Mark McKergow – Guiding Your Future

Foreign.

Shopping at the supermarket, do you take a list of the things you don't want?

No, you do not. Big Partly because it would be useless and partly because the supermarket has, you know, if you take it, I don't want apples or sausages or beans today, but the supermarket has 50,000 things. And so you get there and you still have a choice of 49,000 other things to have on your shopping list. You go with the shopping list of what you want and that guides you much more effectively in the supermarket than the list of things you don't want. And the same is true in solution focused practice and solution focused therapy as it's used and indeed in life, that the list of things you want is just so much more useful than the list of things you do.

Foreign.

Welcome to the mindtrax podcast with breakthrough ideas to live your best life possible and how to make it happen. I'm Paul Shealy and today we will be Talking with Mark McCurgo. Mark McCurgo is a speaker, facilitator, consultant and director of the center for Solutions Focus at Work based in Edinburgh, Scotland. His life's work has been about humanizing organizations in learning, changing and leading. Mark is widely known for his ability to connect complex ideas with simplicity in practice. He is co author of six books including the Solutions Focus and.

Six New Roles of Engagement.

Foreign.

Thanks so much for being a part of the podcast. It's so good to see you again, my friend.

Thank you so much, Paul. It's really good to see you. It's been a while since we were able to connect face to face. Thanks to all the goings on, but here we are together again. It's fantastic.

Wonderful news for me and I know for our listener as well. So tell me a little bit about how you got to the Solutions Focus from the work you had been doing previously.

Well, when we first met, Paul, I was really just starting in my interest in Solutions Focus and training as a brief therapist because I loved the whole way of that approach. Basically it's about focusing on what you want and what's working, but the idea is that you move people on quickly. It's efficient. And in the world of psychotherapy, efficiency is a bit of a kind of, you know, it's an anti word. People don't like to be efficient, they like to be caring and they like to be, you know, with you all the time. And that actually constantly means you'll never get rid of them. And so this idea of you want to do something that's effective so that people can Carry on on their own has always been really important to me. I partly because I suffered under management consultants whose main goal seemed to be to sell more management consultancy rather than actually do anything useful. When I was working in the electricity industry prior to becoming an independent consultant, that was very much how it looked to me and I hated it. It's complete just. It's Dracula. It's blood sucking, you know, and they suck all the money out of the organization and achieve very little and then tell you to hire them again at twice the rate because obviously they need more time because they haven't been able to do anything yet.

Yes, well, you may remember that I had early in my career become a clinical hypnotherapist. And the idea of doing multiple sessions was ridiculous. Why, why would you. And I remember that people come to me for quitting smoking, things like that, and stop their nail biting. And what I said to them, we're going to do three sessions. The first one we're going to get the change. The second one we're going to generalize that change into other areas of your life so you know that this is something you can do for yourself. In the third session, I'm going to teach you how that happened. So I want you to own the magic here. And when I connected with the folks at Neuro Linguistic Programming and was trained by Bandler and Grinder also, they were very much about, let's start now and go to where you want to go. Let's not do a big retrospective of your broken history that got you to this problem state that you're in today. So again, another important resonance point around the idea of doing something briefly and elegantly. Now you said efficient, but I think, I think we're both really attracted to elegance.

Elegance is really important too. And that's so elegance is doing a lot with a little. It's doing something that's really profound, but doing it in a kind of subtle shape shifting way that uses a lot of what's going on already and doesn't change very much, but actually what it changes kind of pivots the whole situation. And that's really, really neat. And that's one of the reasons I went off Neuro Linguistic Programming because it seemed to be vastly complicated.

Really? Oh, well, yeah, I could see that. You know, the first year that I was trained with my partner, Mark Kinnick, we, we spent 21 days and they taught us all these change patterns and my partner and I looked at each other and said, why do we want to learn all these change patterns? We need to model how they came up with neuro linguistic programming. So we spent the entire.

Modeling the modelers. In the second year.

The second year we came back as master practitioners to be trained as master practitioners. There are only 70 of us in the world at that time. And he. And they said, those of you who were here last year, kind of forget about all it. It's really about modeling the modelers. My partner and I elbowed each other and said, duh, Right. Because we really do want to make sure that whatever it is that we're doing when we're helping something make a significant change in their life, that it becomes generative, that they really own the way in which that happened and can use it then for all the rest of their lives.

Absolutely. And that idea of making the client, if you like, kind of key in the story and the person who does most of the work and the practitioner is there, you know, on the edge, giving a few pointers and then can kind of amble away quietly because the client is so, so busy getting on with their lives again and relieved to be, you know, freed of whatever difficulty or stress they had and just back in again. And some of my colleagues talk about leaving no footprints in the client's life. I think that's a bold ambition, but it is very much the ethic of solution focused work is to be as quick as you can, leave no footprints and leave the client thinking that they did all the hard work.

