Solution Focused Therapy Training
Curious about Solution Focused Practice?
Solution Focused Practice is a future-oriented, competency-based approach, with a solid evidence-based practice, with a robust body of research. It has roots at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, California and in social constructivism, with strong links to neuroscience.
With a deep connection and influence from the brilliant psychiatrist, Milton Erickson, it was developed by Steve de Shazer, Insoo Kim Berg and their colleagues at the Brief Family Therapy Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. They spent more than 25 years observing hundreds of hours of sessions and preserved what supported desired client change and discarded what didn’t, carefully paying attention to the questions, behaviors, and emotions that helped clients form realistic, achievable, real-life solutions.
SFBT highlights the client’s capabilities and helps them adopt an alternative perspective on their future to build a more realistic and optimistic perspective and help them be aware of their successes, both past and present. It is a pragmatic approach, and draws from what has worked and is working in a person’s life and build’s on these successes to co-create small steps that the client is invested in doing. This model of counseling and consultation began in the therapy room and has been successfully expanded to many other settings. such as education, hospitals. prisons, government policy, corporate setting, social services and many more.
The Solution Focused approach is a highly effective model in therapy, education, coaching, consultancy and organizational development.
Level 1: Solution
Focused Practitioner
Level 2: Advanced Solution
Focused Practitioner
Level 3: Master Solution
Focused Practitioner (MSFP)
2025 Solution Focused Brief Therapy Training
The Academy of Solution Focused Training is a Founding Member of the International Alliance of Solution-Focused Teaching Institutes (IASTI). In the interest of providing quality training and establishing gold-standard industry practices, IASTI was formed by established institutes teaching and promoting Solution Focused Practice.
IASTI certification includes training, supervision and passing an Assessment.
The following information is from the website of IASTI, go to their website for more information: www.iasti.org
General information about the training
Each level of certification follows training in the solution-focused model as originally developed at Brief Family Therapy Center (BFTC) by Steve de Shazer, Insoo Kim Berg (De Shazer, 1988, 1991, 1994; de Shazer and Berg, 1992) and the team.
BFTC developed the solution-focused brief therapy model (SFBT) influenced by the work of Milton Erickson and the MRI institute at Palo Alto. In addition to the model as it was described by Insoo and Steve, the IASTI training may also include later developments and descriptions of how the approach can be used in Solution-Focused practices in a variety of contexts and clients.
Training hours
Each level consists of 50 hours direct formal training and 100 hours personal professional activities.
- Direct formal training is the organized formal training that is being led by a teacher/trainer. It includes the trainer giving lectures describing the model, but also exercises targeting specific solution-focused techniques, the studying of videotaped sessions, watching live interviews with clients and other work on specific example cases.
- Personal professional activities are activities that you will be able to exercise in part during your normal working hours or even at home. Since the training and practice of the solution-focused model is meant to be done at least in part within the context of trainees’ every day professional activities, you do not necessarily need to allocate exclusive time for all required hours toward certification.
- Examples of these training activities include: Using solution-focused techniques in sessions and evaluating the result, reading assigned solution-focused texts, peer supervision, role plays, keeping a daily diary of observations about resources or other SFBT principles, using the Solution-Focused Micro tools of Michael Hjerth, or other solution-focused learning activities identified by an IASTI Institute.
The proportion between classroom and personal training activities is 1:2 at each level of certification. This reflects the shared view of IASTI Member Institutes that in order to be most successful, trainees need to practice the solution-focused model in their respective professional environments, and that trainees need to develop their skills in a variety of ways both within and outside of the training classroom.
- Hours of supervision of the trainee’s work are regarded by IASTI as an important part of training in the solution-focused model and these are to be included in the total of 150 hours training at each level of certification. Each institute will plan for the inclusion of supervision in their training program with regard to their training tradition and local context.