Solutions-Focused practices and Positive Psychology

I enjoyed reading the Journal InterAction, the new “Journal of Solution-Focus in organizations”.

Each article featured in its first issue was a treasure throve of insights.

I wrote a comment on the paper by Carey Glass: Exploring What Works: Is SF the best way of harnessing the impact of positive psychology in the workplace?

Here is an excerpt from my comment:

The connection between emotions and repertoire of actions, as the author points out, “may provide an explanation for some forms of “stuckness”.
Of course! Clients shift from a system (a constellation of emotion – thoughts – behaviors) primed to a specific action to another system, where they can play around and get unstuck… it is their inner game, literally.

Moreover, the article very brilliantly gave me an answer re another question I had: I am “re-discovering” the power of letting clients dwell in their “preferred future”; so, is my practice just a “feel good” trick?
No, SF is a way to “broaden” clients’ perceptions. Feeling good follows, once clients get “unstuck” and are able to access their memory of the (successful) past experiences and of the (preferred) future.
SF is a respectful way to elicit positive emotions (vs. “positive thinking”): in SF we invite clients to explore the whole situation with a lot of details, therefore noticing the positive, while in “positive thinking” the practitioner rams the positive he or she sees into the throat of the client.

Another point that really resonated with me was about the transfer of some SF practices in organizations: Carey is right, sometimes we are shy (or at least I am) about asking the miracle question in organizational settings. I get intimated myself by the business suits and the million-euros budgets. I feel the need to be “practical”. But that can be a mistake. Now I have some form of evidence that I should stick to things that work, like the miracle question. And actually, in the executive coaching session that most made me happy recently, I did go SF all the way, miracle question included, and it worked: the client wanted to at least get a handle of one big problem (and it would take many sesisons, he thought, to work on that). In a little over an hour, he “solved” that and two lesser problems, on top of it!

Download the article by Carey Glass here.

Read my whole comment here.