About Tara and Naomi:
Naomi Whitehead (she/her) is a Solution-Focused Practitioner (IASTI, EMCC SP, ICF PCC). Naomi works online, in Sheffield, across the UK, and internationally, as a Solution-Focused coach, trainer, mentor, educator and community interest company director.
Naomi's background in working with and coordinating services for adults facing multiple and complex challenges that have experienced homelessness, supporting young people involved in the criminal justice system and substance misuse, and managing voluntary sector projects, informs the structured yet playful, curious and deeply respectful stance she brings to all her work.
Tara Gretton is a registered social worker and accredited solution-focused practitioner, coach, and trainer.
She works internationally with children, families, schools, and professionals, amplifying voices and creating sustainable change.
Tara also provides supervision, leadership coaching, and training, championing relational, compassion and solution focused led approaches in education, social care, and communities.
Feminist, Solution-Focused Pioneer “Eve Lipchik” Revisited by Tara Gretton and Naomi Whitehead, UK
Tara has long been fascinated and inspired by the power of Eve Lipchik’s writing and approach and has gradually and consistently shared her wisdom, literature and teachings with Naomi.
As a result through many conversations, and co-training significant moments, Tara and Naomi have discovered many new perspectives ignited by reflecting on Eve’s work. These include the parallels between what Eve says about thoughts and emotions influencing the physical state of clients and what we now know about co-regulation.
Also the importance of co-creating safety with such sensitivity clients can share all that they need to and the microanalysis concrete evidence we now have about the advantages of preserving client’s exact words, calibration, noticing positive and negative content and what is formulated as a result, and how this all aligns with Eve’s idea “we can cooperate with clients and use their feeling words in conversation without sacrificing the benefit of more concrete signs of progress”.
Best Hopes:
To explore the ideas from Eve Lipchik about emotion in solution-focused therapy actually being not “beyond” but in fact “within” technique.
To invite an embodied and experiential workshop about the new perspectives that are ignited by Eve’s work when immersed into contemporary solution-focused and microanalysis practice which seem to invite powerful and sustainable impact
To share fresh thinking from this year that is influencing Tara and Naomi’s unique perspectives as a result of weaving Eve’s ideas into what they do, and experiment and co-create with everyone in attendance further novel ideas to make a difference in the world.