Where To Start With Clean Language?

Reading The Five-Minute Coach last week set me thinking afresh about a topic that’s bugged me for years: where’s the best place to start when learning to use Clean Language?

For authors Lynne Cooper and Mariette Castellino, it seems it’s best to start with a highly-structured coaching model. I can definitely see advantages in this: the model is highly practical and just works. But it barely touches on metaphor – arguably the most interesting bit of the whole Clean Language journey.

Traditional workshop-style Clean Language trainings – at least in my experience – tend to put their initial focus on developing the skill of exploring people’s metaphoric landscapes, often starting from the question, “That’s like what?” There’s an emphasis on a “Clean attitude”, an atmosphere of extreme respect for people’s “stuff”, and a rather other-worldly feel which often leaves participants baffled about how to integrate what they have learned into what they actually do.

Partly as a reaction to this, in Learn Clean Language Online I make Conversational Clean the starting point. It seems to me that until you are comfortable with asking Clean Language questions, and listening to the answers, in informal contexts, you’re unlikely to feel confident to use them in more formal contexts.

Similarly, I like to encourage people to notice spontaneous metaphors in everyday language, rather than asking people to hand you a metaphor on a plate. Not only are spontaneous metaphors more informal – my hunch is that they may contain more information than thought-up metaphors.

All of this makes sense if your starting point is “I want to learn Clean Language.” However, there’s another way in which seems much, much more effective at developing skill, but it requires a different starting point.

Of my Clean Language students, the most effective by far are those who began by being coached using Clean Language – typically on how to market their businesses. They picked up the questioning patterns as a side-effect… noticed how effective they could be… and then came back to me for more in-depth training.

So my recommendation to anyone who really wants to learn to use Clean Language in coaching, now, is, “Get yourself coached using Clean Language by an expert. It could just change your life.”