Solution-focused practice began as a way of doing therapy and many people who use it are still therapists. We now talk about solution-focused practice because the approach can be used in many more contexts than just in therapy. It is a way of helping that focuses on people’s hopes and preferred futures, movement that is taking place in these desired directions, and on the strengths and resources that can enable this movement to happen.

Another way to understand the solution-focused approach is to notice what its practitioners don’t focus on, which includes problems and causes, assessing and diagnosing. Solution-focused practitioners typically don’t give advice, but rather pay attention to and help draw out people’s own ways of resolving difficulties and making progress.

To find out more, listen to this interview with Guy in the very first of the UK Association of Solution Focused Practice podcast series.

My courses are usually aimed at people who are already working in a helping capacity, so that they can gain additional skills to use in what they do.

Anyone who talks or communicates in some way with others, in order to help change to happen, to help resolve problems or achieve goals, is likely to find solution-focused practice a relevant and helpful approach, and so would be welcome to come on one of my courses.

I wrote a piece about solution-focused training a few years back, which you can find on my Resources page. It conveys the excitement I still feel about training and supporting people in using this approach.

It talks about what is different about solution-focused training, which I believe includes the following -

It gets straight on with it! - 5 minutes into my first course and I was already practising a solution-focused conversation.

An assumption of competence – We assume that trainees bring lots of abilities in working with people and build on these.

Learning by doing – You don’t learn to drive in the passenger’s seat! Solution-focused training is light on presentations of theory and heavy on practice.

Appreciative feedback – We focus on what trainees are doing well throughout.

Tracking progress – We enable trainees to pay attention to how their skills are developing.

Assuming successful application – On follow-up courses, we assume that learners will have made good use of the skills they have developed, and start from there.

Guy has been running training courses in solution-focused practice since the 1990s. He built his training style and content on what he had experienced as useful when trained in the approach himself, and his training remains firmly rooted in his work as a practitioner, which he is to this day. Guy first came across the approaches that led to the development of solution-focused brief therapy while working in a young people’s psychiatric unit in the 1980s, and first used solution-focused practice, as a social worker, in the early 1990s. He now has a private therapy and consulting practice. He has trained thousands of professionals in solution-focused practice all over the world.

Guy offers many other skills and services in addition to therapy and training.

He is an experienced supervisor and consultant, with teams and groups as well as individual professionals.

He is an experienced workshop presenter and keynote speaker, and his facilitation and chairing skills were developed to a high level during his time as Chair of the British Association of Social Workers.