Ready to come Clean?
What if you could enhance your life and the lives of your clients just by asking more beautifully crafted questions?
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Ready To Come Clean?
4 questions + 5 days
a simple model of
Clean Inquiry
Clean Language Institute is a global leader in training and facilitation of Clean Lanuguage methodologies since 2008. We have programs in the US, Germany, Japan, Canada and more.
We love Clean and what it can do for you!!
What Is Clean Language?
Clean Language is a way of asking questions that gives your clients full lateral to answer as they like. It is respectful of their models of the world. It is designed to keep your stuff out and their stuff in, and help you obtain more authentic and accurate information.
It is a skill of using simple questions, cleaned of as much inference and presupposition as possible, to build mental models of another persons experience.
It is used in coaching, therapy, business, interviewing and more recently as a research methodology in higher education.
Clean Language helps clients to discover and develop idiosyncratic symbols and metaphors without any content introduced by the therapist/coach/interviewer.
What Is Symbolic Modeling?
Symbolic Modeling is a facilitation methodology that uses symbols, metaphors, and modeling to create the conditions for positive change.
In Symbolic Modeling (SyM), therapists, coaches, and teachers use Clean Language questions to help people identify their symbolic mind-body experience and to create an internal “model” they can use for change, to sustain or to build.
What Is Clean Facilitation?
Lets look as the general understanding of what facilitation is first.
Facilitation is an act of assisting or making easier the progress or improvement of something. It is a ‘content neutral” way of working with others and assist an individual or group to think deeply about their assumptions, beliefs, values and systemic processes and context (Kraner:2007:xv)
Facilitation is different from coaching and therapy.
Coaching is designed to train, instruct or hold accountability, most often with a focus on the present and/or future. Q: What is Coaching?
It is different from therapy
Therapy is usually applied in a diagnostic manner and intended to treat, relieve or heal a disorder, most often with a focus on how one was affected by the past. Q: What is Therapy?
Clean Facilitation uses clean questions to bring attention to the resources and skills that your client or group express towards an end that is by their design, or what we call in Symbolic Modeling, a desired outcome. Clean Facilitation is not designed as a change methodology, but a way of helping your clients create the most generative conditions for change to occur.
The lovely thing about Clean Facilitation is it is a neutral methodology that blends well for coaching, therapeutic, and management frames. It is at its essence a stance of open, neutral curiosity with the added benefit helping the coach/therapist keep their assumptions, presuppositions and suggestions to themselves. Not through good intentions alone, but through the skillful use of Clean Questions and a modeling methodology devised over a 25 year period.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
R. Buckminster Fuller
Let me show you how Clean Language makes things better.
For THERAPISTS
If you’re in the therapy space we strongly recommend our book “The End of Therapy” which sets out a series of potential points of failure that are endemic in most modern talk therapy methods – and shows how you may incorporate Clean approaches to deliver more successful outcomes for more clients
For COACHES
As a coach, you want your clients to experience positive results that are long-lasting. With Clean Language, your clients will lead their own revolution using all their own meaningful metaphors leading them to triumph faster and more effectively than ever before with results that make an impact on their lives.
In BUSINESS
If any part of your business requires that you talk to people and understand them clearly, Clean Language can help you quickly ‘hear’ them accurately and authentically. It’s worth your time to invest in one or more of our trainings and have superior clearity about what needs to happen.
You’re a professional. Perhaps you’re a coach, a teacher, a therapist, a manager, or even a researcher. You have your education, your certificates, your diplomas, and your licenses.
You’ve taken training in human resources, human performance, child pedagogy, cause evaluation, coaching, psychology…
You’ve taken workshops and courses on active listening, communication, NLP, getting along with people, anger management…
You’ve got oodles of tools to use, even an entire tool box of models to use, some of which have served you well.
Why would you want to learn something new? Something so entirely different to what you have been doing that it is difficult to explain in concepts and best experienced?
Modeling with Clean questions and principles will change the way you work with others and how you know yourself.
Truly listening – listening deeply, accurately, and intentionally – is the beginning of understanding.
We learn to talk and one is rarely taught how to communicate.
We have ears and are rarely taught how to listen.
We have eyes and are rarely taught how to observe.
We are taught how to find ‘facts’, but rarely how to cultivate curiosity.
We are encouraged to be authentic, genuine, our very best, but rarely facilitated to know what that ‘very best’ is.