That's what keeps it going and that's what keeps it running. And you mentioned the NLP thing there about practitioners and master practitioners and grandmaster practitioners and wizard master practitioners. That whole thing turned me right off. And so the thing I love about solution focus is you can learn it in a few days. That doesn't mean you're any good, but. But it's like, it's a bit like learning chess there. Once you've learned the moves in chess, there are no more moves beautiful. But putting it together in a real situation, that's a kind of lifetime's work. A lifetime of, of not in trying to invent new moves, but trying to see how each move works and think about what might fit in a certain circumstance. And so in a way, learning solution focus is not after a couple of goes about learning the model. It's about practicing it, it's about using it, it's about talking about it with other people who practice it. It's about sharing experiences, it's about delving into things that interest you rather than having this big ladder of, ladder of Professionalism, which, which is. I love that. But it also, it's a, it's, it makes it more difficult to sell, to be honest. But because people love climbing ladders and when you say there isn't really a ladder here, you've just got to learn to be good at it.

Well, one of the things I really admired about your work in Solutions Focus Works is that it's a matter of continuing to build communities of practice that support each other in discovering further breakthrough. So before we get any further into this, let's talk about what is the Solutions Focus? Because our listener might not have any real idea of how stupendous this model really is.

Okay, well, when I, Paul Jackson and I wrote the Solutions Focus, there it is. That's the second edition, 2007. The first edition was 2002, so a lot of it's more than 20 years old now. And there is going to be a new edition in next year, I understand. So fingers crossed for that. It's a major rewrite. It's a mate. There is no, not a page without something changing on it. So it's really going to be worth waiting for. But the, the basic idea of course, is the same. It continues through the whole thing. So Solutions focus is different from problem focus. And in Problem focus, the idea is to find out the problem and what's wrong and what's causing what's wrong and then fix it.

And that is this kind of thinking that works very well for if you're trying to fix your automobile or your washing machine or whatever, but it doesn't work very well with people because water machine builds and washing machines don't care what you say to them, but people do. That's the difference. So what we find is, and it's a kind of medical model, the whole medical profession is founded on this idea of finding what's wrong with you, diagnosing it properly, and then giving you the cure that matches that diagnosis, basically. But with things that, if you like mental, which are things, things that are much more to do with the mind and, and you're, and how that connects with your behavior. And it's not a physical illness as such, it's a. It's different to that.

If I could also add that when an expert fix isn't really available because we don't have a good problem definition and we don't have a clear sol it, this is where this work comes in most valuably. It's what Keegan spoke about as a type 3 problem. There are, there are problem types and things like medical syndromes or remember when the Lyme's disease was being identified, nobody had any idea what they're seeing. They simply called the first patient insane. They wanted to give her psychiatric treatment. Right. And many of these things for which there is no expert fix, the medical model problem oriented absolutely does not work.

It does not work and it hurts the patient. Does the trouble with it. So, so it's worse than useless in that regard, I think. So the thing with solutions focus is that we're not interested in what's wrong. What we're interested in is what do you want?

What would your life be like supposing this difficulty problem, whatever vanished, or another way of putting that more up to date way, what are your best hopes from our work together for your own life?

The future perfect I love that's called.

The platform, that's the topic. And then the future perfect comes in. It's that we have six tools in, in the solutions focus and the platform is what are we talking about and what's the benefit of that change? And then the future perfect tool which is really funky and interesting is suppose that tonight a miracle happens while you're asleep.

And the problem is, is gone. Or your best hopes are realized but you're asleep so you don't notice it. Well, tomorrow morning when you wake up, what's the first thing you notice that tells you that the miracle happened in the night. And the person usually goes.

And that's good because it means they're thinking. And then eventually they'll say something like I'll be feeling better. And we go, great, you'll be feeling better. What difference will that make to you?

And then they start, you start to expand this description of the day after the miracle using some very simple questions. And as I said earlier, there aren't very many questions that we use. There are different ways of doing it and but you can order these questions in different ways. But really this is not rocket science, genuinely not rocket science. It's about encouraging people into a detailed description of their life tomorrow with, with their hopes realized.

Well, and I should say that if you ask somebody, well, what do you want? The first thing they sort for is everything that they don't want. And they'll give quite a detailed description of everything that they don't want. At which point we have to pause and say okay, so understood, what do you want? And they'll reiterate everything that they don't want. And it's very important to understand that the definition of the problem state is not identifying an outcome?

No, this is one. One thing I've been saying for years and years is that.

The problem is not the opposite of the solution. That's what most problem focused approaches say. If you find the problem, then the solution becomes clear. But with solutions focused, you recognize that the not very good present that we're in is not the same as an ideal present. And in fact they're nothing to do with each other at all. So investigating the kind of negative aspects of now tells you nothing, nothing whatsoever that's useful about the positive aspects. It's a whole new book, it's a whole new story and therefore we can just jump right to it straight away. And I use the metaphor of, you know, when you go shopping at the supermarket, do you take a list of the things you don't want?

