 Hello and welcome to Pootie Ponders, the podcast where I explore big questions with brilliant people. Today's question is, what is solutions focused coaching and how could it drive down exclusions? And I'm in conversation with Jeff James. Okay, well my name is Jeff James, I'm Dr Jeff James and a little bit about me. I mean about this conversation I suppose. When I was in my mid-40s I did a teaching qualification and went to work. The job I got was in a special school, very long. I lived in West Wales then in a sort of beautiful mountains and I moved all the way across to Norfolk, which is a very different place to look at because that's where the job was. And I worked in a special school for just over two years and then moved from there to work for local authority for educational psychology service as a behaviour support teacher and teaching in a people referral unit, science teaching. So I trained as a secondary science teacher through the meeting of Welsh, which I'd learned when living in West Wales. And before that I was, my first degree was in zoology and botany and I'd done research in that area and ran a fish farm for a while. It was to do with the research I'd done and then had a bit of a change and repaired smashed cars for a while and then had another bit of a change and my first child was born in 1980 and I was put out of work at about the same time so I stayed at home with him and my then wife went back to work and I was free. I felt a bit sort of, I was a bit isolated really because there weren't many dads at home with babies at that time and things like wherever you went there were never changing facilities for a man to use because they're always in the women's toilets. So I was sort of a bit on the edge really so I put my son into a nursery a bit and I got a job as a volunteer with a scheme called On the Move which was adult literacy sort of scheme, government scheme and I imagine that where I lived in Chelmsford in Essex it was very high employment and some big companies working there, Marconi and a ball bearing factory and big employees. I imagine there wouldn't be anybody coming to adult literacy classes and when I got there it was just full up, there were just so many people coming along who just somehow missed out and their literacy skills weren't what they wanted and particularly very young mothers who got children in school and couldn't help them much because they couldn't manage the literacy demand and then I qualified, I did a RSA qualification that then worked as a tutor and I think I was the first person in Essex to be paid by the educational authority to run a course for adults with learning disabilities who were all going to a day centre at that time in Biliriki in Essex and that was just so interesting, such an interesting experience of people who'd had, I mean really their life experience was so limited because in the people I worked with they largely lived at home with aging parents and went to a day centre during the day and that was about it really so the difficulty was they had nothing to talk about really because they didn't do much so we started walking out and about around the place, around the town and looking in gardens and finding things to talk about and then it kind of struck me that that was a good idea so I moved to Wales with my land wife and set up an outdoor facility, sort of outdoor learning for adults with learning disabilities and so they came along for a week and then we did, they kept a diary during the week and the idea was they could take that back to wherever they were living and spending their days then and they would have some experiences to talk about in literacy work they were doing wherever they were and that was very successful, that was terrific for you years doing that and then that sort of fizzled out largely because there was change in government policy and adults with disabilities weren't funded for any kind of recreational thing it had to be put in terms of training and what I did was not, I wouldn't put it as training because it was bigger than that really it was just about being out and about and going to places that like anybody else might go to and they had limited access to and that's how I came, we had a little self sufficient farm that I was running then and that's how that work ran out so then I went to train at Aberystwyth as a teacher using my degree that I'd done all those years before and set off on that path and then while I was doing the work in the special school what struck me was I had no training to work with children who had emotional behaviour difficulties which were all the children in that school they were all statemented as it was called then you know for that and so I was a scientist and a trained science teacher but I didn't have training in that so I asked the rest of the staff in this private run school what their training was and nobody had any people just came and did the job without any training which was kind of surprising because these are children with particular needs of all kinds not just what was written on the statement but for what was underlying the reason that they were managing a mainstream school or where they came from so I started I look for reading and there wasn't any really I found one book that was any that was about that working with children with those kind of needs but didn't give you any idea how to do it so I started MA I did an open university MA that was three years you know one module a year which I finished at just about the same time I moved to local authority and I started a PhD just before I finished my MA which took me eight years and in the course of that came to something which is the subject of what we're going to talk about today I guess which is I started in 98 my PhD in 2001 somebody came along called Harvey Ratner from an organization called Brief in London who brought Solution of Focus Brief Therapy to the UK from America in the 80s and he did there was a one day training session on Solution of Focus Brief Therapy and I had a referral of a boy to do