We are encouraged to use science and rarely taught how our imaginations have inspired and cultivated scientific inquiry. Think Albert Einstein, Elias Howe, and Isaac Newton*.
We are told to learn about successful people and take them to heart, do what they do, but rarely facilitated to model our own successes.
We are told to understand others when most of us haven’t an inkling of understanding ourselves.
What Clean questions and becoming a good modeler can help you and your clients do
Increase your knowledge of personal patterns and how they effect your relationships and work
Create desired outcomes that inspire you
Develop personal strategies for success
Model your own excellence and the excellence of others
Use constraints and limitations as resources towards what you would like to have happen
Sort out complex problems and strategies to bring out the best from yourself and your clients
Stay out of other peoples ‘stuff’
Respect other peoples world views and experiences
Be more skillful in stepping out of judgment, contempt, and ridicule
Work with the deeper meaning in client conversations
Trust others to have capacity and resilience and treat them as such
Become an excellent modeler, helping those around you achieve more
Clean Language is for
Is it simple?
YES!!
It depends.
Is it worth it?
Absolutely!!
Clean Language is a paradigm shift.
Clean Language and its principles will rock your world. If you pay attention and apply what you learn to your relationships and client work I can guarantee you it will rock their world too.
* Albert Einstein – the theory of relativity from an imagined scenario of traveling faster than light
Elias Howe – invented the sewing machine needle from a dream
Isaac Newton – and his apple as a metaphor for what might be happening to the moon
Don’t take my word for it.
Here’s what people are saying.
JANE ADRIAN Teacher/College Professor
Jane Adrian
High School Teacher (at-risk teens), College Professor, Cal Poly
RICK BURKE Nuclear Power Industry
First of all, I want to thank Sharon Small for the training this weekend. It was very informative and the format was excellent. As we expressed during the Q & A, the opportunity to perform as a Facilitator, Client and Observer was a thorough way to obtain the information about Desired Outcomes. Although I wasn’t sure what to expect during the three day training, it was a pleasant surprise. The format in which Sharon presented the material was simple (not easy) and clear. The atmosphere was relaxing and definitely NOT stuffy as some other trainings I have attended in the past. I believe her attitude and flow had everything to do with how we received the information and in turn implemented it during our sessions. Her preparation was “on point” and kept us on track throughout the entire weekend. Her patience with our mishaps and questions was well noted. Her feedback and assistance was smooth and well received. I’m not sure if I have enough adjectives and adverbs to describe the experience.
Sharon’s ability to convey Clean Language to a group of individuals is excellent. I see the confidence and knowledge as she explains the material. The absolute seamless way she transitions from one subject to another is priceless. Clean Language is a valuable tool that can be utilized by everyone in all walks of life and business.
Rick Burke
Project Controls Engineer, Nuclear Power Industry
JACKIE ARNOLD Executive Coach/Author
Sharon facilitated my learning and assessment during my Clean Language Training in Portsmouth UK. I have found her facilitation sensitive, professional and insightful. She has a delightful way of making you feel supported whilst at the same time enabling you to learn and grow from the constructive feedback. I have valued her comments and would describe her as a facilitator with both backbone and heart.
Jackie Arnold
Executive Coach/Author, Coach 4 Executives
YUJI YAMAGAMI Senior Auditor & Trainer
Yesterday, I had a session with one of my clients. He runs a small facility maintenance and cleaning business for retailers and shops. He wanted to know how his operation’s quality can be improved, and he was somewhat obsessed with coming up with “objective” quality criteria so that his cleaning workers have uniform understanding of what is considered “Clean”, for example, clean restroom for shoppers.
As you can suspect, it is hard to come up with something like that. So, I tried Clean Language in Japanese, and I think I did it OK. I asked bunch of developing questions about clean restroom… and he came up with “like my own house’s rest room” or “a restroom that arouse one’s homing instinct”.
After I helped him develop those metaphors, then I switched to sequence questions, bit by bit, attempting to get to the source of how such restroom can be realized, and all of a sudden, he shouted in quite loud voice saying something how he was not putting customers’ shoes when considering quality criteria… and then started stating his action plans quite rapidly.
I was simply amazed by the change that just happened… my client was also very surprised at what happened to him. Yes, less is more…just amazing.
YUJI YAMAGAMI
Senior Auditor & Trainer/Owner, Ennovation