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Bringing a moment of calm to the festive season

Oct 30, 2019
3 min

A Listening Space for parents

I’ve recently started running Listening Space courses for parents in which participants are: introduced to models of human behaviour to help them understand their own thoughts and emotions better – such as Steve Peters’ Chimp Paradox experience powerful new ways of listening deeply to themselves and to others using Clean Language questions, and are given tools to help nurture healthy relationships within the family. I interviewed one participant, whose children are 8 and 6 ye

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Captured Moments: poems inspired by a Listening Space

Tamsin Hartley

May 31, 2019
2 min

Getting to the heart of the matter

Clean questions can transform the way that you listen. One participant from a recent Listening Space course, Mark, describes how he found himself switching to a very different kind of listening as he used these questions in a conversation with his colleague, Anna. She was telling him about how she was struggling to make a decision about a promotion she had been approached to apply for. Rather than going into his usual ‘fix-it’ mode, Mark decided to just sit back and listen as

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Tamsin Hartley

Dec 15, 2018
3 min

Bridging an unreachable gap

Teenage life comes with its ups and downs, bringing with it emotions that can feel confusing and overwhelming at times. As a parent of a teenager it is easy to find yourself distanced and shut out when all you want to do is help to make things better. In this blog Mishtu tells us about the impact that using Clean questions has had in her relationship with her 13 year-old daughter, Anika, enabling them to communicate more openly with one another. Even from when she was tiny, A

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Helping children manage their emotions: part 3

Helping children manage their emotions: part 2

Tamsin Hartley

Nov 12, 2018
2 min

Helping children manage their emotions: part 2

I’d like to introduce you to Sophie – a mother of two young children; Ella, who is eight years old, and Sam, who is five. Having found herself getting run down by all the demands of raising a young family, Sophie decided to look for more constructive ways of managing her children’s more challenging behaviour. She came across Clean questions at a parent workshop and found that they had an almost immediate impact for her: Clean questions help me to know how to help my children.

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Navigating the challenges of chronic illness

Tamsin Hartley

Oct 15, 2018
14 min

Navigating the challenges of chronic illness

I recently interviewed Annie Rappeport, a 32 year-old American PhD student, about her experience of chronic illness as part of a listening project for the International Listening Association. Clean questions were used to invite Annie to consider what has worked well for her in navigating the past six years of ill-health. It is hoped that her very eloquent and moving answers might provide a useful resource for others who find themselves in a similar situation and for the healt

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Tamsin Hartley

Jul 24, 2018
4 min

Asking questions your body can answer

When someone is feeling tension all around the top of their body, how could just two simple questions be as helpful as a massage? Clean questions are a simple, powerful and respectful way of inviting a person to explore their experience. These questions, used with the exact words or gestures the person has used, help to keep the assumptions, suggestions and interpretations of the person asking the questions out of the way - leaving the person answering the questions free to d

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Tamsin Hartley

Jan 3, 2018
2 min

The individual and the community

There is an African Zulu greeting that people give when they meet one another: Sawubona. More than our traditional ‘hello’, this word literally means ‘I see you’. It is a way of saying, ‘I see your personality, your humanity, your dignity, your respect.’ The response to this greeting is Ngikhona: ‘I am here’. You are letting the other person know that you feel you have been seen and understood, that your personal dignity has been acknowledged. Inherent in this Zulu greeting,

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Tamsin Hartley

Oct 7, 2017
2 min

Transformative listening

Change the way we listen to ourselves and we make better decisions, imagine our future more clearly, and take more pleasure in what we do. Change the way we listen to others and we can understand and connect with them with greater richness and depth, to mutual benefit. Clean Language is a simple, powerful and respectful way of communicating and exploring a situation. At its heart lies a set of Clean questions combined with a person’s exact words only. If we remain curious and

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Bringing a moment of calm to the festive season

A Listening Space for parents

Captured Moments: poems inspired by a Listening Space

Getting to the heart of the matter

A creative look at the year ahead

Bridging an unreachable gap

Helping children manage their emotions: part 3

Helping children manage their emotions: part 2

Navigating the challenges of chronic illness

Resisting the pull to rescue

Keeping the conversation going

Asking questions your body can answer

A Listening Space for two people

The individual and the community

Transformative listening

A window into the mind