That which you focus on gets larger

Solution-focus works starts with the following very simple statement "That which you focus on gets larger."

In graduate school, one of my most outstanding professors, Dr. Bill Goodwin (we all still miss you!), proposed a similar idea as the "Yellow Volkswagen Theory". Everyday yellow Volkswagen Beetles drive by you and you never notice.  A friend says, "Hey, there's one of those yellow Volkswagens!" and points one out as is passes.  From then on, you see them everywhere, as if no one in town had one until that day and now just about every-other-person in town owns one. When you bring something out of your subconscious and into your conscious mind  you will begin to see it every where.  Some call this a "self-fulfilling prophecy."  The key to Solution-focused practices in your work is simply shifting you focus to looking for those yellow Beetles: what works.  In my work as a supervisor, this small shift has a profound affect on the way Early Childhood Teachers see their classroom, families, children and colleagues.

Current practices in Early Childhood Education (ECE) often seek out and isolate the "problem", whatever it may be.  Once identified, the problem is dissected until we have uncovered every small part of the problem, sometimes even tying in things that aren't part of the problem. Let's use a familiar example of this: child in a classroom is biting peers during the school day.  In typical practices, we watch this child and look for every instance that they bite, we do this with the intent of finding precipitating behaviors.  We believe that by uncovering these precursors, or triggers, we can intervene and prevent the biting. However, more often then not we find the biting occurs more frequently. We then find no clear pattern to the biting because everything seems to cause this: transitions, peer play, desires, hunger, frustration, happiness, and so on. The biting continues and we can't stop it because the classroom is full of perceived triggers.  This i because we are looking for the problem: biting. If that which we focus on gets larger then when we look for biting we'll see it more and it'll happen more, as we are unintentionally reinforcing the occurrence of the behavior by looking for it.

So what if we apply the Solution-focused the same principle in a different way? What happens when instead of looking for biting, we look for  what the child, and the other children, are doing when the are not biting? When we uncover what makes a child successful, in this case not biting, we then can approach this child from a strengths-based perspective. We can verbally illustrate to the child, ourselves, colleagues and parents the successful experiences in the classroom. And when and if the biting happens again, we now have uncovered the child's successes as a key to changing behavior.

I leave you here to work on this: Look for one, just one, "problem area" in your work (and honestly, it doesn't matter what your work is).  Challenge yourself to remove the problem from your thinking and ask "when I (or this) is successful, it looks like this ____________".

Stay tuned for the next blog post which will involve: Real-life classroom stories of success when focusing on solutions