In our March newsletter we mentioned a blogger who claimed ‘Clean Language is easy enough to learn in five minutes’, and asked what you thought.

Here are some of your responses.

Please note: these comments do not neccessarily represent the views of Clean Change Company.

A little optimistic

5 mins sounds a little optimistic, I worked with Caitlin Walker for 2 days during an NLP practitioner course, and found the "clean" way really powerful.

I run short courses for parents in deprived areas raising self esteem through a programme we call Encouraging Self Belief, one of our Radical Encouragement programmes (www.rais.org.uk). I know its power, and I am keen to get on a course with you to get a deeper insight into the intricacies of Clean.

Keep up the brilliant work. Take care and stay well. Paul Dearlove (RAIS)

And that’s like what?

Learn Clean in 5 min?   That’s like… what?….. these symbols come to mind for me…  

1) Simple in design, a hammer is a truly brilliant tool. A nail is well suited to its purpose. Almost anyone can, in five minutes, learn how to bang the nail into a piece of wood, and if never having come across any of that before, will find it helluva exciting. It is easy in that moment, to assume that now you can make a diningroom suite.  

2) I spent several years as a professional singer. I soon learned that every other teenager who could strum three chords thought they should be on the stage with the ’other’ top guitarists.  

3) Now I am an aspiring writer. I have trashed my first three books as unpublishable, and agree with, was it George Bernard Shaw or Oscar Wilde, who said that you have to write a lot of bad books before you write a good one. After more than ten years of chipping away at it, I believe I will finally be able to publish within the next five. (I say that having won the English prize for my matriculation year at school and subsequently having won two short story competitions and a number of live poetry slams i.e. it’s not that I lack talent!) Do you know as many people as I know who ‘know’ that they can write a best-seller straight up just as soon as they have two months and a laptop on hand?  

In summary - it takes substantially more than 5 minutes of learning ANY skill to get profficient enough to be able to identify and appreciate the difference between gleeful enthusiasm and actual mastery.  

And in closing - people make the 5 minute assumption more often with wood than with marble, with guitars than with violins, more often with fiction writing than with computer programming.

Clean Language is a ‘natural’, accessible tool that is enjoyable, encouraging and satisfying for beginners. You don’t need a Ph.D. in psychology to ‘get it’. That’s part of its power. But Chippendale is still Chippendale, Hendrix is still Hendrix, Kingsolver still Kingsolver, and …*Grin*… Wendy still Wendy. Je’anna Clements

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This entry was posted on Saturday 16 August 2008 and is filed under Introductory Articles.

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