Last night I was interviewed by James Tripp of Hypnosis Without Trance, for a live teleseminar about making Clean Language work in the real world. You can listen to the replay here.
One of the questions which was submitted struck me as particularly interesting. “In what context can I use Clean Language? Are there any hard and fast rules? Do you have a step-by-step manual?”
The short answer is no, there are no hard and fast rules about how, when or where you can use Clean Language. Where would such rules come from? The creator of Clean Language, David Grove, has passed away – and in any case he was happy for people to use his brilliant ideas in whatever way they wanted.
There are guidelines, developed over the years by noticing what typically works well, and what is less effective. There are heuristics – rules of thumb – which enable facilitators like me to get great results, more of the time. That’s what I’m sharing on LearnCleanLanguage.com. But they fall a long way short of a step-by-step manual.
What’s interesting me, though, is that the questioner clearly wants there to be rules. I can empathise with that. Rules make things predictable, and easy. When you just follow the rules, you don’t need to stay actively engaged. You don’t have to think too hard.
Rules are so useful that people often make up their own, and turn them into habits. For example, “I don’t drink alcohol on weekdays,” or “I always have coffee with breakfast.”
That’s great, when it works. But after a while, the rules can seem to take on a life of their own, and become a central part of who the person thinks they are.
We forget that we made the rules up for ourselves, and that we have the freedom to change them.
Comments from original on judyrees.co.uk
JaneBredius
6 April 2012
There’s perceived safety in rules, I suppose. I find the habit of putting things into neat categories very limited and limiting. I am still wondering what it is that drives a person to want to divide the world up into predictable chunks instead of having fun and exploring widely by busking it. Just imagine what you can do if you let go of the rules…
No judgement intended, just me pondering on a part of the human makeup which I haven’t developed – and don’t want to. Everday clean language strikes me as a supremely logical application. The tendency to “keep models for a special occasion” seems like such a waste of opportunities to understand more.
Thanks for the thought, Judy!
June
6 April 2012
Thank you for being so generous by providing this free and introducing me and others to Clean Language. I just love new ways of thinking. Thank you Judy.
John kelly
7 April 2012
I thought that it could go somewhat like this:
A) For the novice we give rules for safety
B) For the advanced novice we give guidelines exploration to test rules discover the edge of the danger
C) For competency we make it is both effective and efficient (relatively consistant results)
D) For self-confidence explore competencies in public, social and personal contexts and or in different cultural contexts develop experiences (Malcom Gladwell states, it take about 11 years of mentoring of 4 hours a day to be come expert….)
E) For expertise you are on your own with your own unique experiences and applying expert systems don’t seem very model-abled. (perhaps!)
Anyway just a thought…not a rule!