When Naming the Gap Isn't Enough: Possible Selves and Collaborative Problem Solving

What each one is actually for

Possible Selves Exercise

The Possible Selves Exercise puts a future identity into words specific enough to be discussed. You name two people: the one you hope to be at some stated point ahead, described by what they actually do rather than by what they are like, and the one you are afraid of being if the intervening time goes the way the recent past has. It came out of Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius's 1986 account of how people carry particular pictures of who they might become, and the finding underneath it is narrow and worth stating precisely — a specific, felt image tends to move behavior in ways a general aspiration does not. Most descriptions treat it as a private writing task, and it usually is. But nothing about the exercise requires a pen or solitude. Asked out loud, as two questions — who do you want to be when this happens next time, and who are you afraid of being if it keeps happening — it works in a conversation, which is what makes it available to a practice like Collaborative Problem Solving at all.

Collaborative Problem Solving

Collaborative Problem Solving, developed by Ross Greene and Stuart Ablon for children whose behavior looks explosive or defiant, starts from a claim that sounds mild and is not: kids do well if they can. Where the usual reading of a repeated outburst is that the child is unwilling, this approach reads it as a specific unsolved problem the child does not currently have the skills to get through — and the whole method is built to find out which one. In practice it runs as a three-step conversation, held deliberately outside the heat of the moment rather than during it. First, the empathy step: name one specific recurring situation in neutral language — 'I've noticed it's been hard to start homework after school' — and then do nothing but gather the child's own account of what makes it hard, without correcting it. Second, put the adult's concern on the table, briefly and once. Third, the invitation: ask the child to think of a solution with you that would address both concerns, and take theirs seriously enough to try it. Greene calls the imposing-your-will alternative Plan A and dropping the expectation for now Plan C; this three-step conversation is Plan B, and it is the whole practice.

What you get out of pairing them

The two sides of this come to it with different complaints.

If you run Collaborative Problem Solving conversations — as a parent, a teacher, a clinician — you know the specific flatness of a solved incident. The unsolved problem behind Thursday's meltdown gets found, a workable plan gets built, Thursday goes better, and the whole conversation has still been organized around a thing going wrong. Nothing in the method asks what the child is heading toward. Adding the two possible-selves questions gives the conversation an aim beyond the absence of the last incident, and it tends to do something else that is more practically useful: children will often say the feared version out loud when they will not say the unmet need directly. 'Someone everyone's annoyed at' arrives faster than 'the transition from recess is hard for me,' and it points at the same place.

If possible-selves work is what you do, usually alone and usually about yourself, the complaint is different and older. Some gaps close when you name them and some sit there for years, fully named, in high definition, not moving. The exercise has no account of the second kind, because its underlying claim is about motivation and the second kind is not a motivation problem. What Collaborative Problem Solving hands you is a genuinely different first question. Instead of asking how to want it more, you ask what the current pattern is accomplishing — because on this account, a behavior that keeps producing the feared self is not an absence of effort, it is a strategy that is working at something, and you have not yet found out what.

That question is available to an adult sitting alone with a notebook, and it is a better question than more motivation.

What Possible Selves Exercise rests on

• Concrete goals outperform vague aspirations observational studies
  Specifying a concrete hoped-for or feared image of the future is more motivating and actionable than an abstract aspiration.
• Future self continuity motivates present action observational studies
  Vividly imagining one's own future self increases psychological connection to that self and motivates present behavior aligned with it.
• Gap awareness motivates change plausible mechanism
  Awareness of the gap between one's current self and a hoped-for or feared future self motivates action to close that gap.

What Collaborative Problem Solving rests on

• Externalizing makes pattern visible randomised trials
  Putting an internal pattern into an external, structured form makes it visible and available for examination instead of remaining implicit and merely enacted.
• Parts have positive intent clinical practice
  A behavior that looks like misbehavior is usually a mistaken strategy aimed at meeting a legitimate underlying need rather than an expression of badness itself.
• Collaborative solution generation increases buy in observational studies
  Jointly generating a solution with the person who has the problem produces more durable follow-through than an imposed solution.

Where they actually meet

Both practices work by externalizing — putting an implicit pattern into spoken or written form, visible enough to act on, rather than leaving it to be simply enacted or endured. Collaborative Problem Solving externalizes the unsolved problem behind a specific outburst, treating the behavior as a mistaken strategy for a real need rather than badness to be punished. The possible-selves exercise externalizes something adjacent but different, not a present problem but a future identity, hoped-for and feared versions written out concretely enough to guide today's action. The seam is that a diagnosed problem and an imagined future self are both material that was previously running someone from behind their eyes and becomes, once written or spoken out loud, something they can look at together. What CPS does for a present pattern, possible-selves work does for a future one; put next to each other, an unsolved problem and a feared self often turn out to be the same material seen from two different distances in time.

