Let’s say you want to practice reality therapy. Maybe more than any other approach, you’ll need to use reality therapy on yourself to become a reality therapist. Here’s what I mean.

You could consider channeling a little William Glasser, because he’s the developer of reality therapy. Then again, you might not want to channel Glasser, because, as Robert Wubbolding has written, to become a reality therapist, “You need not imitate the style of anyone else.”

The point is that you get to do the choosing . . . and a great start is to choose to use Wubbolding’s summary of the delivery system of reality therapy. Wubbolding used the letters, WDEP to summarize reality therapy, and these letters also happen to appear on Wubbolding’s car license plate. If you’re getting the feeling that Wubbolding is committed to reality therapy principles, you would be absolutely right. WDEP stands for Wants, Doing, Evaluation, and Planning. The following four questions capture WDEP:

What do you want?

What are you doing?

Is what you’re doing working? [Evaluation]

Should you make a new plan?

Before enacting reality therapy, you’ll need to adopt a positive, engaged, courteous, enthusiastic, counselor demeanor. You also need to be ready to use your excellent active listening skills. Avoiding toxic relational strategies like arguing, blaming, and criticizing is crucial. Think of yourself as a mentor or coach, and then practice the following strategies to see if they fit for you.

Begin by helping your client (or role-play partner) identify what he/she/they want. You could use any of the following questions:

If we could work on something that feels important to you, what would that be?

What do you want from our meeting today?

This is a big question, but I’m going to ask it anyway: What do you want from life?

If we have a good session and accomplish something that feels good to you, what will we have accomplished?

After you’ve gotten a sense of what your client is wants, you can move onto an inquiry about how your client is currently trying to get those wants. Questions like the following might help:

How are you currently trying to get what you want?

What have you tried?

I imagine you’ve tried various strategies for getting what you want to happen in your life. Tell me about all those things you’ve tried and how they’ve worked.

You can see from this last question, that asking about what clients are doing naturally leads to what Wubbolding considers to be the most important step in reality therapy: Evaluation. Wubbolding hypothesizes that many clients don’t get taught how to self-evaluate and/or may not have much practice at self-evaluation. He uses questions like the following to prompt client self-evaluation.

Is what you’re doing helping or hurting?

Is want you want realistic and attainable?

Does your self-talk help or hinder you in your efforts to get what you want?

Wubbolding has many additional questions about how to help clients self-evaluate in his book, Reality Therapy for the 21^st Century. Check it out.

This brings us to the final question: Should you make a new plan? I think one of the most important insights that reality therapy brings to the counseling table is its emphasis on active and smart planning. Although SMART plans originated in the business world, Wubbolding has an extensive guide for how to help clients make effective plans. In my experiences doing counseling and psychotherapy, I’ve been astonished at how often clients go off in search of goals with either no plans or bad plans. For Wubbolding, client plans should be: Simple, Attainable, Measurable, Immediate, Involved, Controlled, Committed, and Continuous (Wubbolding’s acronym for planning is SAMI²C³). For more information on how to create SAMI²C³ plans, see Wubbolding’s book or the chapter in our Counseling and Psychotherapy Theories in Context and Practice textbook.

All planning that happens in counseling should be collaborative planning. Your job, as you engage in this important planning step, is to come alongside clients, brainstorm small tweaks or big changes in how clients might attain their goals, and to give them constructive feedback about whether their plan is a smart plan while providing encouragement and collaboratively evaluating the plan’s effectiveness. I have no doubt that reality therapy can be effective, partly because the first three reality therapy questions are so central to human functioning, but also because a good plan is a beautiful thing.

Note: the content of this blog is primarily adapted from the section that Robert Wubbolding wrote for our theories textbook.