The Greatest Gift is Belief

It’s Christmas day and this morning, millions of children all over the world ran to the Christmas tree and unpacked gifts and had joy and happiness all around the world. I want to tell you about the gift I received this year that has impacted me the most and the way it impacts the way I think about Solution Focused Brief Therapy and my life.

So the greatest gift that I received, I was talking to a friend of mine about these projects I’m working on that are really just way beyond what I ever thought I would be doing with my life. Like I truly expected to be doing Psychotherapy forever and was happy about it. Like I, I wasn’t sad about that. And now I’m doing all of these other things and I was telling my friend that how much I appreciated that there are people who support me and they believe in me and they encourage me and they advocate for me.

And I was telling him how much it meant to me. And he said, like, Elliott, we saw this in you even before you saw it in yourself. So believing in you became easy. And I realized that’s the greatest gift you can give to someone is when you have the ability to see something in them before they have the ability to see it in themselves.

Because as they see you see it, they start believing it in themselves and it changes who they are and what they’re capable of. That’s what we do in Solution Focused Brief Therapy. When we ask our clients, ‘What are your best hopes from our talking?’, we’re asking them to see a future that they can’t yet see. And our job is to see it.

Our job is to let them know that we see it so that we can help them manifest it. That’s the gift that I have received this past year. I’ve never felt anything like it. And boy, it is powerful. It is strong. It is impacting everything about my life. And that’s what we do in our clients’ lives. When we ask them about the future they can’t yet see.

So don’t worry about, like people ask me all the time, like, Elliott, what if the client can’t get there? What if they don’t believe in it? Like that means you’re doing a good job because you’re asking them to identify a future they can’t yet see. And the greatest gift we give them is our ability to see it.

Because once they connect those two things, their life is forever different. So look, I hope you’re having a great and wonderful Christmas. I hope you’re spending time with family. Hope you’re doing things that you love. I hope you’re getting rejuvenated in all the ways that you need. I’m thinking about you this holiday season. I’m thinking about you this Christmas.

I love you. Thank you for supporting me. Thank you for being a part of this journey with me. Thank you for being part of all of this. Thank you for letting me share my videos with you during this year. Just thank you and enjoy your holiday too.