The principle underneath both

Both practices refuse the same explanation, and refusing it is what makes each of them work.

The explanation is: they don't want it enough. Collaborative Problem Solving refuses it in the open — kids do well if they can is a sentence written specifically to replace won't with can't, which moves attention off willingness and onto what is actually in the way. The possible-selves exercise looks like the opposite, since it is usually filed under motivation. But read its actual claim closely and it refuses the same thing: it does not say that people who fail to change want it less, it says that a vague picture gives you nothing to act on and a specific one does. That is a statement about the shape of what is in front of a person, not about the size of their desire.

So the pattern under both, which neither tradition owns: being stuck is information about conditions, not a verdict on character. When something has not moved, the productive question is what the situation is currently arranged to produce and what has not been made sayable — not how much the person cares.

That second half matters as much as the first. Both practices require the invisible thing to be spoken or written before anything can be done with it, which is why both are conversations or documents rather than resolutions. And both carry the same characteristic failure when the principle gets dropped: a Collaborative Problem Solving conversation slides back into Plan A, an adult imposing a solution they had already decided on, and a possible-selves gap curdles into evidence of personal inadequacy. In both cases the same thing went wrong — the stuckness got read as a fact about the person instead of a description of the conditions.

What that makes the real goal

Held apart from either method, the goal is this: to be able to look at something in your life or someone else's that is not changing, and get an accurate account of why — from the person it is happening to, including when that person is you.

Accurate is the load-bearing word. Not a plausible account, not a flattering one, and not the one an outside observer would generate. The account has to come from inside the situation, because the thing that is actually blocking a Thursday afternoon is usually mundane, specific and slightly embarrassing, and it is almost never the thing a reasonable adult would guess from outside.

Stated that way the goal belongs to no lineage, and it has a clear test that does not require either practice: after the conversation, can the person name what the difficulty actually is, in their own words, in a sentence that surprises you at least slightly? If the answer only confirms what you already believed, you have not got the account yet — you have got agreement, which is a different and much cheaper thing.

Other practices that serve the same goal

Other traditions are pointed at that same goal, and they differ sharply in how much evidence they carry.

Motivational interviewing, developed by William Miller and Stephen Rollnick, is the best-tested of them. Its founding move is to treat pushback as information rather than as an obstacle to be overcome, and to draw the reasons for change out of the person rather than supplying them. It has been through a large number of randomized trials, originally in problem drinking and since across health behavior generally, and the effects are modest but real and repeatedly replicated. If you want the well-evidenced version of the question this page is circling, it is there.

Immunity to Change, from Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, is the closest structural relative for an adult working alone. You write the improvement you want, then what you actually do instead, then the hidden thing you are also committed to that those behaviors protect, and finally the assumption that makes the hidden commitment feel necessary. That is Collaborative Problem Solving's diagnostic turned inward, in writing, and it is unusually good at the case where a gap has been named for years without closing. Its evidence base is case material and organizational practice, not controlled trials, and it should be held at that weight.

From a different direction entirely, functional behavior assessment — standard practice in schools and applied behavioral work — asks what a behavior reliably produces for the person before anyone tries to replace it, using direct observation rather than conversation. It carries substantial applied evidence, and it is the option when the person cannot yet give you an account in words: a young child, or someone in the middle of something too loud to narrate.

A tradition that already does this

A future self elicited inside a collaborative conversation about a present problem is not something we assembled; two therapy traditions built their central technique out of exactly that combination.

Solution-focused brief therapy, developed by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg in Milwaukee from the late 1970s, is organized around the miracle question: suppose that overnight, while you slept, the problem was solved — what would you notice tomorrow morning that told you? What that question asks for is a possible self, in concrete morning-level detail, produced collaboratively in the middle of a problem conversation rather than in a private writing session. The tradition has accumulated a reasonable body of outcome research, generally supportive though with study quality that varies.

Narrative therapy, from Michael White and David Epston, did both halves even more explicitly. Its first move externalizes — the problem is spoken of as a thing outside the person rather than as a fault inside them, which is the same refusal that carries Collaborative Problem Solving. Its second move, what White called re-authoring, builds up a preferred account of who the person is becoming from the moments that do not fit the problem's story. Externalize the problem, then construct the future self: one lineage, both steps, decades before anyone wrote this page.

