In some ways it may be that this question, perhaps somewhat indirectly, points us towards one of the fundamental differences between the Solution Focused approach and many other models. As most people know Solution Focused practitioners ask people very early on in the first session to specify their ‘best hopes from our talking together’ (George et al., 1990, 1999) and pretty well every follow-up session starts with the question ‘so what’s been better since we last spoke?’. As it happens, since I warn people at the end of every session that the next will start with this question and that it might be useful to watch out for better, if only to make the next session easier, I tend to start with ‘well I did warn you . . . so what’s been better?’ and virtually everyone responds talking about evidence of better. And clients continue attending until things are sufficiently different or changed for them to say to themselves (and to us) ‘I don’t need another appointment’. But the question that understandably occurs to people is this ‘how can we know that the sufficiently better state, or indeed the individual ‘betters’ each session, actually relate to the ‘best hopes’ response?’. And of course the answer is that we can’t! We actually can’t know. And here is the tough bit – we have to trust our clients!
Let’s go back to the ‘best hopes’ question and the meaning or perhaps the status of the client’s response. Let’s take a very simple example:
Worker: So what are your best hopes from our talking together? How will you know that this talking has ended up being of use to you?
Client: Well my manager has been saying for a while that I am good at my job but that I don’t believe in myself, and that I’d make a bigger contribution to the team if I just had more confidence. . . .
Worker: OK . . . so what are your best hopes from our talking?
Client: Well more confidence – if I could just find a way of being more confident.
Worker: OK so if we did some talking together and you ended up with more confidence, ‘being more confident’, that would make this useful?
Client: Yes.
So what is going on here? Some people refer to this process as ‘setting goals’ or ‘goaling’, others might talk about ‘contracts’ or ‘commissions’ or ‘establishing the contract’. Now I would avoid any of these terms because I think that they introduce rigidity into the change process. We can hear this confirmed when people ask, as the sometimes do, ‘so how do you handle it when the client changes their goals?’. Once ‘set’ the goals are meant to stay the same throughout the therapy. So only changes that fit the goals can be counted as significant, meaningful, changes. So I prefer to refer to this ‘best hopes’ process as finding a ‘starting point for the therapeutic process’. After all since the Solution Focused Process is non-normative we cannot know what to focus on until the client gives us a ‘starting point’. And we take the establishing of a ‘starting point’ very seriously, since if we do not it is likely that we will be imposing our preferences on the client, but having established a starting point we hold it lightly since we can have no idea what the relationship will be between this and how the client’s life will be when the client says to us ‘things are fine I don’t need to see you again’. Eve Lipchik writes ‘Solutions are the end product of a process of discovery. They may be far removed from what clients thought their goal was when they entered therapy’ (Lipchik, 2002, p 79). We truly do not know what the relationship will be between the starting point and the ending point! And since we cannot know, and only the client can, we have to trust our client. Steve de Shazer of course understood this perfectly. In Clues: Investigating Solutions in Brief Therapy he writes ‘The goal is best thought of as some member of the class of ways that the therapist and the client will know that the problem is solved rather than any particular member of that class’ (de Shazer, 1988, p 93). de Shazer does use the word ‘goal’ but he denies the concept unique status or significance. It is just one of the ways that the client will know that things are sufficiently different and there could well be others he implies. Steve’s framing is flexible.
This flexibility is similarly reflected in follow-up meetings. In their very early paper, Brief Therapy: Focused Solution Development, de Shazer and colleagues wrote ‘Anything that prompts the client to say that "things are better" needs to be identified as verification of change, and anything new or different or more effective that the client reports needs to be encouraged or amplified’ (de Shazer et al., 1986). We can see, he is clear, it is not only those changes that relate to the client’s ‘goals’ (his word), it is ‘anything that prompts the client to say that “things are better”’ that needs to be encouraged and amplified. In the same way, in Keys to Solution in Brief Therapy, de Shazer writes ‘Any change stands a chance of starting a ripple effect which will lead to a more satisfactory future’ (de Shazer, 1985, p 77). So what de Shazer is interested in eliciting from the client is indeed any change and the client noticing and reporting change, de Shazer suggests, is associated with more change. If we limit the changes that we allow to ‘count’’ to be significant, to those that relate to the ‘starting point’, the ‘best hopes’, then we are making the change process more difficult since we are limiting the number of possible changes that can be amplified in the conversation.
Therefore in the Solution Focused approach we choose to trust the client to define their own ‘starting point’, we trust the client to determine what is better, and we trust the client to determine when things are sufficiently better to stop seeing us. Trusting of course is tough and a large part of the difficulty in learning the approach is in letting go of the need to know. We let go of needing to know what the ‘problem is’, or perhaps better ‘how the client is framing the problem’, we let go of needing to know what the client’s finishing point will be, and we let go of needing to know what the pathway between those two points could or should be. The Solution Focused approach is tough for those of us who were trained to need to know and sometimes, if we are being honest, to assume that we know best!
- This question was most recently raised by Topher Welsch, a member of the Solution Focused Practice Level 1 programme, delivered by Evan George for BRIEF in January 2025.
de Shazer, Steve (1985) Keys to Solution in Brief Therapy. New York: Norton.
de Shazer, Steve (1988) Clues: Investigating Solutions in Brief Therapy. New York: Norton.
de Shazer, Steve, Kim Berg, Insoo, Lipchik, Eve, , Nunnally, Elam, Molnar, A., Gingerich, Wallace, Weiner Davis, Michelle. (1986) Brief Therapy: Focused Solution Development Family Process 25:207-221.
George, E., Iveson, C. and Ratner, H. (1990; Revised and expanded Edition 1999) Problem to Solution: Brief Therapy with Individuals and Families. London: BT Press
Lipchik, Eve (2002) Beyond Technique in Solution-Focused Therapy. New York: Guildford.
Evan George
London
21 September 2025
