Stamina Lab Blog
Insights on solution-focused coaching, communication, and the science behind lasting patient and client outcomes.
Don’t I Have to Understand My Client to Help Them?
You don’t need to figure out what’s driving your client, and they don’t need insight before change begins. Dr. Deborah Teplow on connecting instead, and the questions that bring a better future to life.
Solution-Focused Practice and Motivational Interviewing: Four Points of Departure
MI and Solution-Focused practice are not variations on a theme. Four specific points of departure, and what each one changes from the first moment of a session.
What Do I Do When My Client Wants Something Unrealistic or Impossible?
Some clients want what coaching cannot deliver. Dr. Deborah Teplow on naming what is true without arguing, and asking the question that moves the conversation somewhere possible.
Three Continents, One Pattern: Where Lasting Change Actually Starts
Elders in Uganda. Mothers in India. A husband-and-wife team in Vietnam with no budget and no nutrition training. Three stories from Deborah’s summit talk, all converging on the same five principles of lasting change.
Every Solution-Focused Conversation Has the Same Three Parts
Five minutes or fifty, every Solution-Focused conversation has the same three parts. Like driving a car: you start it, you drive it, you park it.
What Would Make This Conversation Worthwhile?
Every coaching conversation needs a destination before it can move. Dr. Deborah Teplow on the one question to ask before anything else.
Your Clients Are Motivated. So What Builds Follow-Through?
Clients agree to the plan and mean it. Then the week gets hard. Follow-through isn’t a motivation problem, and it has a structural answer.
What MI Counts. What SF Keeps.
MI’s 2:1 reflection ratio is a technically demanding standard. Solution-Focused practice works through a different mechanism: keeping the client’s exact words rather than reshaping them.
How Optimism Can Get in the Way of Effective Coaching
Optimism helps clients believe in change. But the coaches who ask what happens when it doesn’t go well are the ones who help clients stay the course.