MOTIVATIONAL INTERVIEWING
SOME OF DERRICK'S CLIENTS
Oriana House
- Used open-ended questions to establish common ground and start building trust
- Set short-term goals that made recovery seem practical and motivated clients to stay positive
Tuscarawas County Health Department
- Used open-ended questions to establish common ground and start building trust
- Set short-term goals that made recovery seem practical and motivated clients to stay positive
MOTIVATIONAL INTERVIEWING
Motivational interviewing is a way of being with a client, not just a set of techniques for doing
counseling. It is a technique in which you become a helper in the change process and express acceptance of your client.
Motivational interviewing is a client-centered counseling style. It's meant to elicit behavior change by helping clients to explore and resolve bad thinking.
One of Derrick's best skills is establishing rapport with client's 1 on 1. After finding some common ground with a client, he'll help them set short-term goals that make recovery seem doable. To a lot of Derrick's clients, recovery seems rather insurmountable, so he likes to put a focus on bite-sized tasks that, once accomplished, make recovery seem practical and attainable.
5 Principles of Motivational Interviewing
Motivational interviewing is meant to be practical in focus. The strategies of motivational interviewing are more persuasive than coercive, more supportive than argumentative. The motivational interviewer must proceed with a strong sense of purpose, clear strategies and skills for pursuing that purpose, and a sense of timing to intervene in particular ways at important moments.
Derrick practices motivational interviewing with these five general principles in mind:
1. Express empathy through reflective listening.
2. Develop discrepancy between clients' goals or values and their current behavior.
3. Avoid argument and direct confrontation.
4. Adjust to client resistance rather than opposing it directly.
5. Support self-efficacy and optimism.
