Dear reader,
Since the birth of this blog, today the number of visitors turned 1,000 and beyond! Thank you so much for following, being around, letting me know you appreciate my work and thank you for simply being. According to the statistics, I’ve got readers from all over the world (in no specific order): the Netherlands, United States, United Kingdom, Denmark, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Philippines, Poland, Belgium, Israel, Canada, Austria, Australia, Croatia, Mexico, Greece, Argentina, Serbia, Singapore, Russian Federation, Taiwan, Norway, France and the Republic of Korea.
Since the beginning of my practice, I’ve had more than 30 clients, many of them were in their following sessions and I’ve had many more who were not in sessions but were curious about what I do. The feedback I got so far is 92/100% satisfaction, which includes questions of respect, professionalism, usefulness, effects and overall experience. I’ve had about 10 workshops delivered on SF introduction at various organizations and have worked with different groups. That has resulted in expanded collaboration, so the project is slowly growing. I receive let’s say weekly emails with all sorts of help/suggestion proposals. Though I don’t measure the feedback from these, I have a sense that the receivers are happy with my answers, because they stay and keep writing. The newly launched Facebook page had more than 100 likes in 5 days only. So I obviously can’t find the right words to express how honoured I am, so I’m (as usual) going to tell you another SF story.
Knitting you all the “cherry on the top” words above, the reality is, I’m almost daily standing in front of huge challenges and have to take difficult steps that I have no idea where they’ll lead to. At least once a day I do a task that I’m scared to do or in the best case, I feel uncomfortable doing (like have a meeting with someone I don’t know well and is not favourable towards the project, implement some new ideas or using new questions in sessions that may not result being useful, etc.). So sometimes at the end of a day, especially if I haven’t seen any client (consequently my purpose is drifting), I feel small and would preferably like to hide for a while. I never do, don’t know how I manage this really. But I do look for support, mostly in people I deeply respect. So I wrote the other day to SF list (online list uniting SF therapists and workers worldwide) and shared my doubts. I got a reply from D. from Belgium, who’s been working as a SF worker for 43 years:
My general advice: whatever you do, do it with passion. More specifically, if you want to be good at doing therapy/coaching, just do just that. Time spent on other things like building organisations, conferences-, etc. is time you will not be able to spend with your clients.
And today I got FB message from a student working in our tutor system, saying she’s heard about my workshop and has heard it was great and students loved it, so she’d like to invite me to deliver another one for her public. Also, I had a meeting with an experienced psychotherapist who is familiar and favours solution focused therapy. We’ve spent a nice afternoon together and I got some very useful information and so did she. We decided we’ll work on preparing a project together one day. So my dear reader, even though I get home late and have zero spare time, I like spending time with you, even though I don’t know you personally and haven’t met you. Yet. Thank you again for being around and being around so much!
Taking small steps, making huge difference. With a smile 🙂