Working with Clean Language can clarify goals and aspirations, help to understand the barriers to achieving change, identify resources for confidence and inner strength and often produce profound and quite transformational changes.

During the 1980's, New Zealand psychotherapist David Grove worked at developing ways to resolve his clients' traumatic memories.  Grove noticed that many of them described their symptoms in metaphor, and he discovered that by asking about these metaphors and using the client's exact words, encouraged new insights and possibilities for change. The first phase of clean language had arrived.

 Psychotherapists Penny Tompkins and James Lawley modeled Grove and converted his research and approach into techniques which could safely be used by practitioners who have no training in therapy. Coaches, Leaders and Teachers find the techniques invaluable in reducing blocks and repeating behavior patterns which are currently un- resourceful to moving forward. 

Further Modelers such at Caitlin Walker developed much of Grove’s work on space and emergent knowledge to enhance the principles of Clean Language and expand its uses in both the mental health and business fields.

Working with clean language provides clients the space to:

Some clients choose to take their learning of Clean Language further and this can be achieved by clean language coaching, studying books and web sites.

Workshops and programmes such as 1 day to 5 day or 6 x 2 hour mini workshops presented by CAW Skills.

ILM Coaching, Team and Leadership development is also available working at Levels 3, 5 and 7.   

Caw Skills are happy to suggest further reading and study sources for anyone seeking to learn more about Clean Language.

A number of useful books on the subject are:
Metaphors in Mind – Penny Tompkins and James Lawley

Clean Language – Revealing Metaphors, Opening Minds – Wendy Sullivan, Judy Rees

Metaphors We Live By – George Lakoff and Mark Johnson

Metaphors are part of our everyday speech.  The Personal Ecology is based on the metaphor of a clients own personal landscape.  An on-line tool assists in the building of a unique metaphor landscape and personal profile which examines an individuals personal way of behaving.

The Personal Ecology Profile (PEP) has been developed by Simon P Walker and Jenny Johnson and there are 5 main assumptions upon which Personal Ecology as a theory is based:

Working with the PEP tool provides clients with the choice to receive further information on the behaviours they choose and adds to the coaching experience.

The PEP can be completed through CAW Skills and coaching or team development planned to suit individual needs.

In addition further reading can be found in:

Leading out of Who you Are & Leading with nothing to lose by  Simon P Walker.

Magical Spelling

This learning strategy is designed predominantly for those many people who have tried to use other mental strategies to learn to spell and, despite many long hours of study, have failed to make progress.  These people, many of them very intelligent, are often branded lazy, stupid or careless.

Magical Spelling is not only about learning, it is about self-esteem, self belief and achievement.

Robert Dilts (NLP behavioural skills trainer and coach) identified the way great spellers spell. Great spellers use the visual recall of the brain – the part of the brain we can all access to recall our favourite place to be or an old photograph.  Dilts noticed that first the great spellers write or think of a word.  Then they check the spelling of that word against a ‘dictionary’ they have in their visual memory.  If their word is the same as the one in their ‘dictionary’ they get a feeling that tells them it’s correct.  If they don’t have the word, or the word they have written doesn’t match, a different feeling tells them to look it up.

Cricket Kemp, an English and Drama teacher, focussing on special needs, spent over ten years researching the literacy abilities of children and adults.  Cricket then worked with Dilts to adapt his model and built the strategies and practices of Magical Spelling.

The practices of Magical Spelling are by no means restricted to spelling.  Visualising success and mental rehearsal are teaching tools which can also be applied to supporting mental maths, exam revision and foreign language studies.  By connecting to their learning brain children notice a difference in their approach to learning – whatever the subject.

Learning to Learn

Clean Language is an excellent skill to build classroom management, in particular assisting teachers to get to the root of problems and identifying what children need to do to move forward with their learning.

The use of spatial anchoring from NLP (research linked to classical conditioning by Pavlov in 1927) is a classic style of classroom management which many teachers know, yet forget to use.  Covert instructions can be given in many ways such as always standing in the same place to praise the whole class, standing in a different place to request silence and the most widely used instruction of playing music when it is time to tidy up.

Linking with logical Levels to build a metaphor for learning at your best, children can connect to their own internal model of how they need to be to learn at their very best.

Tailored programmes in Learning Strategies are offered by CAW Skills:

Logical Levels can provide a valuable resource for identifying your thinking, information gathering and communication processes.  It supports the modelling process to identify how we are when we are at our best.  It allows individuals to organise thinking about themselves, their teams and the organisation.

The model investigates how we operate and the best environments for success.  It identifies what we do, how we do it, values, personal identity and the ultimate purpose for all we do.   

Developed by Robert Dilts and based on the work of Gregory Bateson (anthropologist) it is often referred to as the Neurological levels.  The model sees behaviour as a system.

Purpose – what?
Identity – who?
Beliefs and Values – Why
Ability and skill - How?
Behaviour – What?
Environment – when, where, with whom?

You can tell what level a person is thinking at by listening to what they say:

‘This office is too busy & noisy to plan’ – environment
‘I should be spending more time planning’ – behaviour
‘I don’t know how to start this plan off’ – ability
‘It’s a waste of time planning a year ahead’ – belief
‘I am useless at planning’ – identity
‘Why plan?’ - purpose

Personal and team coaching explores the levels by considering:

Through CAW Skills, development can be achieved by personal coaching, team development and leadership programmes.

In addition further reading can be found in:

Principles of NLP  - Joseph O’connor and Ian McDermott
From Coach to Awakener – Robert Dilts