some work with and on the referral information it said that he'd experienced a highly traumatic event when he was six and which wasn't resolved he was offered he'd actually witnessed a murder in his house and a young family friend and he was offered but TADS was to be offered support by CAMHS of some kind but it never happened so he was 10 when I had the referral to work with him and his behavior was very difficult to manage he was fighting a lot outside and that was put down it was kind of implied this was to do this trauma he'd experienced and I wasn't prepared to just go and start work with him and re-raise this unresolved trauma I had to have a safe way of working and so I was stalling the referral and under pressure from the it said I could refer it to me you know sort of get on with it kind of thing and then Harvey came along with his one day training and I realized that was it because Solution of Focus Brief Therapy is to fail safe in the sense that you don't explore trauma that you're looking for what works and you're not looking you're not interested particularly in what doesn't work so I bought a book that I had on my knee and a notebook met this boy and his mum and six weeks later he was back out in the playground playing football all the threat of poems exclusion had disappeared so he was right on the edge of being permanently excluded it was like one more one more event you know and he'd go and he moved up to high school and disappeared amongst the thousand other children in high school so tell us more about him and how so you did one day of training you had this approach that you felt comfortable using with him and in six weeks it made a difference what did that look like in practice well it was so on the training day I mean Harvey you can't do a lot in one day really with a group of I don't know 40 people in a village hall and the WI making sandwiches at lunch you know it wasn't it wasn't intense but in the afternoon he Harvey was doing something and then he invited us to ask a solution-focused question so I'm the sort of person that tends to put my hand up every time and yeah I could have a go at that so I asked a question and Harvey said he's the most gentle man and he said well yes you could you could ask that or maybe you could and then he asked what was the solution-focused question so that made me think wow there's more to this than you know it's not just being positive there's more to this structure of it so because I was doing a PhD at the time I was doing a lot of reading so I left that training and then found everything I could to read about it and then I bought a book which was actually written by one of his team in the team he worked with in brief in London called Yasmin Ajmal who's edpsite, education psychologist and her book was enough of a clear explanation that in terms of the practicality of it that I read her book and that's the book I had in front of me and I made some notes for myself you know the photo book down the side about what these elements of the practice were and then set off I mean not feeling like I was an expert solution-focused brief therapist but that I could meet the demand of this assessment, this referral I had and I could do something which was going to be safe because at worst it would be a conversation just a chat about stuff you like doing and at best you can make a real change because of what's in this way of working you know like that so I mean as it was going on I remember writing comments to myself after the first session because I've missed a couple of things out if I was to do this is like a script and I made a note to myself you know I won't tell you what I wrote but it was a personal comment to myself about how I've missed it when I came to the second session what I could realise was it didn't matter because all this way of working is all about description it's a particular kind of description so that if you miss one particular you know questioning style if you like to be able to develop the description it'll be in somewhere else so you know it kind of it's kind to the to the solution focus brief therapist as well as to the client if you like it's both very forgiving and also because I was working my PhD was about education I'm rooted in education so it's called my thesis title was called finding a pedagogy because what I was after was a pedagogical way of working with children who are sort of entitled having emotional behaviour difficulties and I'm not which was not going to be a medical or fully psychological but a proper you know from my point of the educational way and this approach is enquiry it's called enquiry pedagogy so that the teacher and the tort are co-constructing the learning that's so that in the doing of that it means what it means is that as the therapist you don't have to have expertise on a lot of areas about disorder what you need to have is you need to know about what enquiry pedagogy is and you need to know what the process of solution focus working is like that and what are the kind of the key elements of that practice I mean what does that look like what would you teach someone if they wanted to know the basics yeah well I'm in the middle of doing I'm just doing the last touches together on an online course I'm doing offering and it's the way I presented is slightly a little bit different to solution focus brief therapy in a clinical setting and for a while when I worked for local authority I was seconded to CAMHS for four years so I've worked like in both areas really education and mental health and time I've tried to slim it down and slim it down and make it simpler so that for school staff to learn it so this is about increasing capacity in school so school staff can learn how to do this with a fairly with a brief course by having it clearly seeing what the structure is and then once you get the shift in thinking then the structure is just something you can provide like I did with that very first person boy I work with so they you know what it's made up of really is the key features of it is