The practices

Every practice here has a source. I will tell you which ones are mine and which ones are not.

Most of this industry invents a framework, gives it an acronym, and implies it came from nowhere. I would rather show you where each thing came from, because the origin is usually the reason it works.

Signal and Source

Mine. This is the practice I hand people most often, and it is for anyone who knows something is wrong but cannot say what.

Ordinary journaling asks you what happened, and then how you felt about it. This runs the other way. Any time you get a strong feeling, you write down what it felt like first, physically and plainly, before you try to name it. Then, and only then, you write down what was going on around you when it arrived.

The reversal is the whole point. A feeling shows up before the explanation does, and if you start with the explanation you will write down the story you already believe instead of what actually happened. Doing it in this order gets you real data instead of a rerun.

After a couple of weeks you have a log. That is when the work gets interesting, because patterns that were invisible one at a time are obvious in a stack. Then we name them, and a feeling with a name attached is a very different thing to live with than a feeling without one.

Where it came from: this is structurally an antecedent log, which is a tool out of applied behaviour analysis. It is what I was trained to do during forty eight weeks of field work with autistic children, where you record what happened immediately before a behaviour rather than guessing at why. I turned it inward and reversed the order. It works for the same reason it works in the field: it replaces your interpretation with a record.

Three moves: log the signal, trace the source, name the pattern.

The trajectory reframe

Mine, and still being written up properly. Practice page in progress

The short version is the sentence I say most often: sometimes fixing something in yourself changes the trajectory of everything around you, and you do not have to fix someone else in order to understand them.

This is the working frame for anyone whose problem is largely another person. A partner who drinks. A parent who never apologised. A husband who controls the money. In almost all of those cases the other person is not in the room, is not coming to a session, and is not going to change because you found the right sentence. What can move is your position relative to them, and that moves more than people expect it to.

GROW

Not mine, and I want to be clear about that. GROW stands for Goal, Reality, Options, Will. It is the standard coaching frame, developed in the UK in the 1980s and popularised by John Whitmore's Coaching for Performance in 1992, alongside Graham Alexander and Alan Fine. It is probably the most widely used coaching model in the world.

I arrived at roughly the same four questions on my own before I knew it had a name, which I take as a good sign about the questions rather than about me. I use it as the container for the free first call, because it produces something you can actually take away from twenty free minutes: a clear statement of what you want, what is actually true right now, what your realistic options are, and what you are actually willing to do about it.

Most people have never written those four things down in the same hour. It is worth doing even if you never hire anybody.

Still being written

Placeholder Two more practices are being codified properly before they go on this page: the work on emotional baselines and how to slot them into your routines and relationships, and the specific way I use one question near the end of a session. They are real and I use them. They are not written up well enough to publish yet, and I would rather leave a gap than fill it with something vague.