Coaching practices for Sfbt Compliments

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

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

• 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
• When someone does something genuinely great I just toss off a "nice work" and move on, and it barely registers
• It feels like this is just how I am
• I bend over backwards to be fair to everyone else and then quietly leave myself out of the equation entirely
• I deliver my feedback as a finished verdict and then the other person just sits there closed off

Practices that may help

1. 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
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. The SBI Feedback Model, Made Practical
   The SBI model (Situation–Behavior–Impact), developed by the Center for Creative Leadership, structures feedback by anchoring it to an observable moment, describing the behavior seen rather than inferring motive, and naming the actual impact. This reduces defensiveness and attribution errors; the model is established clinical practice in leadership development, though direct RCT comparisons to other feedback approaches are limited.
4. 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.
5. Use SBI for positive feedback, not just correction
   Name the situation, behavior, and impact when someone does something right.
   The SBI Feedback Model, Made Practical
6. 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
7. 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
8. Invite a response after delivering SBI
   Close SBI by asking what the other person makes of it — not with a verdict.
   The SBI Feedback Model, Made Practical
9. Compassion-Focused Therapy: Calming the Inner Critic
   Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT), developed by Paul Gilbert, targets shame and self-criticism by training a compassionate inner voice to replace the punitive self-critic. It draws on evolutionary psychology and affective neuroscience — specifically, the finding that different emotional systems (threat, drive, soothing) have distinct neurobiological profiles. A growing body of RCT evidence supports CFT for shame-based difficulties, self-criticism, and depression, though the evidence base is smaller than for CBT.
10. Understand why the sandwich fails before replacing it
    The sandwich fails because it sends three conflicting signals at once.
    The Feedback Sandwich: Why It Doesn’t Work and What to Do Instead

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