one thing is about power balance so that as the adult working with a child I'm not taking control I'm doing everything I can to maintain the agency of the child the child's ability to you know be part of this inquiry that we're doing so that I'm not being a directive teacher where I know more and I'll deliver it I'm asking open questions so there's questions you can't answer yes or no to and from the very from the very start of it I'm approaching the conversation by knowing something about the other person that directs my thinking so the way I present that is that I know so for example if I was working with you and you were the client and I was the solution purpose coach I know that you're successful hopeful and resourceful so that I keep those three things in mind so that if is anything which starts to push me a bit to look like you are not successful hopeful and resourceful I can remember that just slow down and just go back to being that being that being the sort of basis of the conversation and I think well one I mean one thing that's come up with this you know thinking about this work for so long and doing so there's 2001 that I first came across it is that this idea about you know blink of an eye communication between people before you say anything you know the sort of you know the gut reaction type vagal you know system is that if you approach somebody knowing that they are successful hopeful and resourceful that you make a different contact with the other person than if you know that they're in deficit and this good you know that as you will know this good science behind this you can see you know like diamonds thinking fast and slow idea you know that the fast part is unconscious and out of control and rough and important and the slow part is you know you think it and it's more accurate and you have time to reflect so that before even the conversation starts I'm doing something which sets it up in a way that's going to make it go in a particular direction towards strengths and then away from deficit so the first thing is to be approaching the conversation knowing that you can't do any harm that the other person's successful hopeful resourceful and that whatever you do will have a useful outcome so that in a way you can't fail at it and that you've got the right people in the room and the right amount of time so I'm not under pressure from anything really and then to start it off with this idea of power balance the first thing I say is what's your best hope for this meeting so we've got half an hour to have a conversation so supposing it was useful to you and it has to be useful otherwise there's no point in us sitting here and talking to each other so supposing it's useful to you what would that be about what would we talk about that could be useful to you and and it looks like as a pretty that's a pretty high-powered question but I worked over time I worked with children the youngest children sort of working individually were five and they'll respond to that in the same way but obviously your language changes a bit and you present it in a way that a five-year-old can get older better than a 14-year-old if you just said what's your best hope for this half hour kind of thing and in fact with older students I mean just recently I've done some work with two 15-year-old girls and they were very reluctant to come along at all so they would in fact one of them didn't come in the morning and then came later on in the day so the first thing I said to her was have you got any idea what this is about and she said no and I said well I haven't either so how about if we'll first thing we'll do is try and find out what it could be about and in terms of if you think of that from her perspective in terms of power balance then I'm not Dr. Jeffrey James with a white coat going to ask you something make you feel difficult I'm saying well I haven't got a clue what this is about either so let's try and find out shall we and that was a really productive way of starting because we were straight into an inquiry where the student had a pad of voice and I did like that what kind of response do you tend to get to that question you know what would you hope to happen in this half hour do you have a reaction yeah usual response have you got something in mind when you asked that or was that an open question no it's an open question well I'll ask you that because it seems like if you've got a fairly reluctant 15 year old who's been taking away from something else to it and you said you asked any question really the pretty good chance they're going to say I don't know isn't it it's a pretty good chance it's a weird question how should I know that very often what you get back so one important thing reason for remembering that person is successful, hopeful and resourceful is that that is the best answer they could give so in saying to me I don't know they're telling me something important in the best way that they can so I treat that exactly as it said so I might say that's a really answer that's really useful to me that answer because it means I need to ask you a different question okay so when I asked you what could this be about and you said I don't know I'll put it a little bit differently like so supposing you just had the slightest vague idea what it might be about just a vague idea what might that be just like a vague idea how this could be useful a little bit useful to you what could that be about because I've shrunk it so much and again the power's balanced in the room isn't it I'm saying I don't know what the answer is to this and I asked you the wrong question so I'm going to ask you a different one and that will usually you'll get some kind of answer like it'll be like because it'll be of course there'll be a really my behaviour or one 15 year old girl said to me it was a surprising way to put it for a young woman really but that's what she said and then okay so supposing it's something about that so supposing they said my behaviour I said so supposing we did some work around that that was a bit useful