Coaching practices for Solution Focused Brief Therapy Building on What Works After a Loss

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Solution Focused Brief Therapy Building on What Works After a Loss, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

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

  • All day my attention goes straight to what went wrong
  • Everything is genuinely awful right now and any talk of "what would better look like" feels like a slap
  • I finally tried something and it only half-worked, and my whole brain went "see, nothing I do ever works"
  • It feels like this is just how I am
  • I know everything I want to get away from, but if you asked me what "better" actually looks like

Practices that may help

  1. 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.
  2. 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
  3. Coping Questions
    When things seem terrible, ask how the person is managing at all — acknowledging and excavating their resilience.
    Solution-Focused Brief Therapy: Building On What Works
  4. Evaluate the outcome and adjust
    After implementing, honestly assess what worked, what didn’t, and what to do next.
    Problem-Solving Therapy, Made Practical
  5. 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
  6. Preferred Future: Describing Life When the Problem Is Solved
    Ask the person to describe in concrete, behavioral detail what life looks like when things are better.
    Solution-Focused Brief Therapy: Building On What Works
  7. Identify and address secondary stressors
    Name the practical, identity, and relational challenges the loss has created — and work on them as restoration.
    The Dual Process Model of Grief, Made Practical
  8. Look honestly for what has grown or changed for the better
    Without minimising the loss, notice any growth, change, or perspective that has emerged from it.
    Meaning Reconstruction in Grief, Made Practical
  9. Reframing loss as transformation
    When something ends or is lost, practise asking what it is becoming rather than only mourning what it was.
    Zhuangzi and the Practice of Perspective Shift
  10. Run brief after-action reviews without blame
    After any significant outcome — success or failure — ask four questions together as a team.
    Psychological Safety in Teams

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