Nancy Doyle and I decided to write an article on this subject a while ago, and we made some headway with it, then we realised that we wanted to take a clean approach to writing the article. This meant that rather than simply present our own ideas, we needed to find out about, and include, others' ideas, too. So we ran a session at this year's Clean Conference, where we asked people the following questions:

• What is Clean?
• Where did Clean come from?
• Clean is like... because...
• Clean is not like... because ...

Participants worked alone and then in small groups to answer these questions

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Clean Language can be used in many different contexts and for different reasons. For example, you can use it simply to model different aspects of experience. I have always been very interested in how change happens, so decided to use Clean Language to model a change that my husband experienced....

John had been smoking for about 25 years when he first attempted to give up - and he finally managed it about 10 years after that. He tried to give up several times during those ten years - and before his final, successful, attempt, the longest time he'd gone without cigarettes was seven months. Now, eight years after he smoked his last cigarette, John believes he will never light up again; now, it's easy not to smoke.

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"My life has ground to a halt."

If someone you know said this to you, what would your response be?

Some people would show concern or empathy, some would listen, some may ask questions and find out more, and some would give some well-meaning advice. Many of us would respond with a mixture of concern, listening, questions and/or advice. Of course, your actual response would depend on the relationship you had with the person in question and on the context you were in.

What most people wouldn't do is notice, or draw the person's attention to, the metaphorical nature of this remark. And yet there's likely to be a vast amount of information - and the potential for resolution or getting going again - contained within that metaphor.

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Many people have asked me how Apricot Island got its name. And I would love to be able to say it came to me in a dream, or that it emerged as a significant symbol from a Clean Language session. But it actually came about as the result of a web based name creation process.

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When Diana Gibbs jokingly remarked that she’d like some sunshine for her holiday, Marian (half-jokingly) replied, “OK – let’s give it a go”, and a clean coaching session was set up to explore this outcome…

It transpired that Diana was planning a sailing trip with her husband – except that she wasn’t! With only a month to go, she still hadn’t chartered a yacht – and she was aware that she was putting this off in the hope there’d be no boat available by the time she did get around to it.

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