When a Strengths-Based Approach Is Truly Tested

A strengths-based approach isn’t truly tested when you’re surrounded by people who already agree with you.
It’s tested when you step outside your echo chamber and immerse yourself in community – especially in the moments that stretch you.

Critical incidents.
Grief.
Burnout.
Conflict.
Politics, competing priorities, funding constraints, and sector limitations.

Moments where it would be easier to default to fixing, controlling, competing, blaming, or diagnosing what’s wrong.
Over the years, I’ve found myself in many of these spaces. And I’ve noticed something important:

if, after moving through all of this, you still choose to work in a strengths-based, asset-driven, participatory way, then it’s no longer just a framework.
It’s a way of being.

And somewhere along the way, you realise – you’ve become a practitioner, not just a user of a method.
This work isn’t naïve – or “pink-glasses optimism.”
It’s deeply aware of power, privilege, trauma, intersectionality, equity, and injustice.
It simply refuses to let deficit become the organising principle.

While models like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs are often framed individually and sequentially, thinkers like Manfred Max-Neef remind us that human needs are interconnected, relational, and collective. That framing has always felt closer to how communities actually live and heal.

A Full Circle: Brazil to Australia

My journey with strengths-based practice began in Brazil, where Asset-Based Community Development wasn’t something we named – it was something we lived.
People gathered what they had – often not much materially, but a lot of heart and creativity – worked with who was there and built from relationships and strengths rather than deficits.

Returning to Australia, I entered a sector that is often well-intentioned but heavily top-down, siloed, and problem-focused. I experienced firsthand how quickly energy, agency, and imagination can drain when systems define people primarily by needs, gaps, KPIs, and funding categories.

That tension pushed me deeper into practice.
Into the method.
Into the community.

What started as part-time work grew into full-time consulting, facilitation, and capacity building  – and eventually into Soulgen, a social enterprise focused on strengthening communities from the inside out.

Exploring Other Paths – and Finding the Same Truth

Along the way, I explored and practised a range of approaches – not as trends or toolkits, but in real, lived contexts:
Place-based work, grounded in local assets, inclusion, long-term commitment, and multi-sector collaboration
Co-design and co-production, where solutions emerge with people, honouring lived experience and local expertise
Restorative practice, which centres relationships rather than punishment
Community healing, counselling, and later psychodrama to restore health in individuals and systems

In psychodrama, we don’t focus on pathology. We look for health in the system – the innate capacity for spontaneity and renewal. Healing happens creatively, relationally, and collectively: on the stage, with others, using roles, auxiliaries, and surplus reality. Never in isolation.

Storytelling in many forms – Playback Theatre, Forum Theatre, community arts, and narrative approaches – grounded in a simple truth:
the stories we tell shape the futures we live into.
Moving from stories of limitation to stories of possibility and imagination.
Across all of these, a pattern kept repeating.

The Deeper Pattern Beneath the Methods

Glass-half-full thinking in strengths-based practice parallels health in the system in psychodrama.
Sociometry parallels social capital.
Story parallels destiny.
Words create worlds – as Appreciative Inquiry reminds us.
Places thrive when we build from what’s strong, not only respond to what’s broken.
Each approach, when practised well, kept pointing me back to the same foundation:
strengths, relationships, participation, and shared ownership.
Different languages.
Different entry points.
The same deeper orientation.

Being Tested  Again and Again
A strengths-based approach doesn’t mean ignoring pain, conflict, or harm.
It means refusing to let those things be the whole story.
It means staying relational when things are tense.
Staying participatory when outcomes are uncertain.
Staying curious when systems pull toward control.
And just when you think you’ve passed the test…
You get tested again. 🙂
That’s the work.

This reflection also sits at the heart of my upcoming book, The Community Treasure Hunter – an exploration of how communities uncover their hidden strengths, especially in complex and challenging times.

If this way of working resonates – or even challenges you – I’d love to stay in conversation.
What approaches, methodologies, or ways of being have you found transformative in your work or life?
What stories or highlights stand out for you?
Maybe together, we can discover the threads that connect the practices we use, live, breathe , and play with. 🌱