The Rubix Cube Lesson

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For years I have been saying how important intangible things such as love, joy, and fun are to mastering SFBT. This morning I saw why this stuff matters so much. Luckily, my friend agreed to help me demonstrate.

So in the middle of one of my favorite things I’ve ever done, I did an online course about working with couples and did it completely for free and one of the things that I wanted to convey like of course learning how to do solution focused, brief therapy is important and and learning how to master the theory and technique is important, but also part of what’s important is the way that we think about our clients and the way we think about our work. So I’m here in Atlanta and I’m hanging out with a friend of mine, Dr Adam Froerer, who’s a professor at Mercer University and I went and watched him teach a class and just. He has so much fun and joy in the way he teaches the class. And I was like, that’s it. Like that’s what I’m trying to teach people. That’s what am I going to convey is in your work you have to have fun, enjoy.

And then this morning for breakfast, this is Adam’s son, toby, Hi toby and this morning for breakfast. Toby came downstairs. He’s a math genius. He’s a fifth grader, but he’s a wizard in math and he likes puzzles and he told me that he recently learned how to figure out how to do Rubik’s cubes and I was like, how’d you do that? And you watched this little guy, he had so much fun talking about what he did and how we learned how to do it. And then he solved the Rubik’s cube and I was blown away. So I thought, let me show everybody and look right. I’m going to show you real Rubik’s cube really mixed up and watch with the Kiddo can do and I’m going to show you and tell you there’s no tricks, right? And I’m going to show you why it matters. So here you go.

Now, one of the reasons why this matters so much is he liked solving puzzles. It’s joyous to him. It’s fun for him. So he studied and really, really practiced and he did it over and over and over again. And he worked at it and he worked at it to the point where he’d figured out how we can do a Rubik’s cube. Now he tried to teach everyone else in the family how to do a Rubik’s cube and no one else could learn it. All of us have the intelligence and capacity in this house to learn it. Toby tries to teach everybody in the family and no one else could learn it. His sister, he was able to show her his older sister how to do it and she could do it and it takes her a lot longer than Tobi, but because this is not her joy, this is not her passion and thus her skill level of doing it.

It’s not not high. He enjoys math puzzles riddles and his skill level because of that joy raises and it makes them better at it and he got to the point where he can do these things really, really quickly, which you’re seeing right behind me, but no tricks, no nothing. He’s just whipping through. This little guy is 10 years old, but because of his joy and his passion and his love for the work, his skill level of doing this has gone way up. So when you think about solution focused brief therapy, and you think about using this approach, if you want to up your skill, you have to find a way to do it in a way that causes you. Joel, do you finished it that less than two minutes? That’s what happens when you love what you’re doing. Your skill level goes up and become more proficient. So if you want to really master solution focused brief therapy and you want to master this work with clients, then find a way to do it from the way that you love the work, the joy and the passion and the satisfaction you have because it will up your game tremendously. So like toby, what a wonderful lesson we all learned that I even learned watching toby this morning and never ever forget your just one question away from changing somebody’s life.