What Is Your Game Plan? (And, Why It Matters)

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Conducting helpful conversations is hard, there is no way around that. This can be even more challenging when you are using something that is different from the norm as the Solution Focused Approach is. In this video I share my game plan for session and why this matters so much.

Let me ask you a quick question. When you go into a therapy or coaching session, what’s your game plan? This is a question that’s been on my mind for the past couple of weeks. I’ve been making a lot of videos and uh, released a free video training series about this very topic. Uh, because I, I’ve been thinking a lot about like what is the helper thinking as they go into the helping conversation with a client? I want to be clear, I was like, when I say game plan, I don’t mean like what is your structured way of doing things. But I mean like when you sit with a person, what is guiding you? What are your beliefs? What are your tenants that you’re holding onto that increase the likelihood that the client will be able to make changes in their life? So for example, one of the things that I’m thinking is I really want to talk to the hero that lives inside of the client.

I very much believe that there’s a hero that lives inside of every single person. One of the reasons I have to, I believe it’s because we all know that there were problems that live inside of all people, like, uh, problems exist and all of us are flawed in some way or another. So if we accept that we’re not perfect and we have to accept that we’re not perfectly imperfect either, which means everybody has some block and everybody has some hero. And I go to every session dedicated to um, elicit responses from the internal hero of the client because I know the more the client can describe the presence of their desired future, the more they have to tap into the internal hero to make changes in their life. And the reason why in the past few weeks is become more important to me. And it kind of different way of thinking and talking about it is because I think a lot of therapists, like we’d go into the session without being grounded on what our game plan is.

So then when the session gets difficult, as they often do, we get stuck. And we, we, we ended up not doing the job as well as we think we could have and or should have been. And it leads most being burnt out and frustrated and struggling. So I want you to be very aware of what is your game plan. And again, I don’t mean like what is your structured way of doing it, but I mean when you enter into the task of having the solution focused conversation, what is it that is guiding you through that process? Now, like I said, I just made a whole video series sharing exactly what mine is in, in the hope that that people can, can develop what theirs is. But this is such an important thing. You know, you can learn any technique you want to, but if you go into that technique, if you go into the task and all you have is techniques, if you go into the session, all, you know his technique in theory, then when it gets challenging and when the water gets choppy, you’re going to really start to struggle.

You’re going to really start to, to have a difficult time in the session. And I want to make sure that’s where theory technique, but also your principles are really, really grounded. I want to make sure that your game plan is really, really strong. So now to what the client brings up, where no matter what happens in session, you continue on the task of being able to help that person. Because I don’t think, I don’t think we owe it to our clients would be helpful when the process is easy or smooth. I think we owe it to be helpful to all of our clients in. The best way to do that is to know what our internal game plan is, what our internal principles are, and what’s guiding us as people and what we’re grounded in. So, um, I hope you found this helpful. I hope that helps you think about what are your thoughts going into each session. And in fact, I’d love for you to leave a comment below and I’d love to hear what guides you as a professional. And hopefully some of these words could be helpful to you. So please as usual, subscribe to my youtube channel, go on over to my website, elliottconnie.com. I got loads of free stuff over there because I want to inspire you because they continue to build your solution focused skills, uh, and like, and share this video and leave a comment. I’d love to hear your thoughts.