
Clean Coach Certification Programme (accredited ICF Level 1 programme)
Are you a coach, aspiring coach or Clean Language facilitator? Or a manager, consultant, HR specialist, health worker or leader who would like to gain skills in coaching with Clean Language? Would you like to gain formal accreditation as a coach with the International Coaching Federation (ICF)?
Join our Clean Coach Certification Programme to gain training in clean coaching which also forms the basis of your application to become an Associate Accredited Coach (ACC).
The ICF is the leading global organisation for coaches and coaching, dedicated to advancing the coaching profession by setting high standards, providing independent certification and building a worldwide network of trained coaching professionals. ICF accreditation is often required by those procuring coaching services - as a guarantee of quality.
The ICF defines coaching as: Partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximise their personal and professional potential.
We recognised this definition as being a good fit with what happens during Clean Language sessions, and together with our colleagues in Sweden - Lena Sobel and Søren Holm, both experienced ICF coaches - we set out to create an accredited course that would allow coaches to make full use of Clean Language and Symbolic Modelling within their coaching practice.
During the course you will:
- Establish definitions for coaching, Clean Language and Symbolic Modelling and learn how they can combine to produce powerful and often life-changing experiences for your clients.
- Learn the basic clean questions of David Grove and how they can be used for maximum effect.
- Practice Caitlin Walker's Clean Set Up model and ascertain different ways this can be used in a coaching context.
- Find out how to use clean and clean-ish questions to reach and maintain agreements with clients, both at the start of a series of sessions and at the start of each individual session.
- Discover how to identify problem statements, remedy statements, desired outcomes and resources and how to use clean questions to direct clients' attention more to desired outcomes and resources.
- Determine which are the best clean questions for moving a client's attention from their conceptual, everyday world, towards a more metaphorical or symbolic expression of that world.
- Learn how you can help your client to clarify the structure of their thinking by developing the unconscious metaphors they use.
- Gain a deep understanding of the importance of metaphors in everyday communication and in coaching.
- Find out how using Clean Language is a natural way to cultivate trust and safety with your client.
- Participate in coaching practice sessions that will bring you rich personal development - an essential ingredient in becoming a coach.
- Practice the Clean Feedback model during these sessions and integrate this into your coaching practice too.
- Improve your listening skills and develop your coaching presence.
- Discover how to partner with your client to design goals, actions and accountability measures that integrate and expand new learning.
- Learn how the skills of Clean Language and Symbolic Modelling relate to the ICF Core Competencies.
- Understand the ICF Code of Ethics and what needs to happen for you to apply it in your own coaching practice.
- Have access to an online manual and to the Clean Campus - our online community of practice, where you can meet and practise with others on the course and with participants from other clean courses.
The training takes place over 8 days in person or 15 x 4-hour sessions via Zoom. There'll be teaching, discussion, practice activities, demonstrations and time for reflection. Within practice sessions you will receive feedback from experienced clean coaches who have already gained their accreditation with the ICF. Following the training you will join two online group mentoring sessions and you will also receive 3 hours of 1-2-1 mentoring.
The Clean Coach Certification Programme is run according to clean principles, which means that although we’ll be going in a definite direction, the way we get there will be partly down to you and your needs, your questions and your interests. From the outset we’ll be discovering what kind of training you would like to have and we’ll be tailoring what we do to meet your needs. We’ll be checking in with you regularly, because we know that your ideas about what you’d like to have happen are likely to change as new information - about yourself, the process and the course itself - becomes available.
We’ll be respecting and encouraging diverse thinking. We’ll be welcoming your contributions and your questions and we’ll be suggesting you ask them as they occur to you, so that your learning can happen in the moment. We love helping people to learn the skills of Clean Coaching - and to witness the personal development that occurs when these skills are put into practice. We hope you’ll find this programme fun, interesting and challenging, that you’ll enjoy the whole experience and that you’ll learn a lot.
This Clean Coach Certification Programme is accredited as an ICF Level 1 programme. It includes 52 hours training, 10 hours mentoring and your performance evaluation (where you record and transcribe a coaching session and submit this for evaluation). To gain the ACC accreditation you will also need to do 100 hours of client coaching and pass the ICF's Credentialling Exam. Please note that there is an additional fee, payable to the ICF, for the credentialling process.

Our mission / vision for being an ICF accredited coach education provider (docx 14KB)
Our learning philosophy (docx 15KB)
Frequently asked questions
What is the ICF and how does it relate to clean coaching?