No, you do not Big partly because it would be useless and partly because the supermarket has, you know, if you take it, I don't want apples or sausages or beans today, but the supermarket has 50, 000 things. And so you get there and you still have a choice of 49, 000 other things to have on your shopping list. You go with the shopping list of what you want and that guides you much more effectively in the supermarket than the list of things you don't want. And the same is true in solution focused practice and solution focused therapy as it's used and indeed in life, that the list of things you want is just so much more useful than the list of things you don't.

Well, I can also say, and having worked with training people who are coaches, that if they were to walk with another person and dialogue about what the other person wants to achieve, the soon as the client describes a problem area of their life, oftentimes a coach rushes in to provide a fix that they would have applied in their life if they were in that same situation. But that client didn't get to this problem state with their model of Right. Someone else's model of trying to fix things. They got there through their own life path. And by the same token, a solution will emerge out of a different level of thinking. Not the coach's level of thinking.

That's right. One of our themes in the book is every case is different. And that means when you're a kind of practitioner and you and somebody comes in with a problem, you don't think, oh, that's good, I've seen this problem before, I know what to do with it, which is what doctors think. You have to start again at the beginning. You have to clean Your mind let everything go and just be very, very interested in the person and in the detail, the tiny details of what the person is telling you. And that's a whole other skill. I mean, in a way that's much more difficult when people get really good at Solution focus. It's not that they get good at asking the questions because those are easy. They get good at letting all their existing know how and stuff and expectations go and just focusing on this client as a unique person. And it's the little wrinkles in this person's experience that's going to be the interesting part of this.

Yeah, it's beautiful. I really wrapped my brain around Theory you with Senge or with Seyoto Sharma. And the book prior to Theory you, which speaks about presencing, you know, being present to the future as it emerges, was a book called Presence that Senge wrote with Otto Sharmer and Betty Sue Flowers and, and the other person. Anyway, they this idea of being able to let go and let come to be so observant of what is and try to free ourselves from the mental models that may be operating in the moment to really be present. And I love the way you described it, Mark, is we are much more interested in what shows up between our noses than what shows up between our ears.

Absolutely. And that's another thing. When Solution Focus we talk about descriptions of interactional scenes which are scenes of things you can see. They are things that happen between people. And that's a different thing to getting involved in intrapersonal descriptions of what may or may not be going on in people's heads. And a lot of mentalistic stuff. There's a lot of people talking about that a lot of the time. But our theory is that's useless because you can't see it, you can't work with it. You don't know if it's right or not. So now there's a whole other piece about when people come in with a mental illness or some kind of psychological problem, why are we talking about behavior? And the reason is of course, that they are completely and utterly tightly integrated. And you don't need to talk about mental stuff to affect mental stuff. So we love to talk about behavioral stuff that immediately starts affecting mental stuff because it's all the same thing. And people used to talk about their mind body division, of course. And I think we all know, we're all basically agreed now that there is no mind body division. Everything affects everything else. And so when people watch in Solution Focus, they watch us talking about what would you Notice. What would you, what would your colleague notice tomorrow that would tell them that the miracles happened and how would you respond when they noticed that? And these kind of, what difference would that make to you? What would be the next thing that would happen and what would be the first tiny sign that things were getting better about this. These are the kind of questions we ask. And people who are steeped in mentalistic stuff think, what on earth is that going to do? This is just little tiny behavioral stuff. But actually it's reorienting the whole person, their mind and their body and their soul and everything else. And that's what we mean by elegance, you know, so you can do these little small things, but the effect is enormous. And like you, we would say three sessions is normal.

Normal.

And if you're not getting anywhere after three, you should, you should pass. Refer the person on somebody else who'll do something because. Because you do not have a license to waste people's time and you do not have a license to waste people's money by seeing them once a week for five years.

Isn't that wonderful? Yeah. So the other thing that is inherent in solutions focus is this.

Basic principle of brief therapy, which is noticing small, concrete indicators of success. It's something that I first heard by Earl Nightingale way, way back where he talked about success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. So if there is any progress whatsoever, you're a success today. And this notion of small concrete indicators is such a blessing to anyone who's on a path to growth and personal development and goal achievement. To keep that in mind and really look for it each day.

Yes. And if you, if you're doing that, then you start noticing it. It's, it's very strange. These things are small and they're subtle sometimes, but if you know what you're looking for, you begin to see it. And this is a very fundamental principle of human operation. I'm just in the process of changing my car at the moment, and I've been shopping around for different cars and you have this experience that I'm sure people have had where you suddenly get interested in, let's say, a Mercedes, certain sort of Mercedes. And, and all of a sudden the streets are apparently full of this kind of Mercedes because. And you think, oh gosh, there's a lot of Mercedes around all of a sudden. And of course it's not all of a sudden. They were there all the time, but you didn't notice them because you weren't interested in them. And this again is a very fundamental Thing, but it's surprisingly influential. And this way that we help people to start to be aware of what they might be able to notice. Of course they have to notice it. I can't notice it for them, but we can lay the ground and we can sort of have a conversation which prepares them to notice things. And one of the other things we do just to complete the picture a bit, is to look for what's already working.

