Our team has been actively involved in delivering strengths-based practice workshops for over 20 years. As a result, we’ve developed a myriad of creative, thoughtful and energising ways to share our ideas and draw out the wisdom, skills and expertise of those with whom we work.
As a colleague once said,
“Strengths-based practice is like a great soup. One that is full of ingredients that work so well with each other”.
For us, a great strengths-based ‘soup’ will always include ingredients like narrative therapy, solution-focused ideas and appreciative inquiry principles, so you could expect traditions like these, those that go beyond ‘problem talk’ and tell a different story, to form the basis of the work we do with you.
We prefer to customise any learning projects/workshops but some of our most common offerings include or are based on:
Foundations of strengths-based practice
- A foundational understanding of the development of strengths-based practice and connections with narrative, solution-focused, appreciative inquiry and other traditions.
- Critical explorations of uses of power in human services.
- Creating conditions for person-centred change.
- Specific skills including: reframing, externalising conversations, listing, scaling, exploring exceptions, creating pictures of the future and value-adding.
Deeper dives into strengths-based practice
- Exploring implications of a strengths approach within problem centred service systems.
- ‘Doing’ parallel practice within your team or organisation- developing a strengths culture.
- Applying a strengths lens to potentially tricky conversations with people mandated to work with you.
- Exploring what a client-designed service could look like and options for moving toward service co-design.
Making the most of supervision – for workers seeking to make the most of the supervision they are offered
- The principles of collaborative, strengths-based supervision.
- The differences between ‘operational’ / line management and ‘practice’ / or clinical supervision.
- How to form strong supervisory alliances including building a supervision agreement.
- The role of feedback within supervision and how to name feedback preferences.
Strengths approaches to supervision – for workers offering supervision to colleagues
In addition to ideas and material explored in the ‘Making the Most of Supervision’ training, this training includes:
- Ways to focus more deliberately on colleagues’ signature strengths, successes and aspirations.
- Tools that enable supervisees to be more active and engaged participants and skills for:
- creating a safe and generative space
- noticing and celebrating success
- identifying initiatives taken in the face of challenges
- amplifying the creativity and resilience colleagues bring to their roles
- co-researching challenging fields of practice
- offering feedback, ideas and perspectives without claiming to be experts
- exploring resonances and powerful questions emerging from practice
- unpacking values and ethics