Clean Change Cards
£13.26
Want to change stuck thinking faster than you can change your socks? Ask one or more of the Clean Language questions by drawing a card. You can use Clean Change Cards to coach yourself, or someone else.
Want to change stuck thinking faster than you can change your socks? Ask one or more of the Clean Language questions by drawing a card. You can use Clean Change Cards to coach yourself, or someone else.
Change your thinking at the turn of a card
Want to change stuck thinking faster than you can change your socks? Ask one or more of the Clean Language questions by drawing a card. You can use Clean Change Cards to coach yourself, or someone else.
Each card shows a Clean Language question. Most of the questions have slots for the coachee’s own words, labelled ‘X’ and ‘Y’. Using their words in the question makes it personally tailored, and they reach answers that fit them perfectly.
Using the cards
Please use Clean Language as a force for good by asking your questions about the positive aspects of the coachee’s experience, things they like and want more of. If you find you are exploring problems or unhappy experiences, stop and ask the coachee, “And what would you like to have happen?”
Getting into a great mental state
The questions are great for exploring the metaphors which underpin our thinking, and which drive our behaviour. You could use them to get yourself (or someone else) into a great mental state such as enthusiasm, creativity or happiness.
Here’s how: start by asking yourself “When I’m at my most enthusiastic (or the state you want), that’s like… what?” It might be “like Tigger from Winnie the Pooh on a very bouncy day” for example. That’s a metaphor – a way of talking about one kind of thing in terms of another. Then shake your phone and ask the Clean Language question about the metaphor. For example, ask, “And what kind of Tigger is that Tigger?” or, “And is there anything else about bouncy?” Keep asking questions about Tigger to find out lots of details about the metaphor – and notice what happens to you as you do so.
Random-question coaching
You can use the cards to coach yourself. Choose a situation to work with, then draw a card to be asked a random question. Note your answer and repeat…
Alternatively, work (or play!) with a partner to practice your Clean coaching easily. You can let the cards decide which question you’ll ask next – all you have to choose is which of your partner’s words to ask the question about.
Relationship coach Brian Birch said:
“I gave them to my fiancée and she can now coach me well, with minimal exposure to Clean Language.”
Another tester handed them to his PA: she coached him over the phone and achieved instant results!
Clean Change Cards are great for beginners – no previous knowledge of Clean Language is required and full instructions are included in the pack. So the ‘random question coaching’ game is an excellent way to introduce Clean Language to a group.
Learning the Clean Language questions
User Noemie Dehouck said:
“This game can really help beginners (and others!!) to save a lot of learning time thanks to your “tips”.”
The cards are a standard pack of 52 playing cards, with the usual numbers, suits etc displayed. Each card has one of the Clean Language questions on it – the frequency of each question in the pack is based on their frequency in a typical coaching session. And as a bonus, each card also includes a unique Clean Language tip written by Wendy Sullivan and Judy Rees, authors of Clean Language: Revealing Metaphors and Opening Minds.
They are great for helping you to memorise the Clean Language questions, so that you always have them on the tip of your tongue to use in conversation. Why not use them to play solitare, relaxing your conscious mind into the game while your unconscious grasps the precise wording of each question?
Acknowledgements
Clean Change Cards were created by Judy Rees and Wendy Sullivan, authors of Clean Language: Revealing Metaphors and Opening Minds. They gratefully acknowledge their debt to David Grove (the creator of these questions) and to Penny Tompkins, James Lawley and Caitlin Walker for the developments on which these cards are based.
Hans-Peter Wellke –
I had a one-day one-2-one coaching with a client. At the very beginning he asked me, “Are you able to coach yourself with your own coaching tools?” I said, “No, I use paid coaches like you, and in my network of coaches we coach each other.”
Then I remembered, “And yes, I can coach myself. A few days ago I flew back home from London to Germany and on the plane I unpacked the Clean Change Cards. I started to work with them, asking as ever, ‘What would you like to have happen?’ and picked one card after another, coaching myself with my chosen subject, writing down all of my answers.
“That worked perfectly to me, although the questions had been picked at random. By the way … (I took the cards out of my pocket) I have the cards with me. Do you like to see and to try it?” He nodded so we started to work Cleanly by using the cards. He picked one card after another, I asked the question and he put answering every new card in a row in his front on the table.
We worked almost 90 minutes having used about 30 cards, using certain cards up to six or seven times again and again (David Grove’s metadrivers) and working completely Clean. A lot of changes happened in a way he and I had not expected for this coaching day.
The originally scheduled desired outcome for this day appeared as not fitting to his role and to his responsibility in his job. He redefined his job identity, his role, and sharpened it. At the end of the 90 minutes he said: “I never felt myself so well valued, appreciated and understood like today.”
A few weeks later he told me about how well his job runs and about a conversation he had a day before when he coached someone Cleanly for the first time. “Of course it did not work as perfectly as you are trained, but how I did it, it worked amazing well. I only used the words of my conversation partner over a longer time. He felt very well understood, without awareness about my specific listening he continued talking longer and longer – and I got all the I needed.”