Movement in Preston and Poland

No blog post for a little while, it’s all been a little busy! I was in Preston a couple of weeks ago, firstly for the wonderful Preston Guild solution-focused procession and gathering, which saw the birth of a new North West solution-focused network. It strikes me that the north-west is becoming a bit of a hotbed of solution-focused practice, or maybe it always was. Preston did of course host the first few UKASFP conferences, courtesy of then chair, Dominic Bray, still as active as ever as a solution-focused clinical psychologist. Then, the editor of Solution News, Vicky Bliss, is another (adopted) Lancastrian. Talking of adopted Lancastrians, Nick Bohannon, lecturer in mental health nursing at the University of Central Lancashire, is doing a sterling job of teaching solution-focused to hundreds there, is setting up the north west network, and attended my Next Steps course later that week, along with several of his alumni.

It was a terrific course from my perspective and one thing that excited me was an exercise that I tried out – on a group of willing guinea pigs – integrating solution-focused talking and movement. Influenced by an exercise that I had done up in Scotland last new year (mentioned here) it involved the participants first talking about and then embodying their hopes for themselves for the rest of the year, and it ended with a bit of a collective bang.

It served as a dry run for doing it at a plenary session this Sunday at this year’s EBTA conference in Torun in Poland. I’ll keep it under wraps until then, and report back here on how it went.

The photo accompanying this is of five intrepid solution-focused processors in Preston!