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A year of Clean Language

It's been quite a year! So as this one draws to a close I thought I'd offer some musings and reflections on the year just gone, as I experienced it.

The highlights of the year were:

Highlights

  1. Attending Penny and James' Symbolic Modelling Part Three
  2. Meeting David Grove in London
  3. David visiting the Yorkshire practice group
  4. Finishing my dissertation and graduating, receiving my Masters Degree
  5. Completing and being awarded the IPD Certificate in Training Practice
  6. The Yorkshire practice group was still going strong at the end of the year
  7. Doing another one-day introduction and the feedback was great

I went down to London earlier in the year to take part in Penny and James' "Symbolic Modelling - Part Three". An excellent weekend, a quite a journey of personal discovery.

As I drove home (wending my way back up the M1) is was thinking that this is the start of something big. The interest in Clean Language is growing and it offers something that NLP doesn't. But I couldn't put my finger on what that was. Yes I know it's gentler, more respectful and in many cases more 'powerful' than some NLP patterns, but I still had the feeling that something substantial was beginning.

That feeling has continued throughout the year. My intuition is that Clean Language has the potential to enable people to reach deeper resources within them than they have ever reached before.

And then I met David Grove. It was a pleasure to meet David and it was inspiring to to watch him work - his skill and fluency with Clean Language were wonderful. I find watching an expert literally 'inspiring', it gives me something to aim for, a new level of skill to aspire to.

David shared with us his thoughts on the origins, tenets and philosphies of Clean Language. He also ran us through an exercise developing three new Clean Language questions, quite an education.

The very next day I was back in Huddersfield where Andy and I ran another one day introduction to Clean Language. The feedback from the participants was wonderful. The number of participants was also wonderful. We expected may twelve to fifteen, in the end we had twenty.

An interesting note is that around a third of the participants found out about the workshop through our websites and internet promotion. This was a big boost, Andy and I have talked often about the possible strength of the Internet, and here was direct evidence of how powerful (and profitable) it can be.

It was great when David visited the Yorkshire practice group - we expected twelve or so people, and twenty plus turned up!!! I won't go into details (I've already written a review of the evening) but it was certainly one of the highlights of the year.

At the final meeting of the year of the Yorkshire practice group we practiced with the 'Words That Wound' pattern which David had shared with us - for me a lot of Clean Language made sense when I learned to use that pattern.

As a final exercise I demonstrated a pattern I had developed, a Clean Language version of the Core Transformation process. The results were wonderful, so I'll soon write up the pattern so that others can use it and develop it.

It was great fun to play the old gown-and-silly-hat game at my Graduation, I finally made it. I originally moved to Huddersfield in 1982 to do a degree in chemistry, so it's only taken me sixteen years to graduate! (For the record I was awarded an MSc in Marketing.) With that and achieving the IPD Certificate in Training Practice earlier in the year it's been quite busy academincally speaking.

So what of 1999? I certainly get the feeling that things are going from strength to strength, so watch out world - here we come!