Imagine that you are a counselor who is seeing yourself for individual sessions, and you are going to apply some of the principles/practices of solution-focused therapy to yourself. For the purposes of this exercise, let’s assume that the issue for which you are seeking counseling is the challenge of juggling the multiple responsibilities in your life while also being in a graduate school program that should feel fairly relevant!
• Create a list of the strengths and resources you have identified in yourself. It is important to be thorough, as these will help you formulate your questions in the next steps.
• Next, develop and write down three different exception questions: one should be focused on highlighting your past strengths and resources, the second should emphasize your current strengths and resources, and the third should be intended to discover existing or anticipated strengths and resources that could be used in the future. (Hint: This third exception question could be phrased as a miracle question.)
• Now, develop and write down three different coping questions that could be posed to yourself, as the client. How are these different from the exception questions?
• Finally, develop and write down three different scaling questions. Be sure to clearly define the endpoints or the anchors for each scaling question—that is, clarify what will be represented by 1 and what will be represented by 10 on each scale.