And this is such a game changer. But if you think about the ideal end result being a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10 and 1 is you haven't even begun thinking about it yet. Where are you today? Pick a number, whatever that is. And if a person would pick, let's say, a 3 on a scale of 1 to 10, the common response by most people would be only a three. Why so low? Which would force a person to sort for all the blocks, all the barriers, all the problems, all the obstacles, all the scarcity, all the limitations that are currently operating that are so darn frustrating to them. But a very simple change in the way that you ask it, why so high and not lower? Could you talk about that a bit?

Yeah, sure. So there's a curious thing, and it's very simple tool, this idea of a scale from 1 to 10, and it's very familiar to us, and 10 is the good thing, and 1 is nowhere at all. And then you ask people where on scale, and every time they will choose a number, and very rarely will it be one. It is occasionally, and there are things you can do, but Mostly it's like 2, 3, 4, 5, 7. I have sometimes. But the number doesn't matter because the next question is, you've put a flag in the sand here and now you've got the choice, as you say, Paul, you can either look at what's missing or you can look at what's there already. And we always go with what's there already to start with. So how come you're a three and not lower? What's helping you get up to a 3 right now? And it's always right now, you know, just pin it down and they, again, they start to go, well, there's this, okay, and there's that.

And then there's a pause and then, oh, and then there's the other thing.

Huh?

Okay, carry on. And, oh, and then there's that fourth thing and the fifth thing, and then there's the sixth thing and all of a sudden these things. And, you know, were these things there already? I don't know. But they come into the conversation in an interesting way, particularly if the person who's talking to them is sitting there looking expectant and interested and kind of nodding and maybe writing it down and looking excited and going, carry on, carry on. What difference does that make to you? Yeah, okay, what helps that to happen? How do you do?

And what's so gorgeous about this Mark? And it's such a stunner that it becomes something of a meme after that for other people. Like, oh, you know, I only scored 10 points in that game. 10. Why so many and not fewer? You know? But the idea is what you're immediately doing is sorting for resourcefulness, access to resource that's already present. Whereas when the person started the conversation, they were coming in with this paucity of resources, believing that there was no hope to even get where they want to go. So in just that brief moment of changing that question from why so low? To why so high and not lower? It's stunning what an effect that has on the brain's ability to sort for the power and potential that's within oneself.

And then you have the secret weapon, solution focus question must be deployed at this point.

What else? Release the Kraken.

What else? So, oh, there's this thing that's helping me. Okay, great. What else?

There's the other thing. Fantastic. What else? And one of my colleagues, Chris Iverson in London, says, says the solution, focused practice is about asking what else? Until you can't bear to ask it again, and then asking it again.

Because the idea is that this. This thing is more than cumulative. You know, people think there's no things that are working, and then they find one thing and they find 2 and 3 and 6 and 10 and 20 and. And the whole world changes. The whole world changes around.

It does, because it becomes plentiful and abundant almost immediately. And I remember way, way, way, way, way back when I first got into these concepts as a clinical hypnotherapist trained by Zula Bowers. I love that name, Zula. Anyway, she said, now, Paul, if you want to see something quite interesting, ask a person.

And what else? And what else? And see how the conversation keeps going. And then put in, is there anything else? And they'll immediately be the word no. Yes.

This is such an important point.

What is it about the human mind that causes that to occur?

Well, it's curious because language is so influential on this, isn't it? I mean, we don't think about it often unless we're trained in hypnotherapy or whatever. But this, the difference between what else and is there anything else? It's just colossal. And the what else of course has a presupposition in it. There is something else. All you have to do is think about it and find out. Whereas is there anything else? Is a yes, no question and invites you strongly to the easy answer, which is no, I can't. No, no, I can't. No, I can't be bothered to think about it. No, no. And all the solutions focused questions are highly presupposition, absolutely presupposition. And indeed, Steve De Chaser, who was the kind of great grandfather of solution focused work and a mentor to me, he was a fan of Milton Erickson. And you will know Milton Erickson, who of course was involved in Tayton, whose work was used in the development of NLP as well. He was fantastic at noticing little things about this particular client that could be used and utilized and that that spirit went through Steve DeShazo's work and into solution focused practice and through me. But if you learn the presuppositional questions, you don't need all the fancy background, you just need to know that what else is a good question and is there anything else is not.

As long as you are talking about something that connects with what the person wants or what's working. But if you are on the process of what's wrong, oh, this thing's wrong and what else and what else and what else before you, in five minutes your client will be suicidal and trying to kill you. And with good reason, I would say so. So the one else thing only applies when we're on these tracks, that solution focus in habits so much about what do you want, what's already working, Then what else is great. If we're still on what's wrong, what else is, is completely hopeless.

And now the, the next magic question that you always ask once you've got a number as high as it is and not lower is, and what would one step up that scale look like which then gets someone to orient toward possible futures.

Yes, that's right. So there's a good little riff here, which is it's curious that you do what would, what would be a tiny sign of progress that would tell you one point up scale, what else, what else, what else?

