My Week Started Off Terribly, Then This Happened

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When people who are skeptical of the Solution Focused Approach, they often state they have a hard time understanding how this approach can help a client if they are not “solving the problem. I recently had a real life experience that helped me further understand, and hopefully clearly explain, exactly how this happens. That’s what this video is about.

Well, I had an interesting week this past week where at least interesting events happened this past week and it started off quite rocky. See, most of you know, if you’re watching this video, really passionate about solution focused brief therapy and I have been for a long time and I really released a lot of videos and travel the world teaching people to use this approach and write books about this approach. But, and there’s an organization in our field that takes issue with the way that I do certain things and certain things about me that I can’t change. And uh, I, uh, I got an email from someone associated with that organization, uh, this past week asking if we could chat on the phone. I was really excited and hopeful about it. Hopefully we can clear things up and it would be a good phone call, but it turned out to be really negative experience for me.

Uh, this person is, is, is challenging and the type of person that, I mean, all of us have someone up like this in our lives, you know, they’re just so negative and so difficult and so challenging that every time you talk to them, things become challenging for you a bit. And I was really frustrated after this phone call that was so frustrated I didn’t know what to do in my day was just terrible and I was really, really frustrated. So next day I called a really good friend of mine and mentor guy by the name of Bill O’hanlon and he talked to me and he, he didn’t fix the situation, but he shifted my focus to something that’s much more productive and much more effective for me. And it completely changed the way I experienced this city situation in the way that the week when it just shifted focus, changed everything.

And um, it made me think about solution focused brief therapy because the people that are skeptical of this approach, they often ask me, so you’re not solving the problem then what are you doing? And it this situation, it really brought home the idea that sometimes the problem doesn’t need to be solved. The attention needs to be placed on something more effective and more congruent to the person that you are a. and I think that that’s what happens in a solution focused conversation. In fact, I think that’s what’s happens in all talk therapy because in essence, no talk therapy really solves the problem. Talk therapy leads to changes where the client can effectively solve the problem. And what happened in my situation this past week is bill did not solve my problem, but our conversation led to changes in the way I was perceiving things so that I could solve my own problem, stay on a path that was more effective for me.

So I want to. I want to encourage you to kind of shift your focus away. It’s not our task to solve the problem. It’s our task to ask questions and have a conversation that helps the client be in line with what their ideals are and what their desired life is and what their preferred future is. Because when you’re in that path, when you’re heading towards what you’d like to be doing, what you like to be accomplishing most, you can deal with the hardships along the way so much better. So I hope that makes sense. Thank you for allowing me to share that with you. If you liked this video, please give me a like, give me a comment, share it. I love it when people share it. I want to get this, these videos in this message out to as many people as possible. Thank you so much and I’ll see you in the next video.