The honest note is that neither of those traditions is Collaborative Problem Solving, and Greene and Ablon's method has its own separate research base in schools and youth facilities. But the move itself has precedent, and it is a good sign for the pairing that the traditions which arrived at it did so independently.

Using the Possible Selves Exercise to enhance Collaborative Problem Solving

A CPS conversation is usually anchored to a specific recent incident, what happened, what got in the way, which is exactly right for diagnosis but doesn't give either party a picture of what they're working toward once the immediate problem is solved. Bring in a plain-language version of the possible-selves exercise as part of the conversation: ask what kind of person the child wants to be in that hard moment next time, and, separately, what kind of person they're afraid of being if nothing changes. Naming both concretely, not 'better behaved,' but a specific hoped-for and feared picture, gives the joint problem-solving something to aim at beyond avoiding the last incident, and often surfaces which unmet need CPS is trying to diagnose faster than the incident-by-incident review alone.

Using Collaborative Problem Solving to enhance the Possible Selves Exercise

The possible-selves exercise assumes that naming the gap between a current and hoped-for self is what's needed to motivate closing it, but a gap that stays open despite being clearly named is not, on CPS's core assumption, a motivation problem; it's usually a signal that something in the current pattern is serving a real, if hidden, need. When a possible-selves gap isn't closing, apply CPS's diagnostic move to the resistance itself: treat the behavior that keeps producing the feared self as a strategy with a legitimate purpose, and go looking, collaboratively if another person is involved, for what unsolved problem that strategy is actually solving. This often finds something the gap-awareness alone couldn't, not more motivation, but the specific obstacle the feared self has been quietly protecting against.

A parent and a ten-year-old working through repeated meltdowns at homework time

Homework time keeps ending in a meltdown, and the standard CPS conversation, walking through what happened, what got in the way, surfaces that the actual unsolved problem is the switch from recess to sitting still, not the homework itself. That diagnosis alone still leaves both of you without anything to reach toward, so you ask the possible-selves question directly: who do you want to be at homework time, and who are you afraid of being if this keeps happening. The hoped-for picture is 'someone who starts without a fight'; the feared one, said quietly, is 'someone everyone's annoyed at every single day.' That feared picture turns out to be more motivating to name out loud than the incident review was on its own, and gives the transition plan you build together, five minutes of movement before homework starts, something specific to check itself against, not just whether today went better.

When this is worth reaching for

A problem that is fully understood and completely stuck has a particular signature, and it is the same signature in both directions.

With a child, it looks like a Collaborative Problem Solving conversation that has already surfaced the unsolved problem correctly, produced a sensible plan, and then had the plan quietly fail three weeks running. That is usually not a diagnosis error. It is more often that the plan was aimed at avoiding a bad thing and nobody in the room had anything they were heading toward — which is the point at which asking who they want to be when it happens next time does real work.

Working on yourself, it looks like a gap you can describe in detail, have described in detail more than once, and have not moved on in a year. Precision has stopped being the constraint. The useful next question is not sharper about the future, it is about the present: what is the current arrangement doing for you, and what would go wrong if it stopped.

It also fits during any stretch where the same conversation keeps happening — the third time you and someone you live with have discussed the same recurring evening, the pattern is established enough to be treated as material rather than as an event.

And it is most relevant early, before a pattern has been running long enough to become an identity for the person inside it. A child who has been told for two years that they are the difficult one has an additional problem that neither of these practices is built to solve on its own.

Where this does not apply

CPS is built for a specific behavioral pattern with a diagnosable unsolved problem behind it, and a possible-selves conversation layered onto a single isolated incident with no repeating pattern is more structure than the moment needs; sometimes an outburst is just a bad day, and treating it as material for identity work overreaches. In the other direction, an adult doing possible-selves work entirely on their own, with no child or collaborative partner in the room, doesn't have anything for CPS's core joint-diagnosis move to attach to; the 'positive intent' framing is still useful as a private lens on one's own resistance, but the collaborative, two-person mechanism that makes CPS work isn't available without a second person to problem-solve with.

What the evidence does and does not support

Putting a hidden pattern into words where it can be examined has been tested directly enough to carry randomized-trial support, and the idea that difficult behavior is a mistaken attempt to meet a real need rests on strong clinical consensus rather than on trials of that claim by itself; the finding that solutions people help generate get followed through more reliably than solutions imposed on them comes mostly from observational work. The possible-selves principles are observational and mechanistic rather than tested in randomized trials. No study has combined a possible-selves conversation with Collaborative Problem Solving's diagnostic process, in either direction described here. This is a plausible connection between two documented mechanisms, not a tested combination, and the honest read is that the overlap is real but has not been measured.