Since being a young boy, I’ve often found myself reflecting on time and our relationship with it. Even now, as an adult, I can feel myself becoming disorientated when I consider how fleeting the present is and how seamlessly it becomes the past.
And despite the value placed in our society around understanding our past to make sense of our present, I’ve found myself more drawn to the future. Often being more curious about how our sense of who we are now and who we aspire to be in the future co-constructs one another. It’s like our most prized hopes and aspirations for the future, reach back from there and can shape how we show up in the now.
It’s from this position that I’ve found using Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) so helpful in facilitating change through conversation with people. Whether in counselling conversations with people living with anxiety, stress or depression. Or in sport and performance contexts with people wanting to be at their best for the big event, I’ve found SFBT such a helpful framework to work with people and facilitate change.
SFBT works with what’s important to the person, sensitive to hearing what they’re hoping for in their life, and gently works to help people describe change as it may show up in their unique context.
In practice, it often resembles a delicate balance between two pivotal moments in time. On one side, there’s the immediacy of the person’s current experience—the tangible challenges and emotions they confront. On the other, there’s the outstretched hand of the future—a gesture towards the potential for change that aligns with what matters most to the individual. To put it succinctly, it’s about maintaining a foothold in the ‘now’ while listening out for ‘what could be’.
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[Details changed to protect confidentiality]
‘I don’t want to be here any more, Andy’
There are moments, in conversations, when it feels like time slows down and the moment you’re in, with the other person, is all that matters. Indications of suicide are such times.
‘You’ve been through so much and it’s so hard to keep holding all of this. What keeps you going through it all?’
‘…….’
Did that question land? Did it make sense? Have I reached too far? Should I have just defaulted to ‘assessing risk’!? My inner critic was beginning to stir in the silence.
‘I dunno.’
‘….what’s it taken to still be here despite it all?’
‘I just want things to get better. But how can they!? Look what’s happened! I’ll never get my health back and I’ve lost everything I cared about.’
Scott’s eyes well up as he holds back the tears and stares past me, over my shoulder at the wall.
‘It’s a lot. It’s a lot. Scott…’, I lean forward to very tentatively offer him my next question, ‘… given all that’s happened and how you’re feeling….. how would you know things are getting even just a little bit better?’
‘I just wouldn’t be feeling like this’
‘OK….and feeling what instead?’
‘Just….better’
‘OK…OK…and if, after you leave here today, you happened to notice you weren’t feeling like this, but just better, what would be a small sign that would tell you that you’re just…better?’
We were in. Slowly and tentatively, Scott and I spent time describing how ‘just…better’, may show up after the session, what he’d notice and the differences that may make for him.
The tone of the conversation was shifting. Given his darkness, Scott was also seeing the faintest of possibilities in his life: hope.
I never saw Scott again. I did get a text message from him many months later saying he was attending a group we’d spoken about and, despite suffering from a flare-up of a health condition, was still managing to get along and enjoy it.
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This, is the power of working from a strengths-based perspective which is central to working with SFBT. It’s the gentle, co-construction of possibility, through conversation, aligned to what the particular person wants given their unique circumstances.
Given what you may be up against, whether in work, personal life or in sport, what’s possible? Let’s have a free, 30-mins chat to see if we can work together.
Andy Blyth 