Focusing on Solutions

I spent last week in Belize doing crisis counseling with high school students. I spent 2.5 days in the classroom teaching about strengths and healthy relationships, and the remainder of the week was spent in individual counseling with students. I was privileged to walk with these teens through some very challenging situations and deep hurts. 

We focused our counseling efforts on Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT). This is a culturally humble approach that honors that each person has resources within themselves to help improve their situation or live healthier lives. The counselor's job is to create a space where the client can identify and focus on their strengths. And it's an effective and liberating approach, especially when we only got to see each teen once. 

There are elements of SFBT that you can apply to your daily life! Here are a few questions you can ask yourself:

• Are there times when the problem is less of a problem? What is different about those times?
• When do things feel just a little bit better or a little less bad? What are you doing that helps things feel better?
• How have you managed to cope with your daily life despite your problem? What is it about you that let you get this far?

SFBT isn't about minimizing the difficulties of your problems, and it's not about sugarcoating the hard realities you're struggling with. It's about honoring the deep resourcefulness within yourself. Because your problems are big, and so are your strengths.

My Deep Gladness Meeting the World's Need

Where does your deep gladness meet the world's need? What is your native way of being in the world, and where does that meet a need in the world?

This is a post I've struggled with for a long time. I love Parker Palmer's work, especially Let Your Life Speak - but this central concept of the book is a struggle for me to answer. What is my native way of being in the world? How does somebody even answer that question? 

Am I the only one who doesn't know how to identify my native ways of showing up? 

I pause and I consider - when I am the me-est me, what does it look like? I'm attuned yet action-oriented. I show up as a disambiguator and a clarifier. I'm a helper, an encourager, and an empowerer. And I deeply believe the world needs these things. 

This deep gladness, this way of being fully myself, manifests in my transition into coaching and counseling. I want to help people reconcile their story, understand their strengths, take the next step, and own their story. Is this the "deep gladness" Palmer talks about? I don't know. But I do know that it's deep me-ness. 

What does deep you-ness look like? 

Burnout Part 7: Persistence

"And still she persisted." It's so much more than a quotable, meme-able political moment - it's also a truth for many people and for most women. I feel this deeply. When things get tough, what do I do? I try harder! There's beauty to this persistence, and I value my own doggedness. I also can look back in my life and see times that letting go would have been much wiser and healthier for me. 

My challenge to you is to admit, in one small corner of your heart, that unending persistence isn't always the road to success. 

But "no!" our hearts scream back! If we let go, what are we? We're failures! We're quitters! We can't do that! 

Those feelings are real. Many of us value grit and persistence so much that we see letting go of a goal as equivalent to weakness or failure. So, if we get frustrated or if more obstacles arise, we persist even harder. As Emily Nagowski asks in her book Burnout, when we feel like our two choices are "frustrated rage and helpless despair," maybe there's a third option. Maybe there's a quiet voice within us suggesting that we've done all we can and it's time to move on. 

If you need a little help determining whether it's time to persist or release a particular goal, you can try evaluating your options through a quick exercise. Take four quadrants of a piece of paper and list, both for the short and long term, some:

• benefits of continuing
• beneifts of stopping
• costs of continuing 
• costs of stopping

It's not failure to consider where in your life letting go could be success. That's wisdom, and that's burnout prevention. 

I'm a persister - I'm good at holding on and bad at letting go. And I recognize that there are areas in my life that have left me exhausted and depleted. Sometimes holding on is beautiful. Sometimes it is foolish and a waste of energy and passion you could invest in so many other places.

Where do you need to consider letting go?