Stop Paraphrasing and Improve Communication

**A colleague comes to you with a problem they can't get past. You want to help, so you offer a suggestion. They answer with "yeah, but," and a few minutes later the conversation has drifted somewhere else. A week later, the same problem is back on your desk.**

Advice often makes these conversations harder. When you offer a solution or put someone's problem into your own words, they have to stop and work out what you meant. Their attention moves off their problem and onto deciphering you, and the thinking they needed to do gets interrupted.

Clean Language was developed by the psychotherapist David Grove, and it gives you a different way to respond. People describe their problems in metaphor constantly. "I'm hitting a wall." "I'm buried under all of this." Those metaphors carry a lot of information about how the person is experiencing the problem, and often about what would resolve it. Clean Language teaches you to notice them and respond using the person's own words, so they stay foc