minding your language

The language of strengths individualises each of us; whereas, the language used to describe problems tends more to aggregate us into less well-defined groups. In the following brief video, I will contrast the types of language we use for describing ourselves either from a problems perspective or from a strengths approach. Click on the following link now to access the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bALixNzWHVU

This video is part of the email sequence providing subscribers with access to a wide range of strengths-based resources. If you wish to subscribe to the email list click the following link (it's FREE resources that I am offering, with no catch!):

https://positiverisktaking.lpages.co/working-with-strengths-2/

The Risk Decision-Making Coach

2015 has proved to be the year of business investment and change for Practice Based Evidence, with a focus on a US-based online marketing & coaching programme (EPIC from January – June, and Signature Series from June). The messages of 'Positive Risk-Taking' and a Strengths Approach are in the process of being developed into a webinar and signature programme supported through the purchase of the www.PositiveRiskTaking.com domain as the future home of a membership site.

Keep watching this space, Facebook & LinkedIn ads, as well as clicking on the domain for information on webinar dates. Who knows what the new signature programme could offer you… I will be offering business leaders and senior managers the opportunity to access a simple 5-step method to dissolving those fears associated with high-risk decisions. Get on board in order to change your relationship to risk forever!

Sacred Fools

Why listen to the self-styled publicity of the author when you can take the word of an independent expert? The following are extracts from the Foreword written by Professor Steve Onyett for this new book 'Working with Strengths':

Steve OnyettRadical in the sense of challenging the status quo. I love the notion of "funky" mental health services where we first break all the rules – not in a spirit of anarchy so much as in recognition of the fact that so many of our current assumptions simply don’t serve. We need more sacred fools who will run into the royal court and fart in front of the King or Queen in order to shake things up and reveal new and better ways.

There is no shortage of guidance around. There is a plethora of exhortations to be positive and focus on strengths from every direction. However, not so many get behind the rhetoric to look with clear and open eyes at how this plays out in reality. This requires that we look not just at what people say they do, but what they do do. It means that we need to look at what happens in practice and learn from that experience.

Steve Morgan is one of our greatest assets in this context. He has been at the forefront of the movement for strengths based practice in mental health services for a long time and has borne witness to both its successes and it’s disappointments. He has brought this invaluable perspective to bear here in a book that tells you pretty much everything there is to know about how things could be, while also equipping you for the stark realities of implementation in challenging contexts. He does this without judgement or cynicism, thereby leaving us with a sense of the possible and a range of first steps that we can take to make it happen. It has been said that a cynic is a passionate person that does not want to be disappointed again (Zander and Zander, 2000). Here Steve talks to the passion rather than the disappointment.

Targeted training

In health and social care services we have a long tradition of adopting a scatter-gun approach to staff training. Perhaps this is why staff members often feel negative about mandatory training initiatives, or feel that provision is often made as a knee-jerk response to something going wrong. More generous feedback emerges from events that individual's have personally chosen to attend, but these often have little positive ripple effect out into the team they are part of... if you weren't there you simply aren't going to know much about it.

The Practice Based Evidence initiative has long tried to establish a strengths approach to training, as well as to working with service users. The essence is to get all team members to provide a baseline evaluation of the good and not so good practice in their team, against a series of positive statements of best practice that should be relevant to the way they work. Hence, several Practice Based Evidence tools were devised to address different types of teams and different person-centred approaches to working.

In the case of one of the Newham Community Mental Health Teams in 2006 an honest anonymised evaluation of team practice helped to identify the priorities for a subsequent 5-day programme tailored to their needs. This example illustrates how a practice development approach to training initiatives can respond to the needs identified by practitioners themselves, impact on the practice of a whole team, and engage people more in the process of change. This is how a strengths approach can apply as much to team development as it should do for working with service users. See also Take a picture of this for a larger initiative following a similar approach but capturing the evidence of positive change.

Working with Strengths

At a strategic level we are continually expanding the language, but essentially using new words and phrases to say the same thing... recovery, personalisation, self-directed support, person-centred planning, re-ablement/re-enablement. Nobody can seriously disagree with the premise that service users should be given a voice in order to say what they need and want, to reflect on how best to meet their wishes and aspirations, to exercise choice and feel supported in their decision-making. However, there is often a gap between what we are saying we are doing as services, and what service users are experiencing on the receiving end.

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