Clean Language:Revealing Metaphors and Opening Minds: Revealing Metaphors and Opening Minds

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That comes in when you combine one of these questions with the client’s words. A clean question has three functions: Martin, J.N.T. (2007). Book Review: Metaphors in Mind: Transformation Through Symbolic Modelling, Metaphor and Symbol, 22(2):201–211. doi: 10.1080/10926480701235510 The client’s actual words have a precise personal meaning that can be lost if the counselor tries to substitute words or add what is not there, leading to reduced rapport. A particular set of rules for asking certain very simple questions has been developed in a way that lets the client to go deeper into inner experience. That set of rules and questioning procedures was called “Clean Language.” and bubble to the surface in the words we use. Metaphors are a natural language of the mind, particularly the unconscious mind. While initially used in clinical therapy, Clean Language offers helpful techniques to all professional communicators, especially those working closely with others.

We can provide ILM approved in house corporate training and open distance learning courses in Clean Language and Emergent Knowledge. Clean Language training at the BBC There are many different views who created the term ‘clean language’ as it’s such a generic phrase, In NLP we have evolved clean language from the ‘ Meta-Model‘, which is a process of asking specific questions which dig deeply into a persons reality to uncover hidden ‘truths’. Clean Language helps people to convey their own meaning, free of emotional or other distracting interpretations from others.Lawley, J. & Linder-Pelz, S. (2016). "Evidence of competency: exploring coach, coachee and expert evaluations of coaching". Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice. doi: 10.1080/17521882.2016.1186706 This is important to recognize as it reflects how our brains store memories and process information. Metaphor is incredibly important to how we do both and has a significant effect on the quality of the conversations we can have. The purpose of using clean language is to help the subject clarify their own thinking and work through their own problem. We are assuming that they already know how to fix their problem and just don’t know how to access that solution yet. To learn Clean Language in-depth, we recommend the courses run by our partner Clean Change, in particular:

In a therapeutic context, clean language questions often make use of the "full 3-part syntax" which has the format: Clean Language helps people communicate their own meaning, free of interpretation from others. It promotes ease of understanding and cooperative, productive relationships.

When being Clean, you typically use only questions from the list below. When you’re experienced, you can use other questions too but that’s a more advanced topic.