Nice.

And then you say, well now what small things might you do in the next few days to kind of move, to move in that direction? And the logical way would be to do decide the steps and then think about the signs that they might create. But we do it always the other way around. So you think about the signs that would constitute some progress. And then you think, well, what small steps can we take now? Very small in the next, in the next couple of days that will start to move to help us to move. We're building on what's working and helping us to move in that direction. And it's such a. A great way around to do it. It's a bit curious, but you people should try it. And maybe we're going to talk about the users going to the future in a minute, because this is a really key piece of that little framework that it's part of one of my books and my thing to talk about.

When you sent me the first article that you wrote about the User's Guide to the Future, I, you know, it was ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Absolutely. This is it. You know, we're stepping up to the threshold of possibility. There's an immense abyss in front of us. We don't know really how we're going to get to the other side. But there are some things that we do know. We know very clearly the first few steps we could take, and we know some of the precursors to that end result that we want to get to. So if you would talk a bit about this, this is to me a really essential piece or addition, I think, to the work. And it really came from someone who had been using Solutions Focus for quite a while.

Yeah. So if you imagine not all the elements of the future are as useful as the others, and people tend to treat the future as a thing that's well defined in front of you, and then it gets fainter and fainter and fainter as it recedes, until in the distance, you can't see anything. That's a mistake. So here is my way of thinking. I call it the User's Guide to the Future. If you imagine we start now and there are five zones out into the future, and we start in the very distant future, the horizon, I call it, which is where the thing you are wanting, the thing you are hoping for, your goal, your aspiration, will be realized. And then you. So you write down the thing, the goal, the hope, whatever it is, the thing we're moving towards. And then just before the horizon, there are the bits I call the building blocks, the precursors. So what needs to be in place for this horizon thing to happen?

And we can know that because, again, this is way off in the future. We don't have any of these things yet, probably, but we know what we need to make the final thing happen. And the next zone is called Ant Country. And I wrote a piece about ant country just last week on my sub stack, which is called Steps to Humanity Reorganization. And Ant country is the thing not to focus on. Ant country is the bit where it's too complex to model. It's just too uncertain. There's no point making detailed plans for the middle future because they ain't going to happen. They never do. And actually if reflect for a moment on our. All of our experiences of life, you know, we make these plans and then they get thrown off course because unexpected things happen and for all sorts of good reasons. So the secret is not to worry about the middle future.

And then we move.

I should add that our colleague Jack Canfield described it quite well. If you want to drive across the United States at night, you know, you only need to be able to see to the end of your headlight. You don't need. You don't need to know every square foot of the road from here to the other end.

And you can't.

Right.

And. And there will be uncertainties and unexpectedness and you'll have to detour and. And all of that thing. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. So you will have to adjust. You'll have to adjust based on what's happening at the time. But it's too far away for us to be able to plan all that now. So now we come back and closer to the future and we have the zone of the near future, which is what would be the tiny signs of progress? What would you notice that we're telling you you were moving in the right direction? And then the very near future, which is your next small steps, little things you can do in the matter of days or maybe a week or two at most to kind of move there. And the idea is that you work it's right to left on the page. The future is to the right in my model. And lots of people's mind. I know other people have futures that go in different directions. Sorry, folks, you're just gonna have to compensate. But you, you work from. You work from the future back. And you. So you. What's the future? The horizon, just before the horizon and country, let's avoid it. Tiny signs of progress, next steps. And you can get into action on the biggest, hairiest of goals and hopes. You can get into immediate action in a matter of minutes with this. And I've used this with very senior executives who feel completely stressed out because they have so many things going on, they have no clue what to do next. And we, so we went through, we go through the user's guide for each of their projects and at the end of a conversation, they've now not only got a good handle on what the projects are, but actually they have a small next step on each of them, which they can go and do. And they go, oh, goodness me, I feel better about. Yes, because all of a sudden you have some control and some agency over this amazing, whirling, confusing, you know, of present and future that surround us all.

Well, there's also a very important aspect of the human mind that when we stand at the edge of ant country, or what I referred to as the abyss, the void where we really don't know what happens after. This mind is designed to reach into our history, pull out all of the failures, all the mistakes, all the possibilities for disaster they can, and then just lob it into that abyss so that as we look into the abyss, we see everything we fear most. And very often it's what causes that hesitation. So the way in which user's guide works, it's. It's always providing a sense of, of the known and it's allowing us to access more and more of our own resourcefulness rather than the lack and limitation of the past. Also very important is when a client comes to us, Mark, and says, I've got a problem. For me, that's a time to applaud because what they're doing is they're identifying the place to tap, the very place where they're giving away their power out of some mythical fear or erroneous conclusion, some childhood wound or whatever it might be. So it's not a bad thing that someone generates a problem. It just gives us the opportunity, now we can focus.

