Three years ago, Wendy Sullivan and Paul Field launched the Clean Change Community with an ambitious dream: to create a vibrant, long-term community of people who love Clean Language, love to learn, and want to develop truly exceptional skills. Not just a training programme, but a living, breathing community where members could support each other on their personal and professional journeys—a place where everyone could make a difference to others and to the world.
Clean Language—a questioning approach that helps coaches and therapists support clients to discover their own solutions without imposing assumptions—has been evolving since David Grove’s pioneering work around the 1980s.
Looking back at this past year, it’s clear that Paul and Wendy’s vision for their community has flourished in remarkable ways. The Clean Change Community has grown in depth, creativity, and connection, generating innovations that are expanding the boundaries of Clean Language practice. Here’s a glimpse into how this unique learning community is pushing the field forward.
Training Innovations: Deepening the Foundations
Like any good expedition, the Clean Change Community’s training programmes have continued to venture into new territory—charting fresh paths and discovering hidden depths.
Embodied Clean: A Major Refresh
Embodied Clean—an innovative approach that brings together the precision of Clean Language with the power of embodied awareness—received a significant update this year. The training now includes a complete list of activities with a comprehensive handout reference guide, new sessions on Symbolic Bodying (more on this below) and using the “Notice, Trust, Value, Act” model from The Wheel of Consent, plus numerous refinements across many of the processes.
What makes this update special is the collaborative effort behind it. Community members assisted with training delivery, contributed to reference materials, and helped create new demo videos showcasing Embodied Clean techniques in action—a testament to how the community is developing expertise that feeds back into improving the training itself.
Heart of Clean: Back to Basics (With a Twist)
Penny Tompkins and James Lawley’s Framework for Change is one of Clean Language’s core structures for learning to facilitating client change. This year Wendy and Paul went back to basics and reworked Framework for Change as a series of “tacks” (guiding the client’s focus on attention with specific questions to achieve a particular kind of knowing for the client), making it easier to learn and follow.
Paul and Wendy also modelled things that expert facilitators often do that aren’t explicitly mentioned in the original Framework for Change. This includes a useful pattern they’ve called “Expand/Condense”, nine distinct strategies for supporting clients to access and use metaphor, and new ways to use sequencing (a Clean Language technique for modelling what happens over time) in particular situations that involve states of mind. Even familiar territory can reveal new paths when you look with fresh eyes.
Certification: The Boot Camp Arrives (With AI Support)
This year is the first time the Clean Change Community is running its Certification programme online. To support this, Wendy and Paul have developed a structured preparation approach they’re calling the “Boot Camp”—giving aspiring certified practitioners more opportunity to learn and practise before assessment.
Perhaps most excitingly, they’ve created an AI-based tool that helps assessors provide richer, more detailed feedback to participants. Starting with the audio from a Zoom recording, the AI assistant produces formatted transcripts that are easier to read and study, ticksheets showing what questions the facilitator asked and identifying the Clean Questions used, plus a basic analysis of questioning patterns.
This tool is proving valuable not just for assessors, but for practitioners learning from each other’s sessions—they can review transcripts, consider how they might respond to a client’s words, and learn from the patterns in how questions flow across different facilitators’ sessions.
Community Innovations: Creating Together
This year has been rich with new ways for members to connect, learn, and play together.
Festival of Practice: Year Three
The community’s third annual Festival of Practice in August saw community members stepping forward to share their innovations and facilitate sessions. Rather than the usual training calls, August becomes a time for member-led exploration and experimentation.
This year’s programme included sessions on topics including Clean Gamification, Psychoactivity, Clean Self-Facilitation, the Theory of Constructed Emotion, Messy Drawing, comparing relational models of therapy with Symbolic Modelling, working with dreams using reversing and mental imagery techniques, and research findings on “Artfully Guiding Heroic Quests”.
It’s become a wonderful rhythm in the community’s year—a time when members share what they’ve been developing, exploring, and discovering in their own practice.
