Re-Dreaming

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You know, recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of dreams and not like dreams you have, like when you go to sleep dreams, but like dreams you have for the future of your life and things that you want to accomplish as you are here on this earth. And even more specifically talking to my colleague and best friend Adam Froerer about what we were referring to is re-dreaming.

So I want to explain this to you and talk about how it impacts Solution Focused work. But in order to do that, I’ve got to take you back to the beginning of my relationship with Adam Froerer and how we met and the way that it influences our work now. So I met Adam Froerer at a conference way back in 2008, but seems like 10 lifetimes ago,

but we didn’t really connect until a conference a couple of years later, and I’ll never forget this. We were in Sweden attending a conference and we’d been introduced. And we had some mutual friends there that we couldn’t find. So we went for a walk and as we went on this walk, we just started talking about Solution Focused Brief Therapy and realizing that like we get along and our personalities meld.

And it was just a really cool thing to connect with someone like, about my age and passionate about this approach and all that kind of stuff. And we started dreaming about our futures throughout that weekend. We started thinking like, man, it’d be cool to write a book together. And we have now published a book together. And wouldn’t it be cool if we were running like, a training organization like, devoted to Solution Focused Brief Therapy and we built it to a success.

And we now run the largest training organization in the world dedicated to Solution Focused Brief Therapy. We had all of these thoughts and dreams. Adam was like, man, it’d be great if like my full-time job would be like doing research and working with you and pulling apart Solution Focused Therapy and early this year, Adam left his job in academia and he has joined the team full-time.

So like this weekend we were teaching together and we realized this past weekend, and we realized like, all of the things we dreamt about in the past we’ve accomplished those things. Like these ridiculous things that we’ve been talking about for 10 years, like we we’ve accomplished them.

And then Adam was like, man, I think it’s time to re-dream. So we started talking about like, what we want for the next, you know, future pursuits that we’re going to have together. And it was really cool because Adam was like, you know this is kind of like what a followup session in Solution Focused Brief Therapy it’s like, it’s the process of re-dreaming.

And it made me think of a conversation I had with one of my colleagues, a woman named Alesya Courtnage, who, she believes that part of what we do in Solution Focused Brief Therapy, she watched one of my sessions. She said, Elliott, I think I’ve figured out what you’re doing when you are asking clients about their best hopes. It’s just like, you’re trying to catch their dreams. And it’s such an amazing concept. And I love dream catchers. Like those things that people make. And I was in Taos and the people from the Taos Pueblo, like, I was able to get a real true, authentic dream catcher.

And Alesya is sharing this idea about like, I think what you’re doing in your work is you’re catching people’s dreams. And I was like, okay, I’ve been chewing on that for a couple of years now. And then bring it full circle to realize the power of dreams I’ve had in my life, in my professional work, in my relationship with Adam. It’s like, yeah, like in session, when you’re asking me what their desired outcome is, we want to know what’s your biggest dream.

And what’s the impact of that dream. What is the accomplishment of that dream? What does that have on your life? And then when they come back to therapy and people always ask me, what do you do in follow-up sessions? We ask about the dream, like we ask like, so what’s been better, in pursuit of that dream. And we help the client get in touch with that.

And if the goal has already been accomplished, and if they’ve already had some success and they’ve had some movement, sometimes it’s time to re-dream, what else would you like to achieve in your life? And it’s funny to be living in this space. I in 2020 has been a crazy year, but I’m glad that I’ll always remember it as the year that like a lot of my dreams came true and it’s been a hard year for me as well.

Like everybody deals with, with the issues that have happened in 2020, but it’s also the dream when all of these things that Adam and I dreamt about where they actually occurred, they actually came into fruition. It actually happened. And it’s cool to be talking with Adam now about our re-dream and what we want for the future. And I hope that we’ve inspired you guys to dream in your lives.

And when you accomplish the things you dreamt about, re-dream, and I hope we also inspire you to work with clients to start seeing this desired outcome as the idea of capturing dream language and in followup sessions it’s just a matter of helping clients re-dream sometimes.

Thank you so much for watching this video. I hope you enjoyed it. If you want more videos like this, please subscribe to this channel and make sure you hit the bell so you get notifications and don’t forget to leave a comment. One of my favorite things is interacting with people and learning what they got from the video. So thanks for watching. Subscribe. Comment. See you soon.