Blog

What’s it like in your decisive moments? | Paul

15/1/2018

Do you find it hard to make decisions? Yes or No?

If you find out more about both sides of a decision, it may help. Or you just be even more stuck between the two options. What to wear for a conference - that should be relatively easy. It is for me, but not for my business partner.

And what about the ‘big’ decisions? Especially if you are anxiously stuck. How about some different routes towards reaching those?

Every case is different

29/12/2017

Nice to see the number one story in the Observer this week was ‘Viruses save a man from antibiotic-resistant bacteria’, in which a 69-year-od American is brought out of a coma and has his life saved by an injected cocktail of bacteriophages.

The story appears just 16 years after we wrote about phages in the first edition of The Solutions Focus, as an illustration of the SF principle, ‘Every case is different.’

Each phage will attack only one virus, so you have to find the right one to be effective. The trouble with the broad brush approach of antibiotics is that certain viruses become immune to their effects.

That’s rather like different approaches to organisational problems. Broad-spectrum approaches can be applied, often with good effect - but not always. We recommend taking care to find the solution that works uniquely for you.

Read more in The Solutions Focus, Making Coaching and Change SIMPLE, by Paul Z Jackson and Mark McKergow.

And you can find the Guardian article here.

What if your coaching client isn’t ready to talk goals?

21/8/2017

Sometimes a client in a coaching session is not ready to talk about what they want, their goals or even to have a sense of what a better future might be like for them. That may appear to scupper the conversation if you are intent on goal-finding as your first coaching step. But there are other ways to proceed.

One option is to ask your client, ‘What are you already doing that's useful?’ to gain pointers towards from their current activities that might plausibly form part of a more fruitful future.

The Solutions Focus Resilience Pocketbook

Another is to start with highlights from the past - proud achievements, better periods in their life or their work - to get a sense of what’s important to them, their talents and their experiences.

Then, when the time is right, you can have a more informed conversation about what’s wanted in the future.

The logical thread of better conversations

5/6/2017

We are all familiar with tricky conversations in our organisations - the ones you put off for as long as possible or perhaps never have at all. But suppose you could handle these conversations in the best way imaginable, what difference would that make?

What difference would it make it to you, to your team and to your organisation? Each conversation has an impact on your ultimate results, as there is an inevitable logical thread between you, your team and your organisation’s performance.

Difficult Conversations

5 Top tips for building your resilience | Janine

24/4/2017

“A good half of the art of living is resilience.”
― Alain de Botton

It’s tempting to think that resilience is a fixed personality trait, maybe even something that we are born with. But be reassured, the ability to bounce back from failure and to cope with everyday difficulties is something that can be learned and developed by anyone.

Here are five top tips that can help you build your resilience.

The Solutions Focus Resilience Management Pocketbook

A sorry tale of Baby P and three Grown-up Ps, the Press, Police and Politicians | Paul

18/4/2016

In ‘The Story of Baby P: Setting the record straight’, Ray Jones explains how the media distorted the sad saga of the death of 17-month-old Peter Connelly in 2007, following terrible domestic neglect and abuse.

The focus is on the reporting and how The Sun newspaper in particular led a campaign against the social workers involved in the case.

It captures neatly the double bind that pressurises social services even now. They can be attacked for being all too ready to snatch children away from their families. And, as in this instance, remiss in allowing children to stay in the harm's way of their dangerous families.

Dare to be daring | Paul

29/2/2016

We admire daring. Brené Brown calls her new book ‘Daring Greatly’. People who dare are bold, brave and courageous, she says, ready to have a go, not knowing what the consequences will be. We are impressed with that at least partly because we don't always feel that way ourselves.

But perhaps we are more daring than we give ourselves credit for. I think this is especially true if you are using a solutions-focused (SF) approach to change, whether as a practitioner or as a client.

So, how is the SF approach to change daring?

What the pirates did to my book | Paul

25/1/2016

The web is a wonderful thing. But you do have to keep a watch-out for piracy, especially if you have written a book.

After publication of The Solutions Focus, a number of unofficial offers started appearing, promising free downloads.

From the blurb, it looked like my words had been somewhat freely 'translated'. For example, it suggested, 'kibosh doing what doesn't impact and do something different?' and 'to pore on what is doable kinda than what is intractable'. Good advice, we can all agree, and arguably more colourfully written than the original, though I did have my doubts when assured, 'the solutions pore shitting in the playing'.

Anyway, we asked the publisher to chase away the pirates, and more than a decade after the first edition was launched, you can still get the real thing on Amazon.

Fifty Shades of Therapy | Paul

26/2/2015

50 Shades of Therapy

As I was reading volume 2 of the latest literary erotic sensation, Fifty Shades of Grey, I found a particularly arousing passage 79% of the way through. “SFBT - The latest therapy option,” one character recommends to our heroine.

The therapist himself, Dr John Flynn, is good enough to describe Solution Focused Brief Therapy: “Essentially, it’s goal-oriented. We concentrate on where Christian wants to be and how to get him there… There’s no point breast-beating about the past – all that’s been picked over by every physician, psychologist, and psychiatrist Christian’s ever seen…. It’s the future that’s important. Where Christian envisages himself, where he wants to be.”

From 'coaching' to 'constructive conversations' | Paul

20/6/2012

Our book, Positively Speaking http://www.thesolutionsfocus.co.uk/content/solutions-shop#PS is being translated into German. In England our concept of ‘constructive conversations’ has been warmly received – particularly among coaches.

Coaching has taken a decade or two to become an established profession and management tool. The rise of coaching means managers are familiar with the idea of a structured dialogue with a colleague, usually one of the manager’s direct reports. The coaching dialogue may be aimed at sorting out a problem, clarifying goals, encouraging better performance.