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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dr. Deborah Teplow’s full session from the Coach Catalyst Nutrition Summit. Why motivated clients don’t follow through, and what builds follow-through instead.
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.
Stop waiting for session three to see progress. Learn how the Solution-Focused approach acts as a mechanism for change from the very first question.