There’s a certain amount of debate within the Clean community about using a person’s metaphors. Once you’ve used Clean Language to uncover the metaphors which underpin a person’s thinking, then what?

The full-on Clean process, in coaching or therapy, is to keep on asking Clean Language questions, to keep on exploring, until things change. Typically the metaphor transforms, this transformation is isomorphic with a real-world change, and the client gets what they wanted.

And even that is not completely ‘Clean’: the Clean Language questions still contain assumptions and metphors, though they are minimised. And therapy and coaching processes which use Clean Language, such as Penny Tompkins and James Lawley’s Framework for Change, are optimised for helping the client to get the change they want - they are not ‘neutral’.

Controversially, in a recent newsletter we used a testimonial from a hypnotherapist who would elicit the client’s metaphors in an initial session using Clean Language, then use those metphors in devising a healing script, with astonishing effect.

Several of us are also experimenting with ‘Clean selling’: if you can find out the client’s metaphor for what they want and also for the problem they want to solve, you can feed these back to them when you propose a solution. It’s the Clean step on from Anne Miller’s ‘Metaphorically Selling’, in which the salesperson comes up with their own metphors for the situaiton and for the thing they want to sell.

It’s also possible to use Clean Language to model how an expert does something, metaphorically. Once you have this information, it’s gift-wrapped for teaching to others.

And we know that teachers, statesmen, preachers, orators of all kinds have always used metaphor to get their message across, often as a fast-track to our wallets.

Is this ‘Clean’? Depending on your definition of Clean, probably not. Does it work? Brilliantly

This entry was posted on Monday 1 September 2008 and is filed under Blog.

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