Wittgenstein: Solutions Not Problems

As you may have been hearing on recent podcasts, I’ve been training in solution focused therapy / coaching recently. I’ve been finding it pretty transformational, both for me personally but I’ve also found it really useful in work too. It’s a very postmodern practice, in that it just works. In the training that I’ve attended the trainers have been disinterested in the theory, or why it works. Their response is that it does, and here’s how we do it. That’s good enough for me, I really enjoyed getting cracking with it and trying it out on lots of my loved ones before doing coaching with paying clients. However, I have a podcast to run and I need that content baby! So what is the deal with solution focused therapy and what’s the theory behind it? [for the full blog post that I read out here head over to the Patreon where I've unlocked it https://www.patreon.com/posts/70372857 ] If you’re interested in booking a session with me (Patrons get 10% discount) check out the coaching page at justinhancock.co.uk If you want to have a session with someone who isn’t me, I can recommend Biba (who I’ve had some sessions with too). She’s great https://ribalon.org/ If you’re interested in getting some training yourself, I’d recommend the courses at Brief, which is where I’ve been training. https://www.brief.org.uk/ To help with this I’ve been reading How to Read Wittgenstein by Ray Monk and Ludwig Wittgenstein by Edward Kanterian (part of the Critical Lives series). This article by Steve de Shazer is really interesting (and helpful) https://www.sdstate.edu/sites/default/files/2018-06/dont_think_but_observe.pdf The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy came up trumps again with their excellent entry (such an amazing resource) https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/ The Wikipedia page for solution focused therapy is packed with links to the evidence for how effective it is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solution-focused_brief_therapy If you want to understand what I meant by postmodern check out this podcast by Jeremy Gilbert (when Liz Truss was having a go at postmodernism, obviously she didn’t understand what that meant)