‘What are your best hopes from our talking?’ or a variation of this question, is one of the most common openings in solution-focused brief therapy sessions. The best hopes question is designed to begin a dialogue about the outcome a client seeks from therapy. This qualitative research study explores the conversational practices a solution-focused counsellor employs to facilitate the development of this discussion with clients.

Four clients agreed to have their first therapy session with a counsellor recorded, and to be interviewed about their experience of the best hopes discussion. Using conversation analysis, the transcripts of the four best hopes discussions were closely examined and patterns of talk-in-interaction observed. Participant clients’ recollections of the dialogue provided a triangulating perspective on the findings from the analysis.

The originality of the research rests in the use of conversational analysis to examine, in fine detail, what a best hopes discussion looks like in practice. The findings correlate strongly with the conventional understanding that solution-focused brief therapy is a process of co-construction in which the client provides the content while the counsellor ‘leads from one step behind’ by advancing the conversation and formulating questions using the client’s own words. The rich qualitative data in this study, however, expands the understanding of how ‘leading from one step behind’ is actually achieved in the best hopes discussion. Through gaining turns at talk, managing clients’ storytelling and using pre-expansions to frame questions; the counsellor endeavours to scaffold the clients’ processing to reach an expression of their desired outcome, while at the same time working to ensure that clients feel heard as the conversation is co-constructed.