tell you about ours at the end of the chapter.
What happens when you think about these snappy stories? Each kind of snappy is a different metaphor – a different comparison of one thing (snappy) to another (crocodile, cards etc).
We do this kind of comparing all the time. That is, we think in metaphor1. Metaphors are fundamental to how we make sense of the world, and how we organise our thoughts, and yet we’re not usually aware of our metaphors.
This book explores an unusual way of thinking about thinking which will enable you to grasp the importance of metaphor in thinking, in language, and in communication.
You’ll learn how to use Clean Language questions to help other people to explore their thinking and the metaphors which underpin it. And as you get to grips with the material in this book, your own metaphors will emerge, opening up new realisations about yourself and the way you think.
Using Clean Language can:
• Help people to make changes they would like in their lives
• Provide both you and them with valuable information about the way they think and how they do things
• Improve communication, understanding and rapport.
Other specific benefits often reported by Clean Language users include:
• It helps people do their best thinking, setting the scene for greater creativity and for new information to emerge
• It encourages people to take responsibility for themselves
• It empowers people to decide the way forward for themselves
• It honours each individual’s uniqueness, making it especially valuable when diversity is an issue
• It can maximise collaboration and innovation
• It avoids ‘leading the witness’ while getting to the truth
• It enables you to talk another person’s language, so that they feel acknowledged and heard
• It is flexible and can be used alongside a number of other approaches to improve their effectivness.
If your job involves gathering information from other people and/or assisting them to change, in almost any context, using Clean Language questions will help get better results.
Clean Language has its roots in therapy, but is branching into a wide range of other fields. It has been used successfully by coaches, mentors, consultants, managers, health professionals, parents, teachers, journalists, salespeople and people in many other occupations: the list keeps on growing. It seems that it can be used in almost any field of human endeavour.
Clean Language is useful in one-to-one situations and with groups, in formal settings and in casual conversations. By using Clean Language, you and those you spend time with can expect to make better decisions based on more complete information, and so achieve goals more easily.
• “This amazingly powerful tool could transform the way we interact, and run meetings and appraisals, within our business.”—Caroline Frost, Director of Marketing and Training, Informa Healthcare
• “We’ve used Clean Language as a co-coaching model for 250 senior managers and it’s gone down a storm.”—Lorenza Clifford, personal and team development consultant, Pricewater houseCoopers
• “It gives you the confidence to really get results with your clients.”—Mark Hawkswell, coach and trainer
• “When you use Clean Language in the classroom be prepared for a leap in learning. Colleagues have been surprised by the speed of impact. Children learn to think deeply and to express their ideas with clarity. They come to appreciate each other’s specialness and to value differences. They learn to think about thinking and become more comfortable exploring challenging ideas… especially their own!”—Julie McCracken, primary school teacher
• “Clean Language is a simple yet amazing set of tools that is effective in unlocking a client’s assumptions, communication, and thinking. This powerful process is a must for anyone involved in the coaching, managing or teaching profession.”—Steve Nobel, author, coach, and a director of Alternatives.
• “Clean Language is a fantastic tool. It’s so versatile and so respectful.”—Sheena Bailey, management consultant to UK health services
• “Clean Language should be on the curriculum of every secondary school in Great Britain. It will boost confidence and give anyone a much greater understanding of what it really means to be human.”—Pamela Hadfield, learning consultant working with teenagers
• “Quite often, projects succeed in building to the requirements on paper, but still fail to meet the client’s expectations. It’s early days, but I think using Clean Language is leading to better results, and more aligned expectations of what is going to be built.” Roland Hill, IT business analyst, IPROFS, Netherlands.
Clean Language is simple, and yet has fascinating implications.
At the most simple level, Clean Language is a set of twelve questions from which assumptions and metaphors have been ‘cleansed’ as far as possible. These questions are good for obtaining information from another person in a structured way that helps you and them to get a really clear understanding of what they mean.