The worst kind of people are the ones who tend to say they haven't got any problems, but are kind of completely ineffective. And, you know, so I'd much rather. Yeah, a problem's a great starting place and you can jump off in all kinds of different directions. And solution folks, we go quickly to what do you want? What do you hope for?

So tell me a little bit about the insight that you gained when you got this idea of the user's guide to the future. Because that then led to the new edition of the book that's coming out. What do you think the, you know, really was revealed to you in that?

So solution focused work has been evolving over the last 20 years. And I realized in about 2017 that in a way there were some people doing it as if it was. Now there were other people Doing it as if it was 1988.

And these were now almost two different practices. And the. The old practice was actually still surprisingly for solution focused work, still rather problem focused. What's about how would you know if your problem went away and when does your problem not happen? Now, those are both good questions. But if you start focusing it rather than what's the problem? Then what do you hope for? Then it's when does. What would your hopes look like if they all materialized at once? And what instances are there of your hopes happening anyway?

That is so gorgeous because it's Solutions Focus applied to Solutions Focus. So there's this lovely recursivity that now reveals perhaps an error in the model itself. It's not really an error, but it's an opportunity to recognize where we could produce.

Absolutely. And the thing is, the research that there is shows that the sort of the new way. I wrote a paper called SF 2.0. Then I called it the Next Generation of Solution Focused Practice. And I had a new book out two years ago called the Next Generation of Solution Focused Practice. And the new edition of the Solutions Based will have a lot of that stuff in it as well. But that is all about. It's just about getting descriptions, it's all about the detail, it's all about your hopes and it's all about this little interactional details. And that's kind of it.

Cool. So let me ask you, kind of, as we're getting to a point of wrapping up, was there a discovery that you made about humanity going through a global pandemic?

I don't know whether I discovered anything about humanity. One of the things, the thing I noticed in the global pandemic is that the importance of local community.

Yes.

The importance of neighborhood level community. And I spent my life to that point being very fortunate in that I had. I was on and off airplanes and I had friends all over the world. And I suddenly realized that even though I had friends all over the world, Jenny and my wife and I, we had no friends in our street because we hardly spent any time there. And of course, when the lockdown came here, the pandemic lockdown, all of a sudden you start noticing it's actually the people next door, the people along the road who are your. Your most important potential connections. And for all the wonders of zoom and everything else, which is amazing actually, there's something about being rooted in a place. And so I got interested in how do you create effective neighborhood communities? And Solution Focus is a fantastic piece of that and host leadership leading as a Host, not a hero or a servant is another. The host being the ones who gathers people together. That's a fantastic thing to do in community development.

I remember you going out onto the stoop in front of your home and playing saxophone to the neighborhood. That's right.

I did that every Sunday for several months in the pandemic and people came out because we couldn't go near each other with the rules that were here at the time. But you could stand in the street and people were nice enough to come out and applaud and, and you know, we'd all wave to each other and that was felt really important. And we've made a lot of progress since then. In my little bit of Edinburgh, Scotland, which is my background that you can see called the West End of Edinburgh, we had almost no neighborhood community stuff at all. But I and a few others have done some things and we had a, we have a Facebook group which used to have 20 people in it and now has three and a half thousand who all live in this neighborhood. We have a fest, had a festival of the West End last year by the people for the people and you know, we, we keep moving along and I, I feel so much more rooted in this place here now and I feel better for that honestly. I love our international connections and I love that I was fortunate enough to work all over the world and it's so good to be able to say hi to your neighbors and know who's who and where's where and what's what and build connections locally as well. So that's been a thing that I've learned over the last three years or so.

Beautiful. And there's plenty of research that indicates that the most important thing you could do if the grid ever did go down. Survivalists don't really stand a chance as much as someone who's able to build community and share resources. My wife and I have gone out to an event of the world's largest leave no trace event in the Nevada desert called the Burning man. This year as I'm recording this right now with you. This year we had the mud apocalypse where the rains came about four or five days into the event and nobody could move, no vehicles could move, so no services were available. And they're usually it's radical self reliance anyway.

But I think that what this was, this was such a story that it made the British news.

Yes, it was international lens on the ridiculous awful stuff that a few thousand people experienced out of seven seventy plus thousand. But the idea of it was shelter in place Share resources. And we learned that from the pandemic. So when I encountered people that were freaking out, I simply said, well, remember the lessons from the pandemic. Shelter in place, don't plan to go anywhere. Get to know your neighbors. And we had gatherings under our shade structure, sharing heat and sharing food and sharing stories and song and all kinds of things. And I agree with you, Mark. As the world does become smaller and the limit of resources becomes tighter, it's more and more important for us to recognize that we're all sharing this Spaceship Earth, as Buckminster Fuller called it. What would you say is the way forward for our human family? What would your encouragement be to our listener?

I would say.

That.

You, you're right to think about, think about local and global together. That's not a new thought. But, but you can think about local in terms of how do you connect, how do you help people, how can you get people to help you? And then you can think about global in terms of how does your example help to encourage other people? I'm a big fan of the ripple effect. Something, something small or moderate happens in one place, but then it starts to ripple out and other people start to take notice and other things happening and other people start. Get inspired or take inspiration and do something that's maybe a bit related or connected in some way and look out for the ripples. The ripples are there and growing at the moment.

