280 Part IV: Using Words to Entrance
Discovering Clean Language questions
The counselling psychologist David Grove created a body of knowledge
known as Clean Language, in which he perfected the art of asking clean
questions. This work continues to be developed and now forms part of some
NLP practitioner training modules. (You can read more about David Grove’s
work and the people who patiently modelled him for a number of years,
James Lawley and Penny Tompkins, in Chapter 19.)Grove created a set of questions that can be used in a variety of applications;
in psychotherapy and coaching, of course, but also in health, business, and
education. The questions come in three types and work in different ways:✓ Current perception questions: Expanding the client’s understanding of
a situation.✓ Moving time questions: Working with the client’s sense of time.
✓ Intention questions: Concentrating on the outcome the client wants.Making decisions with Clean Language
A student was having great difficulty trying to
describe why making decisions was such a
problem for her. Penny Tompkins shared this
dialogue of working with Clean Language ques-
tions with the student:‘“And, making decisions is like what?” I
enquired.
She thought for a moment and replied: “You
know, it’s like going to the dentist. I’m in the
waiting room and I’m dreading going in.”After a couple more clean questions, I could
tell she was deep inside her metaphor by the
amount of time she took to answer and in the
way she finally said, “I really need courage.”
“And what kind of courage is that courage?”
was my next question.“A courage that will help me go through it
rather than delay any longer.”“And when courage will help you go through it;
where is that courage?”
She touched her chest with her right hand and
said, “Inside me. In my heart.”I continued asking Clean Language questions
so she could develop her resource metaphor
for courage, “a strong energy filling my heart”.
At the end of our time together she said, “If you
had told me when we started that a comment
like ‘going to the dentist’ could link so directly
with my decision making, I wouldn’t have
believed it. In fact, you couldn’t have told me, I
had to experience it for myself.”’
Thanks to Penny Tompkins and James Lawley for
providing this anecdote.