As a complete approach, Clean Language can be combined with the metaphors a person uses, creating a bridge between their conscious and unconscious minds. This can become a profound personal exploration: a route to deeper understanding of themselves, to transcending limiting beliefs and behaviours, and to resolution and healing. The person asking Clean Language questions gets a new understanding of people, and even of the nature of consciousness.
It often surprises beginners to find that the same twelve questions and the same basic principles are used at both the simple level and when using the complete approach. This makes Clean Language very flexible.
Clean Language isn’t useful all the time. Clean is not a persuasion tool, although it can certainly help you to understand what will convince someone. It’s not a good way to force people to change against their will. It is not a method of interpreting metaphors. It may not be the best approach in an emergency or at times when you are delivering specific information. And it can be extremely useful in a wide range of other contexts.
This book is an introduction, to equip you to take your first steps on a journey. We hope it will whet your appetite for more learning, and we’ve included details of further resources later in the book.2
Some people find that Clean Language comes naturally to them, and that they can relax into asking the Clean Language questions in lots of different situations, right from the start. Others find it takes a little longer. The fact you’ve picked up this book means you’re interested, which is really all that’s needed.
Whether you want to become a more involved parent, a better salesperson, a great coach, to extend your creative or spiritual awareness, or just to understand yourself and others more fully, learning Clean Language will be valuable.
About us
The two of us—Wendy Sullivan and Judy Rees—are passionate about Clean Language and its effects. We’ve both been convinced by our personal, real-life experience.
Judy was a news journalist and media executive who worked in newspapers, TV and new media. She fell in love with Clean Language in 2003: as a writer and reporter, she found the way it used metaphor particularly fascinating. A lifelong workaholic with few outside interests, she experienced a major personal crisis when her employers downsized and she faced redundancy—combined with the loss of her partner, her home and most of her friends. Clean Language coaching helped her to find a way out of that fear-filled place and to discover a route to a more balanced lifestyle, including close relationships, wide interests, and a new career. She now works alongside Wendy as a Clean Language facilitator and trainer, and develops new applications for Clean Language in business and other contexts.
Wendy has been working with Clean Language since 1997. Encountering it for the first time in a conference presentation, she discovered an inspiring personal metaphor—a lighthouse. When she excitedly told her husband about it later, he made a teasing comment, “Oh – so you can only focus on a tiny part of your life at any one time – and that only momentarily!” Wendy was surprised to discover how strongly she felt that this was not something to joke about – that the lighthouse represented something key about who she was and how she did things: how she was able to concentrate her own attention, and how she helped others to direct theirs in useful ways. She realised that it had taken only a small number of Clean Language questions to reveal core information that had remained hidden in spite of all her personal development over the years. It was clear to her that she wanted to master Clean Language skills and start using it in her work with people as quickly as possible.
Wendy’s background is in speech and language therapy, but she is now a specialist in training people to use Clean Language on open courses and within companies. She also uses Clean in working as a coach, trainer, facilitator and psychotherapist. Her former students on five continents are now using Clean Language in their work.
About Clean Language and its developers
The Clean Language questions were developed by an inspiring counseling psychologist, David Grove, as he worked with trauma victims during the 1980s and 1990s. In contrast to the fashion of the time, he resisted the temptation to give advice, honoured his clients’ choice of words rather than paraphrasing, and devised questions which contained as few assumptions and metaphors as possible. This approach helped people to work with their own metaphors, enabling them to explore their experience indirectly in ways that allowed them to heal and move on.
David, who was part-Maori, came from New Zealand and spent much of his life on the move. He trained many thousands of therapists in his ‘Grovian Metaphor Therapy’ at workshops worldwide, particularly in the UK, USA, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland. He was visiting faculty at Durham, Manchester and Edinburgh Universities and a score of US Universities included his work in their courses. He co-authored a book, Resolving TraumaticMemories3, with B.I. Panzer, created a number of video and tape sets, and for most of the 1990s ran a retreat centre in Eldon, Missouri.
