The Question Is the Intervention: Glen Lubbert on the Hello, Brain Podcast

Why do habits break the moment life changes? And what does it take to build change that survives the weekend, the vacation, and the snowstorm?

Stamina Lab CEO and co-founder Glen Lubbert joined host Collin Adams on Hello, Brain 🙂, the Brainnovation Network podcast, to explore those questions through the lens of the Solution-Focused approach, an evidence-based way of working built on a simple premise: the person in front of you is already competent and already doing some things that work. The full conversation is below, with the key learnings underneath.

After twenty-five years in health, wellness, and technology, including certification in the Tiny Habits approach under Stanford's BJ Fogg, Glen kept running into the same limit: a habit anchors a new behavior to an existing routine, and it holds only while the routine holds. Then the weekend arrives. The seasons turn. You travel. Context changes constantly, and when the anchor moves, the habit breaks.

The Solution-Focused approach starts somewhere else. Instead of engineering a tactic, the practitioner helps the person describe their preferred future in rich detail: what they want, what difference it will make, and what life looks like when it is already happening. Glen's metaphor is many paths to the same river. When one path is blocked, another opens, because the destination stays defined. The neuroscience supports this: as Lisa Feldman Barrett's work on the predictive brain shows, the brain forecasts based on what it attends to, and a vividly described future gives it something to predict toward.

The line Glen returns to throughout the episode: what you ask about is where the brain goes. He illustrates it with a client who arrives at a session braced to confess a half pint of ice cream. Instead of hunting for the trigger, the Solution-Focused practitioner asks: "What kept you from eating the full pint?" And the client begins describing agency they did not know they had shown. They were satisfied. They knew what they wanted. They stopped.

Our negativity bias discounts those moments of competence by default. The question aims attention at them, and once noticed, they compound.

Collin tells his own story in the episode. As a personal trainer, he closed roughly 20 to 30 percent of his complimentary sessions. After training with Glen and Dr. Deborah Teplow, he began opening every session with one question: "What are you most hoping for?" Then he built the hour around the answer. His close rate went to 100 percent, and the sessions became more enjoyable for everyone in the room.

For the brain-health practitioners in the show's audience, the conversation closes on integration. Neurofeedback and other brain technologies can take weeks to show measurable results, and clients often stop noticing before the data moves. Solution-Focused conversations fill that gap, keeping clients attuned to early signs of movement while the protocol does its work. Some clinics have rewritten their intake questionnaires on this principle, so that from the front desk to the clinician, every question becomes an intervention.

The evidence base makes this more than a philosophy. As Glen notes in the episode, the Solution-Focused approach draws on four decades of research, including over a hundred meta-analyses showing outcomes that equal or exceed other approaches, often in less time. He also shares that Foundations in Solution-Focused Health Coaching has been approved for 6.0 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™ through Indiana University School of Medicine and approved for continuing education credits by the American Council on Exercise.