to you in the next half now we'll go ahead and do that shall we and then they'll go okay and then that's it I'm not going to ask anymore about the project but what it's done is it's given us a clear it's about my behaviour so now the difference is in solution focus working and I'm not going to explore that at all what it means I'm going to ask a different question which is called problem free talk and it's what's your best thing what do you like doing best and what comes out of that is that the person I'm talking to will start to talk about something in the world where they've got some kind of mastery and it doesn't matter what it is or how small it is or so and when they're doing that you know when you speak about yourself in those kind of terms about having mastery then do you know about flow you know about flow state well my I wrote a book in 2016 about solution focused approach and that was one thing I explored in the book was that when you start to flow is the feeling you get when you're really if you're really good at something to do it you know it's going to work without knowing how it's going to work so if you're really good at riding a bike without falling off it you'll jump on your bike and you go whizzing around and you'll never think whether you'll fall off or not what you do is you experience the pleasure of being a really good bike rider or a really good at playing the piano or really good at I mean this the girl I told you about who said being naughty was her project when I asked her that question what's your best thing what do you like doing she said she said mashed potato so I said okay tell me more about mashed potato now this was a she was she was wearing light makeup very well presented she was this is a school that I was doing a one day one afternoon piece of working no one day piece of working and the school said they found me the most disengaged student they got it was a secondary school in a in an area where they have grammar and secondary schools so she was very reluctant to turn up start with and then she you know she did come in and then so and she said mashed potato so okay tell me more about mashed potato and she talked about mashed potato for about quarter of an hour we had half an hour for the meeting and she told you know like okay tell me a bit more about that how come you do that well she well she told me that she kept at it till there were no lumps okay so so how do you know when it's done well mum says oh that's looking really good okay so what's your mum seeing in you that makes you a really good mashed potato maker well and she say things like well I don't give up I keep on till it's done and as she's talking she's talking talking faster and louder and because she's in flow she's experiencing flow as a mashed potato maker and I know that she'd never been asked about that before in her life who would ever have asked about them would they would they particularly somebody you know dr. James coming in from somewhere to do some training in the school about behaviour management or whatever you call it you know like that anyway so she told she told me all about that what I'm doing is I'm listening to her story and then not not offering much apart from another okay how come you do that or tell me a bit more about that or oh wow so who would notice that then what would your mum say if so these are just kind of triggering inquiry questions really like that and then when that when she'd finished that I said she wasn't ready she was she was in such a you know energised state really talking about it I said okay so that was mashed potatoes tell me something else that you like doing and she said she had a little thing and she said lasagna oh lasagna so she did she did about nearly 10 minutes talking about lasagna how you have to you know how you have to do that have to layer it properly and how you have to and the same thing so what is it about you that you know you can do that so what's happening is she's getting talked about strengths that she's got which she never knew particularly that she'd had or never verbalised anyway but she can hear in her own ears her saying well I suppose I'm a stick at it I suppose I'm persistent oh right you think how that translates into what was happening for her in school the most disengaged student they got you know in another setting but of course the important thing is that when she's making mashed potatoes she's the same person as when she's in a mass class looking out the window the same person with the same strengths so the same potential for you know persistence in one thing as another anyway we nearly run out of time so we very quickly rounded the meeting up and did the things we finished which are more of these elements of work there's seven elements and you can tick them off if that's what you're going to be doing and so I did some more work in the school the reason I did the work with her I wanted to demonstrate to her head of year who've been in touch with me about how this work works so by seeing it she was sitting in the room by seeing it happening that was a way of showing her and then we met with the other heads of year and then with the whole school and a week later I had an email from the head of year to say that she'd arranged a meeting with this girl as a follow-up and the girl hadn't turned up so that was okay so you know anything about that well she already had an appointment with a counsellor or something like that she came the next day anyway I had another email from this head of year and she said the head of year said well I don't know what's happened but I'm having teachers talking to me about this girl and she's doing better in class she's getting her work done, she's paying attention and that was after one 30 minute session and I've seen that happen repeatedly over 20 years and in that conversation so the mashed potato and the lasagna and obviously you've talked a bit about how you reflect back on the strength and the skills or you're encouraging her to reflect back on those do you do more is there