Coaching practices for Solution Focused Strengths

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Solution Focused Strengths, 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
• Where I come alive is in the human glue
• All day my attention goes straight to what went wrong
• I’m trying to reach this goal by white-knuckling through the exact things I’m worst at, and it’s draining and stalling

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. 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
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. Strengths-Based Leadership, Made Practical
   Strengths-based leadership, developed by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie building on Gallup’s decades of manager research, holds that the most effective leaders invest in their own strengths and build teams whose combined strengths cover all four leadership domains — executing, influencing, relationship building, and strategic thinking. Gallup’s correlational research consistently finds that strength-focused teams report higher engagement and performance, though the causal direction is not fully established.
5. Lead from the relationship building domain — hold the team together
   People strong in relationship building are the glue that holds a team’s cohesion under pressure.
   Strengths-Based Leadership, Made Practical
6. 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
7. Set goals that build on your signature strengths
   Design goals that let your top strengths be the primary vehicle rather than your weak spots.
   VIA Character Strengths, Made Practical
8. Bridge from signature strengths to purpose
   Identify the top two or three things you do better than most people and trace how they can serve something larger.
   The Life Crafting Intervention: Scripting Your Future Self
9. Lead from the strategic thinking domain — absorb and analyze information
   People strong in strategic thinking keep the team focused on what could be, not just what is.
   Strengths-Based Leadership, Made Practical
10. Use a signature strength in a new way each day for one week
    Apply one of your top character strengths to a context or relationship where you don’t normally use it.
    VIA Character Strengths, Made Practical

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