James Lawley and Penny Tompkins were inspired by the effectiveness of David’s healing work. They codified his approach and extended it, making it more accessible to a wider range of users. They called their work Symbolic Modelling, and their comprehensive book on the subject, Metaphors in Mind: Transformation Through Symbolic Modelling, was published in 2000.
Now we, along with others, are working to make Clean Language still more accessible to people worldwide.
David Grove’s original work, and Penny and James’s subsequent developments, take a revolutionary view of the way people think and communicate, and provide a set of tools which has the potential to change many lives for the better, way beyond their origin in clinical therapy.
In this book we’ll use the word ‘Clean’ both as an abbreviated label for David, Penny and James’s work and its derivatives, and to indicate the philosophical approach which underpins them. We’ll explain more about this later.
About this book
This book is an introduction to Clean Language. It will be a practical workbook for beginners, as well as a reference guide for Clean Language facilitators who have some experience. We begin with simple ideas and simple activities that require no prior knowledge, moving on to more complex ones.
Chapter 1 offers a brief overview of the principles of Clean Language. The three chapters which follow look in detail at three of the principles—asking Clean Language questions, working with personal metaphors, and listening exquisitely.
In Chapters 5 and 6 we go through the 12 basic Clean Language questions in detail, explaining how they are used.
Chapter 7 looks at the use of Clean Language in modelling for finding out how someone does something, while Chapters 8 and 9 consider its use in contexts where change is wanted. Modelling and change are the principal applications of Clean Language.
At this point, you will be all set to use what you have learnt to facilitate yourself, so we provide activities for this in Chapter 10.
From here, with the basics in place, Chapters 11-13 will help you to fine-tune your skills as you start to use them to help others make the changes they would like. You will learn how to direct attention more precisely and how to make use of space.
Finally, to inspire you to use Clean Language in your own life, in Chapters 14 and 15 we give some more detailed descriptions of contexts where it has already been used.
To help you, we have used different kinds of bullet points to mark out different kinds of information.
Denotes an example of Clean Language being used in real life – Denotes a Clean Language question
Throughout, we will suggest activities for you to do. They are integral to learning Clean Language and by doing them you’ll get information which is not provided elsewhere, including a sense of how it feels to ask, and to be asked, the Clean Language questions. So please do them! If you read the book but don’t have the experiences you may draw inaccurate conclusions about how engaging the process is.
Some of the activities can be done alone, while others need a partner. Sharing the activities with others will bring the maximum benefit.
We’ve also included transcripts to illustrate specific sections. While some have been edited slightly to help you grasp the point being made, they are the best way to see how Clean Language has been used in real situations.
Our snappy story
Remember the search for a snappy story to open the book? We (Wendy and Judy) used Clean Language to help us to find the kind of snappy story that was right for us.
We started by exploring what we each wanted to happen. Judy wanted the knowledge the book contains to be like a ball of golden light which could be passed from person to person—leaving each person’s hands full of light as it left them. Wendy imagined a globe with a network of bright connections: as each new connection was made, it exploded in dozens of new directions. Like the lighting of a sparkler, each new spark potentially became the hub of a new explosion, a new network.
As the conversation continued, we turned our attention to what we wanted the effects of the book to be. As we discussed our hopes and plans it became clear to us that we wanted its launch to be like the arrival of the digital camera. Remember the switch from film cameras to digital photography? In the days of film, there were some excellent photographers—but most people took relatively few pictures, and those we took were often quite uninspiring.
Once we’d got the hang of our digital cameras, though, all that changed. Nowadays, everyone has the freedom to take lots and lots of pictures—and the more we practice, the better the pictures become. Becoming a good photographer is within everyone’s reach. We can also snap away in ‘difficult’ conditions, such as low light—and if it doesn’t produce a top-class picture every time there’s no harm done. We even have cameras in our telephones that are small enough to carry everywhere and use at any time, without preparation.