any more directive part of that practice or you give her stuff to go away and do or it's literally as it sounds I can quickly I can't teach you how to do this in 10 minutes quickly run through the structure so there's the setting of the project there's problem free talk there's something called exception finding which is sometimes people will talk about a problem in the past and because this is a very respectful way of working as all psychotherapy should be then I'm not going to stop the person talking about that but what I'm going to do is wait for a little gap and then I'm going to say I'm going to acknowledge the difficulty but it seems to me when that was happening to you it was a really difficult time and I'm interested that even though it was so difficult for you somehow you've come through it and you're here today and you're telling me about that and that's what I'm hearing something about you that you could cope with that somehow and keep going is that true about you so acknowledging is a way of bringing the problem solution-focused, strength-focused rather than going to explore the problem where the deficits might lie so that's an element another one is what will come after the mashed potato could be scaling and solution-focused scaling isn't about numbers to try to move somebody so if somebody said an 8 I wouldn't say so what would you do to be at a 10 in a week's time just more better if somebody was at a 3 I wouldn't say so what would you do to be how come you're at 3 and not at 1 in other words what's already working what's already going well that you're already at 3 and that when I've worked with particularly a couple of times I remember working with a mother and a 13 year old and the mother thought that was a revelation because she'd never heard anybody talk about that bit she'd only ever heard talk about the bit from 3 to 10 which wasn't present and not talk about the bit which is already present and that makes in terms of self-esteem of the person you're talking to that gives them a different view of what the world's like because they've already got so if a person was at 3 I'd say what I can see is you're already sort of well on you're part of the way up the scale getting all the way up to 10 where things are going okay for you so how come you're doing that what is it about you that you can do that and then so the next part okay so supposing we were to talk in a week's time where do you hope you might be with that 3 do you hope that might change stay where it is what are you hoping about that and then so this is about hope not about fixed you know well I hope it might be at 4 next week alright so supposing that happens supposing it was next week and we were talking to each other and it wasn't 4 what might be a bit different what might you know you might be doing something a bit differently what might that be so then they're talking about the plan that gets them from where they are to getting towards their 10 on the scale or 9 or wherever is their high point on the scale and then and that's so that's scaling and then and then what I do with that is to say is to give a task at the end of the session which is the task is to look out for what's going well so I'm going to ask you between now and next week you look out for what's going well notice what's going well and then I'm going to ask you about that so that's such a wide question it's not saying notice you doing that particular thing you've talked about but notice what's going well because that will incorporate that and also anything else that's around and then and that's and there's compliments then compliments are a part of it so that at the end of a meeting I'll always do compliments which is there are three people in the room like a mama child and me and I'd say so there's going to be three compliments to you one is going to be you to yourself one's going to be your mom to you or one is going to be me to you so remembering the power thing then I'll say so who would you like to go first and that'll be well I don't mind I say and I'll say well I don't mind either so you decide who would go first and then it'll be their choose and very often I find very often it's that the child has had really no practice itself complimenting particularly children who get in a very difficult place you would have noticed seen the same thing that they're not used to saying to themselves yeah I'm okay at that that's something strong about me so often the first time it takes a little bit of time for them to get near enough to be able to so they might ask mom to go first and she'll say well I've noticed that in this meeting you've just been talking an awful lot you know you've been talking and being clear and then that'll give them a little clue so then they might say yeah well I think well mom said about my talking I think I might say the same thing I think I've been talking really well and then I'll say whatever my contribution is and that so then if we have another meeting that's going to get into a routine then so we're going to finish with compliment and task and in solution focus complimenting it's very different to praise because I see praise as being one person giving you an opinion about another person so in my opinion Boogie you know you've been doing a good job here because you let me talk nearly entirely all the time and you haven't said very much well that's my opinion of you but if I was to say to you it seems to me like something about you is that you are able to just sit back and let the conversation flow is that true about you that you can do that and then you're nodding your head so you know you're confirming it and that's not my opinion of you that's me kind of summing up my thoughts about it and then offering it to you and then you can confirm it or you might say that's not true at all I've been feeling really impatient but I've been you know I've just been controlling myself also something you can control yourself in a tight situation to be able to do that you know like that you know so it's a very there's a lot of