Solution-focused coaching

What it is

A solution-focused conversation asks what you want to be different, what that would look like in ordinary detail, and when some piece of it already happens. It treats you as the person who knows most about your own life, and it treats small, already-present successes as the material to build on.

Its most distinctive move is how little time it spends on why a problem exists. The working assumption is that you do not need a full account of a problem's causes to start moving toward what you want.

Where it comes from

The approach began as solution-focused brief therapy at the Brief Family Therapy Center in Milwaukee, where Steve de Shazer, Insoo Kim Berg and colleagues described a way of working that focused on solution development rather than problem analysis (de Shazer et al., 1986; de Shazer, 1985).

Coaching adaptations followed. Berg and Szabó wrote it up for brief coaching (2005), and Anthony Grant and colleagues tested solution-focused, cognitive-behavioural coaching in controlled studies from the early 2000s.

The principles underneath

Build on what already works

Times when the problem is smaller or absent ("exceptions") are treated as evidence of what you can already do, and the question becomes how to do more of it.

Describe the preferred future concretely

A vivid, everyday description of the outcome you want gives direction and makes progress noticeable. The well-known "miracle question" is one way of drawing this out.

Scale progress instead of judging it

Rating where you are on a 0–10 scale, and what one point higher would look like, turns an all-or-nothing goal into a direction with a next step.

Small steps

Change is taken in steps small enough to start this week, on the assumption that small changes tend to lead to further change.

You are the expert on your own life

The coach asks rather than tells, and works with your language, resources and judgement instead of supplying a diagnosis.

How a session runs

1. Start with what you hope to get from the conversation — your "best hopes" for it.
2. Describe, in ordinary detail, what would be different if that hope were realised.
3. Rate where things stand now on a 0–10 scale, and look at what already puts you at that number rather than at zero.
4. Look for exceptions: recent times when some part of the outcome you want already happened, and what you did then.
5. Name what one point higher on the scale would look like, and choose one small step toward it.
6. In the next conversation, start with what has been better, however slightly.

When it tends to fit

• You know roughly what you want to be different and keep getting stuck analysing why it is not.
• You want a short, practical conversation that ends with a next step.
• Something is partly working already and you want to understand and extend it.

Where it stops

It is not designed to work through trauma or long-standing distress, and focusing on solutions can feel dismissive to someone who first needs to be heard about how hard things are.

When a problem is driven by something that does need understanding — a pattern repeating across relationships, a belief that keeps reasserting itself — a purely forward-looking conversation can miss it.