Coaching practices for Solution Focused Brief Therapy Building on What Works During a Big Change

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 During a Big Change, 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
  • 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
  • Everything is genuinely awful right now and any talk of "what would better look like" feels like a slap
  • 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

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. 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
  4. 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
  5. 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
  6. 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
  7. Evaluate the outcome and adjust
    After implementing, honestly assess what worked, what didn’t, and what to do next.
    Problem-Solving Therapy, Made Practical
  8. Apply the experiential processes early, behavioral ones later
    Use consciousness-raising and emotional arousal early; counter-conditioning and stimulus control after you commit.
    The Transtheoretical Model of Change, Made Practical
  9. Identify your current stage before choosing a strategy
    Diagnose where you actually are in the change cycle before deciding what to do.
    The Transtheoretical Model of Change, Made Practical
  10. Narrow the scope: a smaller problem space is a richer one
    Restrict the problem to a specific user, use case, or scenario — the narrower the brief, the richer the possible solutions within it.
    Deliberate Constraints, Made Practical

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