This past week I was in La Paz, Bolivia, visiting a friend named Marcos and launching the SFU En Espanol. And it was a really cool event. I was super excited to be there. I mean, it was really, really wonderful. And while we’re at the event, somebody asked me a question and the answer that I gave to that question, it wasn’t a question I get a whole lot, but the answer that I gave was kind of new, even as it was coming out of my mouth. It was kind of a new response and I wanted to share it with you because I think it highlights a really important idea about why Solution Focused Brief Therapy matters and why it matters today more than I think it has ever mattered before.

So what happened was this woman asked me why I spend so much time traveling around the world teaching people Solution Focused Brief Therapy. In essence, what she was asking was, why is using this approach so important? And I thought about that for a while and my answer honestly is because like life is really hard. Life is really difficult. Life sucks. I mean, we all have stressors in our lives.

We all have traumas we’ve experienced. Covid and, and taxes and like work problem, like life is littered with difficulties and problems. In fact, did you know your brain is actually not wired for joy and happiness? Your brain is wired for survival. That means in order to achieve things like joy and happiness, you have to do something intentional. You have to like train your brain to become something that wants to experience joy and happiness because your brain doesn’t naturally do that.

What your brain naturally does is about survival. So your brain is actually this thing that kind of wants to be anxious and wants to focus on problems and wants to find the struggles because that’s how it survives. If you wanna have joy and peace and happiness and love, you have to train your brain to focus on those things, which is what Solution Focused Brief Therapy does. In fact, that’s exactly what we do, is we ask clients questions that help them focus on the things in their lives that they want to experience as desirous. And it impacts us as professionals. By doing this work, we become more trained to experience things like joy and love and happiness in life. And I can’t think of a better way to spend my time here on earth.

I can’t think of a better thing to do than help people have more joy and then me get more joy from helping people have more joy. I mean, it’s, it’s one of the greatest gifts ever and in the world we live in now where like the 24 hour cycle of news is so negative and so like streaming into our brains nonstop, coming straight into our phones and we can’t even stay away from it.

Even me, myself, there are certain apps that I turn off the notifications for because I don’t want to get the the negative onslaught coming into my brain because I know I have to train my brain to focus on a happy, positive, light things. That’s why I think Solution Focused Brief Therapy is important. That’s why I think it’s more important now than it’s ever been before.

And one of my greatest honors is I get to spread this message either here on like digital platforms or by traveling the world and sharing this message with people. So that was my answer. I want you guys to understand that like life is hard, but you can still have joy. We just have to learn to focus on it.