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.
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.
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.
Motivation is a state. It fades when the client is tired or stressed. Why a described preferred future, not motivation, gives follow-through its best chance.
The Solution-Focused approach uses the client’s exact words in the next question. Motivational Interviewing trains the opposite skill. Here’s why the difference matters.