this it's a even balanced conversation all the way through from the beginning to the end it feels like curiosity is quite an important kind of element here like you have to do quite a lot of reflecting and teasing out of different things and trying to find things out that perhaps haven't been asked before for a child that is a terrific bit of noticing Boogie because you know what I'd say you know like people like you know when I'm doing the training of the course it's about so how do you know one question to the next question and the idea is you can't know your question until you heard the answer to the previous one and when you when you've heard that your curiosity will lead you to the next question and you can't know it so it means you're sitting there just waiting paying attention to what the person's saying and then listening to what they've said and then formulating your next question from that so curiosity is what leads the whole conversation so you know like two solution-focused coaches would have a conversation at each point because their curiosity would lead them in a different place but the direction is always the same because overall I'm curious about what your strengths are what your qualities resources and strengths are and your hopes and like that you know your hopes and your strengths and your successes so resourceful hope was successful that's sort of embedded in it all the time like that I'm interested to know how this works when you've got children who have you talked a bit there about how sometimes they find it hard to see their strengths because the kinds of kids that I've got in mind are maybe children who are really used to hearing about their challenges and their difficulties and their failings and they might readily list those and the idea of engaging with them in this kind of really curious conversation focused on their strengths it sounds unlikely you know how do you make that work it does sound really unlikely and I think how you make it work is by sort of having a bit of understanding what's going on underneath it because if a person's got a bit of a way of thinking so if they tend to think about themselves as being in trouble and a failure and they're dominated by a problem if you open that up if you open up that neural net that way of thinking that'll be very strong and it'll come in strongly so that all the time you're doing this work you're being careful that you don't do that even to the point when it does start to open up and the person starts to talk about it the acknowledgement idea is that you can return it to being strength focused and close that net down very quickly by asking a strength focus problem so that and I mean I have to say when I started off doing this I was like you I thought this is never going to work because I was only ever had referrals from children who everybody else had tried everything else I mean including when I was working for the mental health clinic you know there were there were medics who had prescribed medication and there could be other people doing other types of talking work but nobody was doing the work that I was doing and they were getting people getting stuck so that it's like it's a big challenge really it's whether you can make this work or not and you think well why should this work but nothing doesn't and it's because that an awful lot of the rest of the kind of helping work returns to the problem once you're in the problem field that tends because it's a habit of thinking that will tend to dominate the whole conversation and because of what goes with it so when a child is talking about failure they won't be feeling a high level of self-esteem and they might well tend to close down so then you get stuck because they won't talk to you because you're in the chair with the head down and having heard this before probably not feeling good about themselves and not having anything to talk about really that doesn't make them feel bad whereas as soon as the 15 year old started talking about mashed potato she was energised into talking more about it and it was I mean it was odd because she didn't you know she didn't say why are we talking about that you know she didn't well what a weird conversation to have you know what are you on why are we talking about mashed potato because to her this was her the little bit of the world where she was a star so that's why it does it does seem unlikely and it gets sometimes solution-focused brief therapy and solution-focused coaching get represented as just a positive conversation but if you were trying to have a just a positive conversation without the understanding and the structure then it would probably land back in the problem because the problem will keep popping itself out so that I mean you're like in your work you do my work that I do as I walk into the room and the child walks into the room they know what's going to come next don't they because they've done this before we rarely meet children at the very first stage do we you know in the in the preventative line we meeting them later on so they're beginning the conversation knowing this is going to be what's gone before it's when I something a rather person over the school fence and they hit the head on the ground you know it's going to be that one and so because they've got that in mind they're going to be in that state where they're not feeling good about themselves something like that which because I had in my head a question around you know how much of this is about the approach and how much of it is about the fact that you've built that kind of safe space where you really hear a child and it sounds like the skill in the approach is actually really important which brings me to a kind of a sort of final question really for you which is around do people need to be you know trained very clearly trained practitioners to be able to do this kind of work and have these kinds of conversations because you mentioned in our sort of chat beforehand about this fear that sometimes we have an education that we're not trained therapists