Clients commit on the day the goal is set. The commitment isn’t tested until a hard day arrives. Solution-Focused practice rehearses that day in advance, and the client writes the script.
A client went to the gym twice. What you ask next decides which side of the problem they’re on. Dr. Deborah Teplow on questions that only sound Solution-Focused.
Every time a client speaks, a practitioner does one of three things with the client’s words: keeps them, deletes them, or changes them. Which one you do shapes everything that follows.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Every coaching conversation needs a destination before it can move. Dr. Deborah Teplow on the one question to ask before anything else.
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.