Blog

Chris Iveson helps us to sort out a muddle that can catch us out when we get confused about on the one hand 'doing therapy/coaching' and on the other 'doing our jobs'. As Chris says 'nowhere is this muddle more confusing than when assessing the safety of (and risk to) children in families where relationships have gone awry.'

We are talking about something really small . . . .really, really small. We are talking about the difference between ‘a’ and ‘the’. Can the difference between ‘a’ and ‘the’ make a difference? I have begun to think that it can.

Another great conference organised by Essex County Council's Essex Social Care Academy (ESCA) and all our friends in the Divisional Based Intervention Team (DBIT). And remember that Chris Iveson and our BRIEF International friend and colleague Elliott Connie will be there.

In describing his approach to painting Monet offers us a wonderful description of what we are trying to do in Solution Focused Brief Therapy. Evan George explains the connection.

Harvey, Chris, Sarah and I thank all of you for your support over the course of 2018, whether in the form of attending courses, or commissioning courses, visiting this website, taking an interest in our work, reading our material, attending our conference workshops or plenaries or inviting us to present our thinking – but most of all we appreciate your interest in the Solution Focused approach. Thank-you.

People may want to be happier, have a better relationship with someone in their life, they may want to find confidence and courage and some of them of course might want to sleep. Evan George asks whether we can treat all these examples in the same way or whether there is something different about the sleep response.

Coaching often presents itself as radically different from therapy or counselling. But is it? Aren't the similarities more significant than the differences when we think about the foundational assumptions? Evan George proposes that the truly significant distinction is that between problem-focused and solution-focused approaches whether the context of application is coaching or counselling or therapy.

‘Don’t you think that there is a risk that your clients may not feel that they are being taken seriously, that they are being understood?’ This is the polite version of a question that Solution Focused presenters are asked frequently, indeed a question that I was asked the other day, very politely and very appropriately, in Helsinki. And the question is an important one. Evan George tries to answer.

Evan has just returned from Finland where Ben Furman invited him to share his thinking on therapeutic minimalism. It was a great 2 days and during the course of those two days he learned a great deal about what he thinks about the Secrets of Minimalism. Here Evan sets out four foundational ideas without which minimalism is impossible.

There is a sort of logical error that must have a name. It is when we apply the requirements or characteristics of one thing to another thing as if the two things are of the same kind – just that they are not. Evan George discusses one of these logical errors relating to our field of Solution Focused Brief Therapy.