But being solution focused, you want ripples that are useful. There are also some ripples that are not useful and they're very distracting and they're very annoying and, you know, a lot of people, including myself, spend too much time worrying about them and cursing at them and all the rest of it. But look for the ripples of usefulness and aim to create a few ripples and then look for a few ripples, because if you're doing both of those, you are maxing out our chances. I think if you're, if you're just creating and not looking while he's going to be working very hard, if you're just looking, not creating, well, maybe, you know, you could. There are ways you can learn by trying to do things in your own, in your own place. And so I would, I would say that. And we must keep going. That's the other thing. Solution focus is all about small steps and the way through any abyss, morass, you know, whatever is small steps. You keep putting one foot in front of the other. As the explorer Ranulph finds once said, that is the way that you walk across a continent is you keep putting one step in front of the other and keep going. And I love the solution. Focus is a fantastic way to keep going, but the going is important. Just sitting around hoping for the. For something to get better is not. Is not. Apart from very temporarily a satisfactory answer. I think you've got to keep going and say take action. One or the other. Take action. But take small action, take focused action. Take action that you can see the results of and the action that is focused on usefulness and progress.

Beautiful.

If we can do that, then. Then maybe we can do something.

Absolutely, we can do something. I'm thinking of a new acronym, R O U X Ripples of usefulness expressed. So we're all going to be at our stoves making the next roux for our meal.

That thickens things up in a nice way usually. Guys.

Mark McCurgo, thanks so much for being with me. What a great gift you are to the world. Thanks so much for being here.

My pleasure. Fool. Nice to be with you.

I hope you enjoyed our conversation with with Mark McCurgo. You can learn more about Mark at markmcurgo.substack.com that's M A R K M C K E R G O w dot S U B S T A C k dot com that's a complicated one, but you'll also find it in the show notes. And now in the second part of the podcast, it's just you and me. I'll tell you how to use the Paralympical sessions in the Mindtracks app to easily handle obstacles and move toward the success you want, especially as it relates to our discussion with Mark. If you're new to the relaxing paralyminal audio sessions, they use breakthrough technologies to activate your whole mind in only 20 minutes to help improve any area of your life. Let's get going.

Welcome to the follow up to my conversation with Mark McCurgo where we talked about the solutions focus and the user's guide to the future. And I have to tell you that I've always loved Mark's mind is so brilliant at thinking about how we can make progress towards what really matters to us. The ideal future, the future perfect that we would like to get how we could get out of the problem and blame oriented mindset that keeps so many people stuck. Paralleliminal technology is something that is oriented towards getting us into our resources so that we can create the world that we want to live in. Whatever that looks like in terms of your success, your health, your relationships, your growth, the creation of your life as you would choose to have it be and solutions focus is an integral part of the way in which I think and teach how we can in fact identify the resources available within us and all around us so that we can take the steps in the direction and realize that which we truly desire. So in thinking about the conversation I just had with Mark, I've identified four potential ways in which you could think about bringing Paralympical listening sessions into making progress today. So the four areas are orienting to your future, orienting to the future you desire, recognizing resources that are available to you right now. Third is taking tiny next steps. And the fourth is sorting for evidence of success and resources that are within us and available to us wherever we might be. So if we think about these four areas and look at the potential paralimal recordings you could play with, starting with this idea of orienting to the future that you desire. Now, Mark and I talked about how difficult it is for many people to think other than this is a problem I have, I need to get rid of it. I But to be able to expressly state what it is you're choosing and what would it look, sound and feel like if you were living it? What are the descriptions? And as he said, and what else? And what else? And in what other ways would your life be different so that we could sort for the distinctions that you could notice every single day on the way to your success? So two Paralympicals that may be very helpful to you. The first I identified is called wealth motivation. So think about wealth not just in terms of financial abundance, but well being, because the root of the word wealth and well being is shared in the Old English language. So what wealth or what abundance, what.

Resourcefulness are you looking for that you're motivated to build, create, to recognize or receive in your life right now? Wealth motivation, great way to get your thinking oriented toward the future you want to create. Second parallel that I would recommend here is called power thinking. And power thinking is a way of making sure that the thing that we need to do in the small next steps in front of us are those things that that are in our consciousness right now. How are you going to wake up today and see the result of creating the life that you want? In Mark's work, we didn't use the phrase, but it's called the miracle question. In brief therapy. Imagine tonight you go to sleep and the change occurs, but you're asleep, so you don't know that it happened. What would be the first evidence that the miracle occurred? And so as you begin thinking about these as Evidence, how are you going to focus your thinking, your actions today to have that come about? The second area that I'm thinking about is recognizing resources that are available to you right now. Now, the basis of Paralympical technology is the recognition that, that we are tremendously resourced.

