SIMPLY FOCUS Podcast: The Good Life Approach - Your weekly podcast with the little extra Solution Focus for your daily life‪!‬ Elfie Czerny & Dominik Godat

Wei-Su Shu on SF in China and Taiwan. In today’s episode, we talk with Wei-Su Hsu, Professor at the Department of Educational Psychology and Counseling, at National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei, about the cultural adaptions of Solution Focus (SF) in Taiwan and mainland China. Check out what fascinates her with Solution Focus, how her SF journey started, how she worked with Insoo Kim Berg, and what she learned from her. Enjoy her craziness for Solution Focus and what she learned from translating SF books into Chinese. Find out more about cultural adaptions of Solution Focus in Taiwan and mainland China (e.g. with the miracle question, scaling or complimenting), what helps her to learn Solution Focus, and how she benefits from practitioners, students, and clients. Learn more about SF in schools and her research “The Effectiveness of Solution-Focused Group Therapy in Ethnic Chinese School Settings: A Meta-Analysis”. Hear her take on complimenting and reframing in the Chinese culture and persuading people to accept Solution Focused concepts. Wei-Su shares her teaching of Solution Focus in Taiwan and mainland China and her aim to be less the expert and to wonder more. She closes with two stories about Insoo Kim Berg or how she showed her not to be the expert and do her own things. The Challenge of the week: “I invite you all to practice to learn to believe in miracles.”

Kirsten Dierolf about the ICF Core Competencies and Solution Focus. In today’s episode, we talk with Kirsten Dierolf, M.A., MSFP, MCC, Solution-Focused Practitioner, Trainer, Coach, Author, and President Elect of ICF Germany about the ICF Core Competencies and Solution Focus. Find out what fascinates her with Solution Focus now, what attracted her in the beginning, and what kept fascinating her since. Hear how she got into working with organizations and leaders and what she likes about this work. Learn more about the core competencies of the International Coach Federation (ICF) and the compatibility with Solution Focus, how the ICF Core Competencies influenced her work, and what could be interesting to explore more as solution-focused practitioners. Check out how she partners with clients and elicits what clients really want, her take on narrative and solution-focus as combination to ICF mastery, the difficulty of assessing coaching quality or recognizing solution-focus, and the good reasons to go for ICF certification. And try out the challenges of the week: 1.) When you are coaching someone (or do therapy or other solution-focused practice), and you notice yourself judging someone, find a hook to suspend your judgement and see how that feels. 2.) Listen to some of your recordings of solution-focused practice and look at all the situations where you could give your client a little bit more say in how the session is run. So, am I leading the session? Is the client leading the session? Are we co-creating it together? And what tells me that we are doing one of those three?

Dr. Ursula Bühlmann on doing SF beyond language. In today’s episode, we talk with Dr. Ursula Bühlmann, specialist in child and youth psychiatry and psychotherapy, supervisor, coach, trainer, and EBTA board member, with qualifications in solution-focused brief therapy, creative children’s therapy, hypnotherapy and Traditional Chinese Medicine, about using different forms of expression in Solution Focused therapy and coaching. Find out what fascinates her about Solution Focus, how she found out in her first job as medical doctor that she won’t be happy to be the expert and came to Solution Focus in child psychiatry. Listen to a story with Steve de Shazer and what differences it has made not be the expert. Hear how to do Solution Focus in other ways than with language and how to let your clients lead you to what you do with them. Check out what fascinates her with working with athletes and what she does with them, how she combines SF with other elements, and her experiences in training Solution Focus in China. She tells us stories of adapting Solution Focus to different contexts, how an experience with Steve de Shazer helped her to trust the process even more, and emphasizes the importance of joy when working with the Solution Focused approach. Listen to her thoughts about how much space there is for the problem or for difficulties in the Solution Focused approach. And do the Challenge of the Week: Once a day, find little things that work, give yourself a tap on the shoulder and observe what’s happening in your body and what differences that makes for you.

Dr. Peter Szabó on re-tuning to a totally different mode. In today’s episode, we talk with Dr. Peter Szabó, co-founder of SolutionSurfers, Coach, Trainer, and Author, about walking alongside clients. Find out what fascinates Peter about Solution Focus, the quality of listening and the story of Momo by Michael Ende, the first experience of this completely different mode of interaction or walking alongside, and what becomes possible when not wanting to be helpful and useful. Check out how to know when to ask questions and when it’s time to listen. Peter elicits how his work has changed and the reinforcement through the developments at BRIEF. Learn more about the history of re-tuning and how it changed everything for him, his gratitude for being exposed to and supported by Insoo and Steve, and Insoo’s way of re-tuning and his public confession of deleting the most important chapter in his German book with Insoo. And the Challenge of the Week is the classical prediction task: „1.) Predict: Will you catch yourself in the coming days being present like Momo. 2.) Check if you were right. You get points for correct predictions (The full challenge at 35:19).

Naomi Whitehead on Solution Focus as a celebration of who people are. In today’s episode, we talk with Naomi Whitehead, IASTI accredited Solution-Focused Practitioner, Coach, Therapist & Trainer as well as EBTA Board Member, about bringing Solution Focus to Communities. Learn what fascinates her with Solution Focus, how John Wheeler, Mathias Schwab, and Tara Gretton influenced her work, and how she sees Solution Focus as a celebration of who people are. Find out more about Curve Chats and how she brings Solution Focus to communities, e.g. to a barber shop in Sheffield. Check out how she supports equality in her work and fundamentally trusts her clients. Naomi tells us about her events that she is organizing in Sheffield and her workshop that she will do with Tara Gretton in Switzerland (stay tuned!). She elaborates how the lived experience of people can inform the service design, e.g. in her work with Ben’s Center and their vulnerable people project as well as her work with soul food. Listen to what kept her passionate about Solution Focus in the last 17 years and how that connects to her lived experience in Bolivia and her use of Solution Focus in her volunteer work in a prison in Bolivia. And do the Challenge of the Week: When at some point over the next week a person annoys you, acknowledge that and think about all the qualities that the other person has shown when doing this act and what else you appreciate about that person.

Kenneth Kwan with stories of hope. In today’s episode, we talk with Kenneth Kwan, Solution-Focused Conference Speaker, Author, and High Performance Strategist, about Covid-19 and the differences Solution Focus can make and has made in Singapore. Check out how Solution Focus was useful when people started being affected by Covid-19 at the “Grace Assembly of God” church in Singapore, how they dealt with the sorrows and fears of people, how they started a dialogue of hope and optimism with their church members, and how they talked about their best hopes at the board level. Find out what we can learn from the experience they made in Singapore. Listen to the importance of sharing stories of hope, love and elements that work, asking and co-creating with people, and how people step up to help and support. Hear the good news and how life is slowly coming back on the streets after 5 weeks of staying at home. Kenneth also shares what small and medium sized enterprises could do during these difficult times and proposes a small next step that leaders could do, a small next step that facilitators and coaches could do, and a small step that everyone could do. And we focus on the silver lining - the good things that are happening during this crisis.