We’d like this book and its effects to be like that. It is designed to put Clean Language in people’s hands, worldwide, ready to be used whenever it could be valuable. Enjoy!
1 ‘Metaphor’ in this book includes analogies, similies, parables, metonymies, parallels, literary metaphors etc.
2 For readers with an appetite for theory, a short essay, ‘Theoretical Underpinnings of Sym bolic Modelling’ by Judy Rees, is available online at http://www.cleanchange.co.uk
3 Obviously learning Clean Language from a book does not make you a therapist. Use what you learn here only in ways which are appropriate for your qualifications and experience. If you are in any doubt about your competence to deal with an issue, refer to an appropriate professional.
Chapter 1
Getting Started
“No-one ever listened themselves out of a job”
—Calvin Coolidge, US president
Clean Language amounts to a new way of thinking about the way people think, with profound implications and powerful effects. And the basics are simple.
Typically two people are involved. The questioner asks Clean Language questions and the speaker answers.
There are twelve basic Clean Language questions, which are combined with words used by the speaker. That makes the questions as flexible as the notes of the musical scale, which can be used to create anything from a nursery rhyme to a pop song or an orchestral symphony.
As Clean Language questioner:
• Listen attentively
• Remember that your assumptions, opinions and advice are your own
• Ask Clean Language questions to explore a person’s words, particularly their metaphors
• Listen to the answers and then ask more Clean Language questions about what they have said.
If a person is seeking to change, then change happens naturally as part of the process. This isn’t a method for forcing anyone to change.
The same approach, with the same questions, can be used wherever you’re gathering information—anything from a recruitment interview to a corporate best-practice project, to finding out what your child did at school today.
The Clean Language process
To introduce the principles of Clean Language, we are going to begin with the two most commonly used, and most versatile, Clean Language questions:
– (And) what kind of X (is that X)?
– (And) is there anything else about X?
The ‘X’ in the question refers to a word or phrase the speaker has used.
For example, in the introduction we wrote about a snappy story and asked:
– What kind of snappy?
We could also have asked:
– And is there anything else about that snappy?
Using a person’s own words in your question shows that you have really been listening. Don’t paraphrase—parrot-phrase! People’s words are important to them, and using their words tends to help them feel respected and acknowledged. You’ll be surprised how easy this soon becomes.
Both questions encourage the person to elaborate on their experience, to find out more about it. The question ‘What kind of X?’ invites them to ‘zoom in’ on the specific details, while ‘Anything else about X?’ can help them ‘zoom out’ to the wider context or to focus on other details about ‘X’. Both these questions can be usefully asked about more or less anything, any time. So keep them handy!
A mother who had just learned some Clean Language picked up her daughter Jenny from school. When Jenny showed her a picture of a house she had drawn, Mum asked, “What kind of house is that house?”, “And is there anything else about that house?” and so on. What resulted was one of the longest after-school conversations they’d ever enjoyed. The next day after school, Jenny demanded: “Ask me some more questions, Mummy!”
It seemed as if the meeting had been going on for ages, but at last the discussion seemed to be moving forward. Then the sales director said, “I think we’re at breaking point.” Margaret, who was in the chair, felt herself becoming annoyed, why on earth did the director think the meeting was on the point of breakdown? She remembered her Clean Language and asked, “What kind of breaking point is that?” “The point of breaking through,” the director said. Margaret was relieved to have been wrong! The meeting moved quickly forward to a resolution.
What’s special about Clean Language questions?
The two Clean Language questions we have just introduced sound very ordinary. So what’s special about them? One way to understand this is to compare them with two commonly-used questioning categories—Open and Closed questions.
Closed questions limit the speaker to a yes/no answer and tend to close down the topic. Open questions invite more than a yes/no answer, adding detail to the topic. So the effect of Clean Language questions is similar to that of open questions.
