Guy Shennan

I am available by arrangement on weekdays between 9am and 5pm. As I follow a solution-focused therapy approach, I usually have space for new clients, as I only occasionally see people on a long-term basis.

I specialise in solution-focused brief therapy, which I have been using since the mid-1990s. I am now a leading practitioner and trainer in the international solution-focused community.

My work is also informed by systemic practice and narrative therapy, each of which I have also trained in.

I have been training helping professionals to use solution-focused practices in their work since the late-1990s. The second edition of my book, Solution-Focused Practice: Effective Communication to Facilitate Change, was published in 2019.

More details about me and my therapy practice, and information about the solution-focused approach can be found on my website: guyshennan.com. 

I have a therapy room in Hackney, London, where I see people in-person, and I also offer online and telephone sessions.

Solution-focused therapy is a forward-looking, future-focused and strengths-based approach.

As with other therapy approaches, listening is at the centre of this way of working. If you were to work with me, you would experience me listening to you very closely, at all times, and being guided in all that I did with you by this listening, in particular to your hopes from the therapy.


Whenever you wished or needed to talk about problems you have been experiencing, I would be listening just as closely - and I would be curious about exceptions to these problems, any successes you have had in dealing with them, however small, and what you hope to be happening instead.

In this way, your hopes from the therapy - what you wish to be happening as a result of coming - will be what we organise the work around, rather than the problems you have been experiencing. My role will then include helping you to describe the future you would like to be in or moving towards, and to focus on anything you are doing or have done that fits with movement towards this 'preferred future'.

Typically we will pay a lot of attention to the small details of these things, of your preferred future and of progress being made towards it, and what you are doing and are able to do - your abilities and potential - to help these things to happen. It is not always easy to focus on such details on one's own, and this is where the solution-focused therapist comes in, to assist you in doing so. 

And doing this has been shown to be effective in enabling people to make progress in their preferred direction. 

Although the approach is called solution-focused, it is not really about 'finding solutions', but rather its focus on desired futures and progress being made generates a sense of hope and possibility, and through this, an ability to make desired changes.

In solution-focused brief therapy the work starts from the word go. There is no separate initial assessment session, and we focus on the person's hopes from the therapy from the beginning of the first meeting.

The work is open-ended, so we don't fix any particular number of sessions, and yet it is typically brief. Some people have only one or two sessions and find this is enough to feel they are moving sufficiently in their desired direction to be able to continue to do so under their own steam. Three to five sessions is typical. In a small number of cases we have more sessions, but if you are going to find solution-focused therapy helpful - and there is a good chance you will - you can expect to notice this sooner rather than later.

In this podcast, I talk in some detail about what happens in a first solution-focused brief therapy session: https://sfpodcast.podbean.com/e/ep-1-what-is-solution-focused-practice/ 

Regarding what I can help with, because solution-focused brief therapy is organised around the hopes of the person rather than the problems they have been experiencing, there are no exclusion criteria based on the type of problem a person is experiencing. In other words, it could help anyone. As with all therapy approaches, it won't help everyone, but it could help anyone, and the only way to know for sure is to try it.