The Adventure Playground
The Adventure Playground has continued as a space for playing at the edges of Clean—exploring unanswered questions, challenging assumptions, trying out new ideas, or integrating Clean with other approaches. These workshops are led by community members eager to experiment and discover.
This year saw sessions including:
Vocal Adventure Playground explored pace, tone, and rhythm in coaching conversations. Inspired by Clean Language founder David Grove’s work, participants experimented with slow-motion questioning, deep tonal shifts, and rhythmic speech patterns—pure experimental play, noticing what happens when voice becomes a conscious element of practice.
One Word flipped the usual New Year intention-setting on its head. Instead of choosing a word for the year ahead, participants used Clean Language questions to reflect on the year’s highlights and “chunk up” to discover their One Word for 2025 to date. Then they explored what that word might offer for the rest of the year and beyond.
Practice Groups: Learning by Doing
Something simple but powerful emerged this year: member-initiated practice groups. Created and organised by the people who attend them, these groups provide regular space for practising whatever members choose to focus on. Sometimes the most valuable structures are the ones that simply create space for people to learn together.
Messy Drawing Explorers: A Creative Investigation
Following a presentation at the Festival of Practice, something sparked. A group of interested members began exploring “Messy Drawing” in more depth, developing the approach and techniques together. They are preparing to present their findings at Metaphorum, the annual conference for the entire Clean Language community—taking an idea developed within the Clean Change Community out into the wider Clean world. That’s exactly the kind of innovation and cross-pollination that makes vibrant communities thrive.
The In-Person Day: Meeting Face-to-Face
On 11th September, something rather special happened. The usually online community gathered in person—a rare treat that was particularly exciting as members from the US joined UK-based practitioners.
The group explored activities using gestures and space—far more interesting in person than on screen—including enacting a metaphor landscape. These face-to-face connections add another dimension to the relationships built through regular online interaction.
Taking Innovation to Metaphorum
Metaphorum is the conference for the entire Clean Language community worldwide, and last time saw Clean Change Community members presenting innovative approaches they’d developed:
Clean Self-Facilitation emerged from one member’s process of modelling how she uses Clean Language to facilitate herself. She shared both the process itself and the insights that emerged from that modelling, offering others a map for their own self-facilitation journeys—a practical example of how personal exploration can generate new approaches that benefit the wider field.
Symbolic Bodying is a powerful approach that evolved from explorations in Embodied Clean. It involves representing and exploring a resource (an internal state) with the body—as a static physical shape, a gesture, or a movement. Embodying a state physically generates new and useful information that may not emerge through just talking or drawing, helping to integrate mind and body into a more complete experience. The approach is playful, accessible, and revealing in ways that continue to surprise both practitioners and clients.
What This All Means
Three years in, the Clean Change Community has become something remarkable—not because of executing any grand plan perfectly, but because members have shown up with curiosity, creativity, and genuine care for each other. They’ve taken risks, offered their ideas, facilitated sessions, supported each other’s learning, and pushed the boundaries of what Clean Language can be and do.
The innovations this year demonstrate what happens when skilled, thoughtful people create together—when someone shares an idea and others pick it up and run with it; when groups emerge because someone sees a need and steps up; when people cross oceans and meet face-to-face because connection matters.
For trainers Paul Field and Wendy Sullivan, the joy continues to come from getting to know new people and watching members develop into exceptional Clean Language facilitators who continue deepening their skills. The genuine care and support that’s always been a hallmark of this community has deepened even further. And the innovation that emerges when given space to explore and create continues to surprise in the best possible way.
The Clean Change Community offers more than just training—it provides weekly live sessions on Zoom, e-learning courses, practice groups, group supervision, and opportunities to explore the expanding edges of Clean Language. Members can join development paths for beginners through to advanced practitioners, with everything included in a monthly membership that makes long-term learning sustainable and accessible.
As the community enters its fourth year, one thing is clear: when you bring together people who love learning, give them sophisticated tools to explore, and create space for innovation and connection, remarkable things emerge. Here’s to another year of learning, growing, innovating, and making a difference in the world—together.