Brief Solution Focused Coaching
Brief Solution Focused Coaching skips the diagnosis of what's wrong and goes straight to what's already working, using a small set of questions to build a step the client can take now.
A short row of boxes runs left to right, ending in one concrete action rather than a diagnosis.
Reach for this when…
- A client keeps circling the same problem without moving toward action.
- You have one session, not twelve, to create momentum.
- The client is more resourced than they think and needs that surfaced, not told.
How to run it
- Open with the pre-session change question: what's already shifted since booking?
- Ask the miracle question to describe the problem-free state.
- Ask exception questions: when wasn't this happening, and what was different?
- Scale where they are now and what a half-point better looks like.
- Ask coping questions to surface strengths they're not crediting.
- Set one small 'do something different' task to break the pattern.
A worked example
Situation. Rami Haddad's fintech startup PayWasl, in Amman, Jordan, had stalled on its Series A. He arrived at coaching describing everything wrong with the fundraising market.
Applied. The coach skipped past the problem talk to a scaling question, then set a 'do something different' task: pitch three investors outside his usual fintech list instead of re-pitching the same five.
Result. One of the three said yes within a month. He'd been repeating the same pitch to the same room for half a year.
The catch
It works fast on stuck patterns but it's not built for grief, trauma or situations where the client genuinely lacks a resource, not just access to one. Push the miracle question too hard on someone in crisis and it can feel dismissive of how bad things actually are.
If the client has no history of the problem ever being absent, the exception question will come up empty - don't force it.
Origin: Steve de Shazer & Insoo Kim Berg