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Today, I’m going to use my little Lego friend here to demonstrate the power of questions and putting hope in each and every question. You know, very often clients come to our offices, completely bogged down by the problem. And the problem is like holding them down, holding them stuck and prevents them from elevating and living the lives that they want to live and should be able to live.
And I often say that I think Solution Focused questions are kind of like helium balloons. When you ask questions that are filled with hope and connected to the hope that the client wants to achieve it, it levitates the client. It makes them feel better. Like when you, even you like when you think about the things that you hope to achieve, the more real that hope becomes the more impact and power it has to like lift your mood and in fact, lift your life. So Solution Focus questions are supposed to achieve that. And to show you that we’re going to use my little Lego friend to hear as a mock client, so you’ll see the power of Solution Focused question. So when a client comes to Therapy, they come like stuck. The problem has impacted their lives in a tremendously negative difficult way. And the very first question we ask is “What are your best hopes from the Therapy?”
And that is like taking this client and afixing a helium balloon to them because it immediately shifts the focus from the problem that’s holding them down, to the hope for what they want to achieve. It has a very powerful effect on the client. It causes the client to truly start feeling better. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve worked with clients and they come into the office and they’re like in tears and they’re crying and they are talking about the problem.
And they’re totally like they, they report having like stomach and knots and just not feeling well. And by the end of the session, they’re laughing and smiling from a really, really deep place. And that is strictly because we shifted the focus from the problem to what is hoped for. So once you have the client’s desired outcome, what do you do next?
Now, when you are using Solution Focused Brief Therapy, every question you ask has to be connected to the client’s desired outcome. So let’s say I ask my little client here.” What are your best to have our talking?” And the clients says, “I want to be happy.” Then my questions have to be about the presence of their happiness. My questions have to focus on the presence of the client’s happiness.
So I’m going to say something like “So what are your best hopes from talking?” “I want to be happy.” “So suppose you woke up tomorrow happy, what’s the very first thing you would notice.” And by asking the question like that, it’s like putting another helium balloon around the client that helps them focus on their happiness each and every question has to be attached to the desired outcome that the client listed.
And every single time you ask another question, it’s like attaching another levitated component to the session that just lifts the client up. I think the best thing I see when I do Solution Focused Brief Therapy is the client being lifted up by the power of the questions, but not necessarily the questions, but when the client hears their answers and they hear themselves talking about the presence of their desired outcome, it just continues to lift them up and bolster them. So after I say, “What are your best hopes?” And the client says, “I want to be happy? And I say, “Supposed you woke up tomorrow happy, what would you notice?” The client is going to say something like, “I wouldn’t be crying anymore.” And then I’ll say, “What would you be doing instead?”
And it’s like, attaching another component. This is the power of a Solution Focused description. People often ask me, like, why does the description work? Why does it make a difference in our client’s lives? And the reason the Solution Focused description works is because it lifts the client up. The more they describe it, the realer it becomes, and the realer, it becomes, the more they get lifted up and their mood is impacted. Their life is impacted. Their actions are impacted. I often tell people that if you want to make a difference in someone’s life, you have to change what they see when they look at themselves, you have to change what they experience when they think about their future. And every time you ask a descriptive question, it’s literally like adding a balloon.
You’ve got to see the movie up. It’s literally like just lifting them up in the most beautiful, wonderful ways. People often ask me, so what do you do at the end of a Solution Focused conversation? Like how do you, how do you help the client go off and make changes? And as you can see, I don’t have to do anything for the helium to rise. It just wants to ride. At the end of our conversations, we simply let the questions do the work and we send the client off and allow them to levitate and be their best-selves.
