The Miracle Question

I recently received a query from a life coach in the USA about the Miracle Question.

For those of you who have never heard of the Miracle Question, it is a coaching exercise associated with Brief Therapy (also known as "Solution Focused Therapy").

Brief Therapy provides a set of techniques for helping people to make positive changes in their life which focuses on solutions and how to get there using your strengths and resources rather than on more traditional techniques of analysis.

The Miracle Question is often posed by the therapist or coach right at the beginning of a series of sessions.

The question itself is an incredibly simple way of getting you to think about how you would like your life to be.

The idea is that you try to focus in as much detail as possible on what that preferred life will be like and then you start to think about how you might get there beginning with the very first step.

In Brief Therapy you might be asked to rate how close you are to achieving the future you want on a scale of 1-10 and then to say what would take you just one point closer to the goal and focus on that as that first step. Then you could be asked to focus on other actions that might take you further up the scale.

You can see a simple version of the Miracle Question on my website at the link below:

Miracle Question

Blog Post Written by Life Coach David
For Life Coaching Books and Resources visit: Life Coaching Books

Dealing with Mental Stresses

Albert Ellis, the person who invented Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (a form of cognitive behavioural therapy), suggests a simple technique for helping with certain types of stresses as follows.

The technique applies to situations where you find yourself thinking that someone should or must or ought to do something. You may be thinking this about someone else (a kind of expectation or demand) or about yourself (a form of self criticism). Or indeed you may be thinking it about a situation rather than an individual: Thoughts such as it ought to be like this or it ought not to be like this.

If you have these kind of internal demands or expectations (and I think we all do at some time or another) then if they are thwarted you usually begin to feel stressed or resentful or angry or frustrated (with others or with yourself or with the situation).

The technique suggested by Ellis is that in this kind of situation in your mind you replace your internal dialogue with the new thought 'I have a strong preference for X' instead of 'X ought to be the case' or 'S/he should do X' or 'I should do X'. You could of course slightly alter the formulation to use a similar phrase with which you are comfortable, such as 'I would greatly like it if X.'

If you do that you may find that the feelings of stress, resentment, anger or frustration reduce.

Try it and See!

Note: If you are interested in learning more CBT techniques like this one through telephone life coaching session, to help with a personal stressful situation then visit the link below for information about what such sessions might cover:

Life Coaching with CBT

Blog Post Written by Life Coach David
For Life Coaching Books and Resources visit: Life Coaching Books