Taking time to reflect on what's important to you can be a great antidote to all the busy-ness of our everyday lives. This blog invites

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 music teacher friend recently shared her experience of working with a pupil who has Asperger's syndrome and struggles to manage his em

Asking a child Clean questions can help them understand their emotions better so that they can deal more calmly with the ups and downs of th

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 childre

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. As you will see, these questions were a great way of prompting Annie to expand on her answers, to dig a little deeper beneath the words she had chosen. The

What happens if we resist the temptation to rescue? If we are willing to sit alongside a person in their discomfort rather than go into ‘fi

Clean questions help to keep a conversation going without me having to think of clever things to say.

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

The Listening Space can be used for joint exploration, facilitating two people together to explore an issue that is important to them. Wheth

Meet Jo – a police sergeant who manages a community policing team. Over the past couple of years the demands of Jo’s work have changed significantly. She finds that she has an ‘increasing number of jobs half finished’, which leaves her feeling very stressed. Whilst many of the changes that have taken place are beyond her control, she believes that her stress levels aren’t helped by the fact that she is ‘not a good closer’. At a recent management training event she learnt how

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

Change the way we listen to ourselves and we make better decisions, imagine our future more clearly, and take more pleasure in what we...

Naoki Higashida's powerful description of living with autism is a salutary reminder that we should never assume to know what another per

If you're a parent you may well identify that raising children can be one of the most rewarding experiences that life has to offer. But

The whole world is a metaphor for something else. And metaphors do just arise spontaneously. When we are asked  Clean questions of the meta

Asking Clean questions is a great way of helping someone explore and develop creative ideas. The Listening Space helps to give structure to

Sophie had been suffering from awful daily headaches and was reluctant to take the strong medication for chronic migraine that her GP had prescribed her. Instead she decided to explore her symptoms by asking herself some Clean questions : What kind of pain was it? Where was the pain? Was there anything else about that pain? Did the pain have a size or a shape ? She soon realised that she was embodying her distress at having to keep sending her very reluctant 7-year old dau

Asking Clean questions of the metaphors we naturally use to describe our experience helps us to bring them into focus, making them more defi