[If you haven’t read Part I: Why Be Your Own Best Coach Is As Revolutionary as the iPhone, start there.]
What Makes Be Your Own Best Coach Like the iPhone?
Be Your Own Best Coach marries two powerful disciplines: solution-focused practice and behavior design, and unifies them through our Y-PET framework for change.
We help you put it all into action through our Solution-Focused StoryCrafting method, which connects up all the moving parts of a self-driven change process and makes good things happen.
What Is Solution-focused Practice?
Solution-focused practice developed in the family therapy world. In the early 80s, Steve DeShazer and Insoo Kim Berg (a husband-and-wife team), and colleagues at the Brief Family Therapy Center in Milwaukee stumbled onto something that evolved into solution-focused brief therapy, a psychotherapy approach that was radically different from traditional psychotherapy practice.
Like root-cause analysis that grew out of an approach pioneered at Toyota in the 1950s and spread widely through industry and business, traditional psychotherapy begins with the premise that to help someone, you must first be an expert in the problem, understanding it from all angles: Its origins, meaning, purpose, and how it works. And then you must be able to figure out how to fix the problem right at its roots.
Solution-focused brief therapy turns this approach on its head . . .
. . . but not because of any deliberate intention.
The truth is, solution-focused brief therapy evolved almost accidentally and organically.
After observing hundreds of hours of therapy, the Milwaukee group found that what helped clients make lasting, real-life changes was not diving into all the details of clients’ problems and trying to overcome the barriers that kept people from having the kinds of lives they wanted.
It was actually exploring exceptions to the problem: that is, noticing times when the problem was less apparent or even absent. This led to one of the central tenets of solution-focused brief therapy: Find what works and do more of it.
If someone is more productive at certain times of the day than others, examine in fine detail what helps the person when they are most productive instead of trying to fix whatever is going on at the unproductive times. Look for even the smallest clues of success and build on those because small changes can yield big results.
Another development came from zeroing in on the client’s hopes for the future rather than undoing the problems of their past. This implies that knowing a lot about the problem may not be necessary to formulate a solution. In fact, problems may be unconnected and even irrelevant to the change process.
By getting right to the outcomes the client wants, solution-focused practice is time-efficient. And, it turns out that the number of sessions needed to help people decreases when working solution-focused rather than problem-saturated.
Since its inception almost 40 years ago, what began as solution-focused brief therapy used only by psychotherapists has evolved into solution-focused practice. It’s now being used extensively in many different settings including medical and behavioral healthcare, schools, business, criminal justice, and social services.
The effectiveness of solution-focused practice has been demonstrated through exhaustive research over decades. And, solution-focused practice continues to prove its value in helping people make lasting changes more quickly and more easily than the traditional problem-solving approach.
What Is Behavior Design?
Behavior design is the second pillar in our Be Your Own Best Coach program.
When we talk about behavior design today we’re talking about a framework for intentionally and systematically changing human behavior through persuasive modifications to the physical, social, and digital environment.
Although the term behavior design is relatively new, the fundamental question it answers is as old as human history: How do you get someone (or yourself) to take action and take that action in a specific way?
A framework means it’s a set of ideas that describes and predicts how and why people behave the way they do. It’s also a set of practices for changing those behaviors. That’s the intentional part.
Behavior design is also systematic, which means it’s not a bunch of random ideas, tips, or techniques. It’s anchored in observations and experiments from psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics that describes why people do what they do, and why and how certain interventions can lead to certain predictable behavior changes.
Behavior design applies to all change, big and small, temporary or permanent, occasional or routine. It applies to changes you want to start doing as well as behaviors you want to stop doing. (Have any bad habits you’d like to crush forever?)
Behavior design also includes persuasion. It’s not about coercing or forcing people to do one thing or another. It’s about making the desired change easy to do with the least friction (resistance). Good behavior design has integrity because it preserves individual choice, autonomy, and dignity.
When we talk about environment within the context of behavior design, we mean the immediate situation or setting you find yourself in. We love trees, but environment in this case is not about hugging them.
Behavior Design harnesses the power of tools to strategically modify how the environment looks and feels, how it cues your behavior, and how it may respond to your behavior to keep you on course.
The manipulation of environment to prompt certain behavior is all around us.
In the digital world, environment can mean the color palette of a website, the way the navigation path is laid out, or the number of clicks we need to make to hit the BUY NOW button.
In daily life, environment shows up everytime we stand in line at the grocery store and are tempted with the inexpensive candy, magazines, and little products like lip gloss and nail clippers that are displayed right at eye level. Or, at a 3-story medical clinic where patients pass a wide, brightly lit and attractively-decorated stairway before they arrive at the bank of elevators located at the end of a long hall.
At home, we use behavior design to make desired routines easy to carry out. A simple change in where you put your recycling bin can make a big difference in whether your paper, plastic, and glass find their way into it or simply end up adding to your town’s landfill.
How Does the Solution-Focused StoryCrafting and the Self-Leadership Map Work?
During your five-week Be Your Own Best Coach journey, you’ll create your own Self-Leadership Map using our proprietary Solution-Focused StoryCrafting method.
Solution-Focused StoryCrafting is a highly structured journaling process that capitalizes on the power of multiple evidence-based practices and offers them to you in a unique experiential learning format.
As the name suggests, Solution-Focused StoryCrafting walks you through a series of solution-focused questions and exercises that take you step-by-step on a journey of exploration and discovery that takes you from dreams to action. It’s all about revealing and amplifying the hero within you.
The Solution-Focused StoryCrafting activities give you ways to consider, assess, track, measure, create, and develop a narrative of hope, competency, courage, and possibility that reduces or eliminates the faulty thinking, self-defeating attitudes, and ineffective action that has held you back in the past.
The activities include the use of evidence-based strategies, tools, and techniques that you work on independently or as part of small-group breakouts during the course.
You’ll also have the advantage of the power of the community, which deepens your engagement and amplifies the effectiveness of the Solution-Focused StoryCrafting method.
You know that expression, “There’s more than one way to skin a cat?”
The Solution-Focused StoryCrafting method provides many roads for you to consider on your journey toward a better career and more satisfying personal life.
It invites you to be both the subject and the scientist as you experiment with new ways to think about your goals and take action to reach them. You learn what works for you to deliver the results you want. And, you see what fits your unique needs, interests, values, and preferences.
The result? You walk away with a personalized, Self-Leadership Map that you have created just for yourself.
Remember how we began with the story of the iPhone and Steve Jobs’ quote “Creativity is just connecting things?”
Be Your Own Best Coach gives you exactly that: a super powerful system for professional and personal transformation built on a wholly new, innovative way to connect the things in your life that really matter.