My thesis is simple: we each have a mind of our own. A 'personal mind', the American psychologist William James called it. A unique, extraordinary labyrinth of neural networks to which no-one else can have real access. Any process aiming to help us change our minds for developmental or therapeutic reasons must start from the premise that the choice must be ours alone.

Are you aware that your clients use metaphor several times a minute? And that your clients reason and act in ways that are consistent with their metaphors?  And that the nature of metaphor makes it ideal for working with out-of-the-ordinary problems and high-level goals? And that Clean Language keeps coaches' (unconscious) metaphors out of the coaching process, and facilitates clients' metaphors to change — and as they do, so do their perceptions, decisions and actions? If not, you need to read this article.

Being able to make the distinction between a Problem, a Remedy and desired Outcome statement is vital to being an 'outcome orientated' facilitator. This article gives detailed instructions on how to recognise client's PRO statements and how to respond so that you have more choice about where you guide their attention.

PRO can also be used to keep meetings on track, to keep a group in a creative state, to move people beyond conflict towards a joint outcome, or in numerous other productive ways.

I describe how I used Clean Language to facilitate Sports Performers' metaphors to give them a greater awareness of their sensory/intuitive processes and provides a language to discuss the previously 'difficult to describe' processes like: "How to get into the zone".

• Use of metaphor in coaching, therapy and healing
• Development of Symbolic Modelling and Clean Language
• How and why Symbolic Modelling works
• Unique elements of Symbolic Modelling
• The structure of a session
• Case history
• References

We published our first article on David Grove's Clean Language, Less is More, in 1997. Since then our model of Clean Language has undergone two revisions. Here we document these changes and explain why they happened. By charting the development of our thinking we demonstrate how modelling over the long-term is an evolutionary process.

These notes are based on my experience of using writing as an adjunct to clean language therapy and personal development. I have benefited significantly from the use of drawings... for exploring metaphors alone. However, at times I felt constrained by picturing...  I am used to writing and certainly feel more competent at it than I do at drawing. 

The 'Mirror-model' was developed in 1998 as a means of introducing a self-reflective, non-interpretative model of conversational change into Organisational Healing's NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner trainings.

Part 1 of this article is a summary of that development, and has a few thoughts about adapting a rigorous therapeutic modality to the wider world of conversational change.

Part 2 will offer a detailed example of how you can use the frames and the questions with a client.

The 2 parts can be found on separate pages in this article.

Philip Harland's report on the French NLP Congress 2001 and his description of working in French with Clean Language

Not a list of questions - a few notes on using Clean Language in Hebrew