The Practitioner's Guide to Ericksonian Choice Architecture bridges the gap between behavioral economics and the helping professions and provides a model for guiding without controlling. This empowers clinicians to develop collaborative relationships with their clients, leading to positive and sustainable outcomes.

This book establishes Ericksonian Choice Architecture (ECA) as a legitimate extension of behavioral economics, applied to the clinician–client dyad. It offers a coherent, ethically grounded framework for choice-centric care, in which the enduring outcome is not engineered change but an increased capacity for authored choice that respects client autonomy and values. By treating decisions as both psychological acts and designable events, the author demonstrates how communication can shape choices rather than correct them. Explaining how clinicians can work with biases and mental heuristics rather than against them, this book supplies evidence-based strategies to design “optimal choice environments” that make progress feel self-directed rather than imposed.

Full of rich case material and thought experiments, this book is essential for Ericksonian practitioners, hypnotherapists, psychotherapists, and licensed counselors, as well as graduate students and trainees in these fields. It will also interest healthcare clinicians, leaders, and behavioral economists.

Dan Short is a practicing clinical psychologist who also serves as director for the Milton H. Erickson Institute of Phoenix, Arizona, adjunct faculty for the Milton H. Erickson Foundation’s hypnosis training program, and the originator of ECA. Short served for five years as Editor-in-Chief for the Milton H. Erickson Foundation Newsletter and two years as Assistant Director at the Foundation. During that time, he oversaw the preservation of nearly 1,500 hours of audio recording from Milton Erickson. Short has taught medical hypnosis at Sonoran University of Health Sciences for more than a decade. Short has published five books, served as guest editor for the American Journal of Hypnosis (AJCH), and authored dozens of scholarly articles and book chapters. Short’s research interests have focused on Ericksonian hypnosis, resulting in a research-based treatment manual for Ericksonian therapy (ET), which is used by training institutes around the world.