Clean Language vs the coaching heavyweights
Ever wondered how Clean Language stands up against the better-known coaching methodologies? Let’s go compare!
Clean Language
Clean Language should be your go-to when you want to support a person to explore their own thoughts, their own motivations, their own metaphors: to make your person-centred practice truly person centred. Your Clean Language questions can be like a mirror, reflecting the person’s internal landscape as it is, without distortion.
If your role takes you beyond ‘pure’ coaching, as many do (for example, manager-as-coach, or health coaching), then using Clean Language can make you very influential. It delivers opportunities for your information and advice to be hyper-personalised, and so much more likely to be followed.
In a health coaching context, Clean Language can be used to:
Enhance self-awareness: By asking Clean Language questions, coaches can help clients explore their motivations, beliefs, and values related to health and well-being.
Identify underlying issues: Clean Language can help uncover hidden obstacles or limiting beliefs that may be hindering progress toward health goals.
Foster self-directed change: By reflecting back the client’s own words, coaches can empower clients to develop their own solutions and strategies.
And it seems that Clean Language can add lots of value for the health coach, too. Users report that it takes the pressure off their consultations, re-ignites their passion for their work and reduces the chance of professional burnout.
Now, let’s explore some of the key similarities and differences between Clean Language and other approaches: the coaching heavyweights.
Comparing Clean Language with Other Approaches
Motivational Interviewing
Similarities: Both approaches are client-centered and emphasize the importance of building rapport and trust.
Differences: While Motivational Interviewing (definition here) focuses on guiding the client on a pre-determined path towards change, Clean Language takes a more exploratory approach, allowing the client to discover or create their own solutions.
Appreciative Inquiry and Solution-Focused Work (SFBT)
Similarities: All three approaches usually concentrate on strengths and positive experiences.
Differences: Appreciative Inquiry (definition here) is more focused on collective inquiry and co-creation, while Clean was first designed for one-on-one conversations and has developed group-work capacity more recently.
Solution-Focussed Work (definition here) has its origins in individual therapy, like Clean Language. However it brings a set of well-defined structures to bear on conversations, while Clean is less prescriptive.
Many Clean practitioners do take an outcome-focussed approach, concentrating on strengths and positive experiences. But others take a very different approach. They may aspire to give equal weight to all aspects of the person’s experience, including ‘negative’ ones, and/or they may seek out clients’ challenges, ‘drama’ or the origin of traumatic experiences.More on Appreciative Inquiry and more on Solution-Focussed Work in previous posts.
Conversational Hypnosis
Similarities: Both approaches use language to influence thoughts and behaviours. Historically, Clean Language developed as a type of conversational hypnosis, from David Grove’s fascination with the work of master hypnotherapist Milton Erickson. Erickson emphasised that the metaphors used by a hypnotist would only be effective if they resonated with the client: Grove took this to its logical extreme by working only with the client’s own metaphors.
Differences: Conversational Hypnosis typically uses indirect suggestion to guide the client towards an outcome determined by the hypnotist, while Clean Language focuses on the client’s own language, metaphors and desired outcomes.
This isn’t an absolute distinction, though. Many contemporary hypnotic practitioners are now strongly influenced by Clean Language (see the Hypnosis Without Trance work of James Tripp). But you’ll still find plenty of hypnotists, especially entertainers and street hypnotists, who believe that they must exude power as “The Hypnotist” in order to be effective.
More on Hypnosis and Clean Language with Igor Ledochowski in a previous post.
Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP)
Similarities: Both approaches use language patterns to understand and influence behaviour, and there are close historical and present-day links between Clean Language and NLP. UK psychotherapists who use Clean Language are usually members of the NLPTCA, for example.
Differences: In NLP, specific techniques are used to change thought patterns, often in the direction of an outcome determined by the practitioner. As with hypnosis, many NLP practitioners (especially in the UK) are strongly influenced by Clean.
But many NLPers worldwide, probably the majority, believe that they need (and can have) “control” or “power” in an interaction: a hierarchical world view. Clean Language focuses on the client’s own language, metaphors and desired outcomes, and fits with self-organisation, emergence, bottom-up processes, and facilitation.
Non-Violent Communication
Similarities: Both approaches emphasise self-awareness and mutual understanding.
Differences: Non-Violent Communication provides a specific framework for expressing needs and feelings. Caitlin Walker’s Clean Language-based model Clean Feedback Model makes a more explicit distinction between what is heard and seen, and the meaning that is made from that.
Combining Approaches
Many practitioners have experimented with combining Clean Language with the above approaches to positive effect. Clean Language seems to make effective approaches work even better!
So if you’re a practitioner of NVC, NLP, conversational hypnosis, SFBT, Appreciative Inquiry or Motivational Interviewing, why not add a Clean Language question or two to your next session?
Missing from the list above is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. This doesn’t seem to produce a helpful blend… but that’s a subject for a future blog post.