The Seven Challenges

The Seven Challenges® is a comprehensive counseling program for adolescents and adults that focuses on alcohol and other drug problems. It is designed to motivate clients to evaluate their lives, consider changes they wish to make, and succeed in implementing their desired changes. It supports them in taking power over their own lives. With The Seven Challenges, people address their drug problems, their co-occurring life skill deficits, and their situational and psychological problems. Although counselors in the program provide a structure for groups and a framework for individual sessions, the content of each session is exceptionally flexible and adapted in response to the immediate needs of the client. It is not pre-scripted. The Seven Challenges uses an approach called Mastery Counseling, which helps people look at what is happening in their lives. They learn to recognize what is going well and what is problematic. Whatever is not going well, or as well as they would like it to be going, is identified as an issue. In Seven Challenges sessions, counselors teach people to work on their issues. As they do their work, the challenge process is used to help them make thoughtful decisions, including about drugs.