It’s just over six years since I first met David Grove, creator of Clean Language.

I can date it easily because we met at NLP Conference in 2005 – and this year’s Conference is a couple of weeks away.

I had the job of interviewing him for an article in Resource magazine, and ended up, as I put it at the time, “dangling upside-down in a dark, sub-zero November car park on a psycho-active fairground ride”.

It was the beginning of a fantastic voyage which led to me co-authoring the book “Clean Language” – now available in Japanese and shortly in Russian – and having a great many other adventures, including hundreds of hours of training and coaching using David’s Clean processes.

Six years may have passed, and David’s death a couple of years ago changed many things.

But when I re-read the article recently, I noticed that the central themes have stayed with me. Only this morning, I was writing about the fact that the more powerful the process is, the greater the possible danger: “Accidents with chainsaws are rarely trivial” as Neil Scotton puts it in the article.

And my understanding of what’s really going on has barely changed. The other night I was talking to colleagues about how my coaching sessions seemed to take clients away from airy-fairy personal development fantasy, and work with the client’s “ground truth”. It seems that unwittingly, I’ve been going for the place where I thought David was working, then.

As I said in the article: “It’s to do with the fact that people don’t experience the world as it really is. Each of us creates our own reality, by filtering what’s out there through what we believe.

“What I think David is doing is seeking change by working directly with the reality that his clients experience on the inside, at the deepest level. Never mind that it’s not “true”, never mind it’s different to his and therefore seems wrong.

“He’s working with that part of the client that expresses itself through symbols, dreams, physical gestures, movement, and metaphors. And using these techniques, that part can resolve its deepest traumas, find its own solutions — and live happily ever after.”

Read the full article here