I HAVE been lucky enough to get to know several different kinds of talking therapies over the past few years, but the one I always come back to is called Solution Focused therapy.

It is a type of therapy which clients often enjoy rather than dread and I also found the approach incredibly helpful when I was in need of support myself. As the name suggests, discussions between therapist and client focus much more on the future and where the client wants to get to rather than any problems or challenges from their past.

One SF therapist, Fredrike Bannink, describes her role as being like that of a taxi driver. The focus is on where the passenger is going rather than where he or she has come from.

And her job is to help the passenger get there in as short a time as possible. Some people are very clear about their destination or how they would like their lives to look, but many have never really thought about things in this way at all.

They know they want to get away from the problem, but they are less clear about what they would like to take its place. Like the passenger in the taxi, saying you don’t want to go to the airport still doesn’t tell the taxi driver where it is you would like to go instead.

So how do you go about deciding where you want your journey to take you?

There are many tools and exercises out there to encourage people to think about their own goals and priorities. One simple one is to imagine that someone is going to write a book of your life and present it to your grandchildren (or another child who is important to you).

What would you like that story to include?

How would you most like to be portrayed and what achievements would you like them to read about? What would be the very best chapters that could be written about this particular phase in your life?

What about the next five years? Imagine that you could see those children reading the book. What is the most important thing that you would like to see them reading about you?

In which ways would you like them to be proud of you? The word ‘success’ means a multitude of different things to different people and likewise your own book will be completely individual to you.

The trick is to spend some time working out what success means to you personally and what you would like your own book to contain.

What is the first small thing you would do which those children would love to read about?

The best bit about doing this is that the chapter about 2022 has not been written yet and neither have the ones for the months and years ahead. It is entirely up to you what they come to contain. Whatever has happened in your life up to this point, never forget that you still have time to create a story of which your grandchildren will come to be proud.