What is Clean Language?

Clean Language is a questioning approach developed by counselling psychologist David Grove. He designed a small but powerful set of questions that use a person’s own words to gently guide their attention toward their inner experience. When asked in context, these questions often open the door to new insights or possibilities. And when those new discoveries are explored further using clean questions, the results can be unexpectedly deep and transformative.

Clean questions encourage people to look at their experience from fresh perspectives — often revealing new, resourceful ideas about themselves. This way of inquiring has found applications across many fields, including coaching, psychotherapy, leadership, health, and education.

David Grove noticed that people naturally describe their experiences using metaphors — symbolic expressions that often operate below conscious awareness. By listening closely to these metaphors and reflecting them back, clients can access a deeper, more embodied understanding of their own thinking and behavioural patterns — what Grove called their “truth.”

Clean facilitators use these questions, along with the client’s exact words and metaphors, to create conditions where genuine and sustainable change can take root.