The problem that many of us have is that we think in terms of lack or limitation. We have faulty conclusions about who we are, mythical fears about what might happen. And as a result, we live much smaller and we push our resourcefulness to the side. We marginalize how powerful and resourceful we actually are.

So in the thinking that Mark and I were discussing, it's that recognition, not why so low, but why so high and not lower. Remember, it was this idea that on a scale of 1 to 10, where would you place yourself today? Whatever number you pick is fine. And then we ask.

Why did you choose a number that high and not lower? And you start to sort for resourcefulness, resources that actually are in play right now, that if you did more of that or access more of that, you would make progress that you want very different than only a three. Why so low and not higher? Which causes you to sort for lack limitation, scarcity blocks barriers, everything that would stand in the way of you getting what you really want.

So this idea of using paralliminal technology to help you with this, the number one, and you've heard me use this over and over again in the Mind tracks podcast, the Prosperity paralleliminal, because it helps you sort for the truth that you are abundantly resourced, the universe is abundantly resourced, and, and your prosperity consciousness gives you access to those resources, connect with them, translate those into your actions, into in this day, and you will be creating your world as you want it to be. The second parallel that really helps us recognize our resourcefulness is called personal genius, and this is a great one in whenever you're going to learn anything new, that you're going to develop new skills, you're going to gain new knowledge, you want to be able to accomplish new things. Personal genius is a great starting point because it recognizes those beyond genius resources that are already within you, that you have access to when you connect with the vastness of your non conscious mind, your inner mind, it's connected to infinite intelligence, high wisdom, and use that as your access to resourcefulness is a matter of having a conversation with your inner mind on an ongoing basis. Personal genius, a great place to do that.

The next area is about taking tiny next steps. So the idea is, wherever you are right now, what would one step up the scale looks at and feel like what is some small action you could take in the next 24 hours, in the next couple of days, in the next week. And if you could think of a small step, think of an even smaller step still. That will be very beneficial to you in recognizing there's no need to hesitate, there's no need to doubt. This small step is definitely something that you can take. And the parallel that can help really in a powerful way with this is called the new Action Generator. So long as you could conceive of a next step you could take, new Action generator will really help you put that into play and make progress right away. The fourth area I mentioned is this idea of sorting for evidence of resourcefulness and success. So evidence is, we talked about it in our conversation as small concrete indicators that show you are making progress. Now, this is so critical to people's ongoing realization of a long arc toward their goal because sometimes our goals are high and they're hard to get to. And making small, tiny next steps and noticing, oh, that worked, I've made some progress today, that's really helpful. Do more of what works and anything that isn't working, do something different. So the para liminals that I think could really help with this, number one, finding treasure. Because that para liminal orients the mind and it's amazing goal seeking capability to identify, as Mark said, seeing Mercedes all over the place when he wants to buy a Mercedes. Right. It's that your brain actually begins to sort for and notice all of these treasures, all of this resource, all these possibilities, all these opportunities that you're calling to yourself that are showing up for you. But you might not have noticed it because you weren't asking the question, how can I take one small next step in the direction of my goal today? So finding treasure super gets your mind really orienting toward that. Like Sherlock Holmes, discovering the ways in which everything fits together to show you that you can do it. The second parallel is one I did with Stuart Emery called Success Built to Last. Now, not only are you going to be establishing where it is you want to go, but it's also going to be reinforcing this idea that whatever you want to do, whoever you want to be in the world, be really good at it. And it's perfectly okay to start out being really bad at it because hey, in some cases you're a beginner, you've never done this before. And on the long arc toward that massively transformative goal that you're going to be living into today and over the next rest of your life, really.

You'Ve got to take a first few steps and not everything works out the way you might have imagined it. It's what Mark was referring to as ants country. Now ants. You could think of his automatic negative thoughts, but in his metaphor, it's how ants actually build communities and build the structures that they live in. What happens? They don't have eyesight. There's just a lot of interactions that happen. Very chaotic, very unpredictable, and very often when we're building a success that we've never experienced before, we're going to encounter some unexpected challenges. We're going to be taking some actions that we hadn't really anticipated we were going to take. And we'll be encountering some people we never really thought would be helpers along the way. And so the notion of success built to last is it really keeps us in the hunt for the opportunities that we can then strengthen our beliefs, recognize the possibility of our success, and keep on keeping on as we realize our desired future. I hope you enjoyed this as much as I have. Keep it going. Discover those small next steps that you can take today to realize what truly matters to you. Thanks for being here.

Thank you for joining me today. I applaud your willingness to maximize your potential. You can easily use the paralyminal audio sessions in the MindTracks app to stimulate your non conscious mind, I.e. your inner mind, to reduce any resistance in your life and to propel you toward the success you want. Go to www.mindtracks.com go. That's www.mindtrx.com go. These amazing audio tools have helped millions and I encourage you to bring them into your world today. Be sure to be back for more episodes of the mindtrax podcast. You'll find insightful conversations with authors, experts and thought leaders all devoted to improving your life's experience. Thank you again for being here on our MindTrax podcast.