Coaching practices for Exception Finding Sfbt

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Exception Finding Sfbt, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• It feels like this is just how I am
• I don’t believe I can actually pull this off, and the things I do that take real grit I just wave away as nothing
• I bend over backwards to be fair to everyone else and then quietly leave myself out of the equation entirely
• I’m reaching for a framework that worked great somewhere else and dropping it onto this situation, and a part of me isn’t sure the two cases are actually the same kind of thing underneath
• All day my attention goes straight to what went wrong

Practices that may help

1. Exception Finding: When Is the Problem Already Less Severe?
   Identify times when the problem was absent or less severe — these are evidence that solutions already exist.
   Solution-Focused Brief Therapy: Building On What Works
2. Solution-Focused Brief Therapy: Building On What Works
   Solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT), developed by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg, directs attention to what already works — client strengths, past successes, and desired futures — rather than to analyzing problems. Meta-analyses report small-to-moderate positive effects across a range of presenting issues, with particular strength in behavioral problems and depression in adult populations.
3. Complimenting Strengths Throughout the Session
   Deliberately name real strengths, efforts, and resources the person displays — not as praise but as information.
   Solution-Focused Brief Therapy: Building On What Works
4. Be Fair: include yourself in the fairness you extend to others
   Apply the same standards of fairness to yourself that you would to someone you respect.
   FAST: DBT’s Skill for Maintaining Self-Respect in Relationships
5. Question whether the category you’re reasoning from actually fits
   Before applying a model or framework, verify that the category it was built on genuinely matches your situation.
   The Ludic Fallacy: When You Mistake Real Life for a Game
6. FAST: DBT’s Skill for Maintaining Self-Respect in Relationships
   FAST — Fair, Apologies (no unnecessary ones), Stick to values, Truthful — is a DBT interpersonal effectiveness skill developed by Marsha Linehan for maintaining self-respect in relationships. While DEAR MAN aims for getting what you need and GIVE aims for relationship health, FAST targets the internal cost: whether you feel like yourself and respect yourself after the interaction.
7. The Fogg Behavior Model, Made Practical
   BJ Fogg’s model states that behavior happens when three elements converge at the same moment: sufficient motivation, sufficient ability, and a prompt. If a behavior isn’t happening, one of these three is the bottleneck — and diagnosing which one tells you exactly what to change. The model is practitioner-developed with strong theoretical grounding; large-scale RCT evidence is limited but the framework is widely used in product design and behavior change programs.
8. Behavioral Chain Analysis: The DBT Method for Understanding Problem Behaviors
   Behavioral chain analysis (BCA), a core DBT skill developed by Marsha Linehan, maps every link in the chain of events — from the original vulnerability through the triggering event, thoughts, feelings, and actions — that led to a problem behavior. By making the chain visible, BCA reveals multiple points where the sequence could have been broken, turning a post-hoc autopsy into a concrete prevention plan.
9. Building a Second Brain (BASB), Made Practical
   Building a Second Brain (BASB) is Tiago Forte’s system for capturing, organizing, distilling, and expressing ideas using a personal knowledge management (PKM) system. The four-step CODE framework (Capture, Organize, Distill, Express) structures an external system that reduces the cognitive load of remembering and re-finding information. BASB is a practitioner framework grounded in cognitive-offloading and note-taking research rather than a formally tested protocol.
10. The Formula First-Session Task and Between-Session Noticing
    Assign between-session observation tasks that direct attention toward what’s already working.
    Solution-Focused Brief Therapy: Building On What Works

Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.