ICF stands for International Coaching Federation, a leading global organisation for coaches
and coaching. The ICF is dedicated to advancing the coaching profession by setting high
standards, providing independent certification, and building a worldwide network of trained
coaching professionals.
The ICF defines coaching as: “Partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative
process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. The
process of coaching often unlocks previously untapped sources of imagination, productivity
and leadership.”
Who was David Grove?
David Grove was the creative genius who developed Clean Language, Clean Space and Emergent Knowledge - the clean approaches upon which the entire field of ‘clean’ has been built.
What is Clean Language?
Clean Language is a simple set of questions developed by counselling psychologist David Grove. These questions are used with a person’s own words to direct their attention to some aspect of their own experience. Asking these questions in the right context often results in an interesting new insight or the recognition of some new possibility. And if that new possibility is then questioned using Clean Language, the result can be quite profound. Clean questions invite people to consider their experience from different perspectives and they are often surprised by their own capacity to generate new, powerful and useful ideas about their own experience.
What is Symbolic Modelling?
Symbolic Modelling was created by Penny Tompkins and James Lawley when they worked with and observed David Grove over several years, to discover what he was doing to achieve his phenomenal results. They combined David’s ideas with ideas from the fields of cognitive linguistics, systems thinking and NLP to produce a model which could be taught to others to enable them to achieve the same kinds of results as David.
What is Clean Feedback?
Clean Feedback is a way of giving someone (or yourself) feedback that is likely to be acted upon. This is because it separates out what actually happened from what you are making up about that event and from the impact it is having.
Testimonials
This is the best training workshop experience I've had in my professional career. How the programme is structured and organized, and the support are all exemplary. And Marian Way is a superb teacher who makes complex Clean Language topics easily understandable - generous, always on focus, and kind. And most valuable is her rich experience and knowledge. Best of all is learning a whole new way to become an even better coach, transcending the role of just being a provider of advice or just some accountability project manager, but facilitating true genuine self-directed life-changing transformation for clients, on their own terms. And that it also qualifies for ICF certification is just the icing on the cake. I cannot recommend this training and development programme for coaches highly enough.
Jonn Kares
I started the Clean Coach Certification programme after a few years of deciding what would be the best next step for me to combine Clean Language skills with a planned programme of study to help me develop the next stage of my career. I am a nurse, working in healthcare and knew that I wanted a more focused approach to support the change that I wanted in my career. I joined the Clean Coach Certification programme with some trepidation as I expected it to be mainly experienced coaches and I would feel an outsider! That was not the case at all. The design of the programme and the skills of the leaders allowed me to fully engage in the process of exploring and challenging myself. I had attended some Clean Language skills training before, but as a face-to-face programme, and discovered the power of using clean questions in many conversations. This training was online, delivered over a few weeks (which went by too quickly) and I remain amazed at how much I grew in my skills and enthusiasm for coaching using CL. So much so, that I am now describing myself as a coach and changing how I earn a living! The focus of this training is the development of skills via practice and feedback, just what I needed to develop my confidence and areas of development/training need. And…I have made new friends from across the world. I would recommend this training for anyone who wants to put their heart, as well as their head, into their coaching practice. I learnt so much about who I am as a coach and what I bring.
Sue Cradock
I want you to know how much I appreciate all the time and energy you put into the success of your Clean students. As someone who has taken a lot of workshops and trainings over the years, nothing compares to what you have created with Clean Learning and the way you carry on David Grove's legacy.
Anonymous
Upcoming events
Clean Coach Certification Programme (ICF ACC) in Switzerland
- Places available
- 14-17 May and 11-14 June 2025, 8:30 to 5:30 CET each day
- Pro Natura Champ Pittet, Switzerland
- With Marian Way , Caitlin Walker PhD
Clean Coach Certification Programme (ICF ACC)
- Places available
- Tuesdays 4 November 2025 to 24 February 2026, 9am to 1pm GMT each day
- Online via Zoom
- With Jacqueline Ann Surin , Marian Way
Clean Coach Certification Programme (ICF ACC)
- Places available
- Tuesdays 4 November 2025 to 24 February 2026, 2pm to 6pm GMT each day
- Online via Zoom
- With Doris Leibold , Marian Way
Featured products

Clean Approaches for Coaches
Marian Way's book about creating the conditions for change within a coaching session, using Clean Language and Symbolic Modelling.
£20.00
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