I was struck by the idea of Clean Language after reading the chapter in Wilson’s book Performance Coaching. Wilson’s book, The Life and Work of David Grove expanded on that idea and also added a lot more about Emergent Knowledge and other areas. Some parts of the book were not as valuable to me as a coach. However, I found very helpful the idea to use the coachee’s words back to them so as not to pollute their thinking. This was a hard lesson for me to learn – I think that I thought I was adding “value” in some way by interpreting what the coachee said. Now I think that this just muddies the water for the coachee. So unless I ask permission to share an idea of my own, I now try to re-use the coachee’s own words rather than rephrasing them.
Another useful idea for me was to ask for metaphors to explore the topic, especially when the coaching topic is a difficult one for the coachee. Grove used these techniques to explore trauma and I have faced only a small number of coachees who wanted to talk about traumatic events. However, it has been useful to ask for metaphors in many of my coaching conversations. For example, my coachee was talking about a feeling of grounded expansiveness. I requested a visual image for this and she replied that it was like a majestic mountain. We explored this a little more and I now regularly ask her about whether certain behaviours come from or could come from the majestic mountain.
While reading this book I explored the website about Clean Language by Penny Tompkins and James Lawley, www.cleanlanguage.co.uk. The videos and additional articles there were very helpful. The videos helped me understand what Wilson meant about the rhythm and speed of the clean language questions.
I read an article about metaphors students use for learning. Teachers can ask students, “And when you’re learning, that’s learning like what?” I plan to use this with my students and then I can build on their diverse metaphors to enrich our discussion and help them find their motivation to get over any possible learning difficulties.