and we're expecting to do that role right that's a really good question as well because I mean you hear that people people say you know like in education they say well we're not therapists always not social workers well I don't think that's true I think that I think that people working with other people are always therapists in the sense of but if you take it as therapy being you know a trained approach where you're going to explore the history of a problem then we're certainly not therapists in that sense but in terms of working in the moment with people who have needs then children in schools have needs all the time to all staff in school are dealing with children in need all the time and they're not necessarily doing it by just giving an instruction they're doing it by relationship and if it's through relationship then that's therapy I mean you know psychotherapy has got three parts of effectiveness really which is relationship, specific approach and other factors which are unknown well relationship the third of it relationship is a big part of education and so you know that so I tend that it's not it's not alien to teachers to be therapists but it is alien if they're to think of themselves as like a psychoanalyst with a couch something like that in terms of training because it needs enough enough explanation to get the mindset shift so like the mindset is when you see something go wrong when a child approaches you and something's gone wrong your question is not what's gone wrong but what's gone right so you're going to ask this question what's gone right in other words what's working what's just going well for you that's counterintuitive to the way most people work most of the time when problems are around but if you get the mindset change the structure the seven elements come out of it to start with pretty scripted because it's a different language but as soon as you get what the question about this understanding is you can start to shape them into your own language so what I've been doing so far is a two day training course so it's about seven hours over two days something like that well two years ago I set up an online course I ran in Australia and the UK to pilot it and now I'm just setting up a new one here which is about the same amount of content time and I've run the distance training and that seems to work as well as the as the face to face with one proviso really that in common with a continuing professional development you know as it's changed the last ten years is the training element and then is the follow-up and supervision and the follow-up and supervision is a crucial part of it so that after the online course or the on or the face to face I'll have a zoom session with people and then we're starting to get some real like inquiry work about what's working some people are going slow some people quicker some people got questions about it and also last year I produced a a workbook which is called Solution Focus Coaching a Workbook for Educators and that's got the structure written into the workbook and also spaces to write notes so that when as they leave the course they've got the structure they've got the whole thing written out in a spiral workbook you can put on your desk and scribble on it to carry them and then there's the face to face follow-up and that's what makes it work and that's sufficient people can get on and do the work that sounds fantastic so I'll make sure that we link in the show notes to all those the various bits that you've you'll do so I always like to end with a kind of a closing thought and you're welcome to take it where you want but the thing I'm wondering that I think is really important about your work is that sometimes it seems like you're the person who holds on to hope when maybe everyone else has given up on a child and I wondered if you had any thoughts around that and reflections for those working with you yes I think that's a good way to put it I think I think this hopelessness is really debilitating isn't it and I think both sides really like the adult professional and the child can both lose hope after a bit because we've tried everything and nothing seems to work and that's when what I think is this step that should be exclusion comes along when people get hopeless and then we can't do anything else since the last resort and you'll have to go and in my experience I don't need to go to that step because by keeping hopeful you can be doing something you know in the moment that's different and I mean I'd add to what you said I think hope's important but I called this I had somebody came into a session I was doing in Lincolnshire who's the inclusion officer and she said to the just we were just sort of in the process of doing something and I was saying to the group I call it structured kindness because like unstructured kindness doesn't really go anywhere because if you're just kind of unstructuredly kind to a child who's just beaten somebody up in the playground it's not productive really but structured kindness is this solution of folks approach and it's kind in the sense that they're hopeful about the other person and knowing that they're resourceful and successful in me in order to bring it out in them so I think the hopeful part and the structure the structured kindness aspect of it is really important and when you can see the difference it makes then you can start to think well maybe I can do this maybe it's worth doing this and it doesn't just bounce off against the you know the rhetoric around discipline and you know exclusion and that kind of thing I mean I've worked with children right on the edge of exclusion for 20 years and you know with a little bit of work and a bit of time not necessarily one session but five sessions over a month say or a little bit longer and then by by staff in school this is then the child isn't excluded and they're where they should be with their friends and their peers you know they've made a mistake they've learned something and they've got over it you know those kind of things productive