Category: Conversations About Change

Engaging is the first of the four processes in MI (engaging, focusing, evoking, and planning) and lays the groundwork for the first session and the sessions to follow. And as you likely know from experience, engagement can occur with some clients in a matter of minutes, and with other clients,...

Listening can appear to be a very passive experience, but if you really want to listen, and offer a reflection back to a client as you attempt to understand what they are attempting to communicate, it can take quite a while to become very skilled at having these reflections come...

Forming a reflection is attempting to understand what the client is communicating to us. We listen to what the client is expressing and we provide a response in the form of a statement, and not a question. The reason we do this is because asking questions of the client often...

When we think about “good listening” there are many aspects that come to mind. And behind this practice is a belief and trust that it can be beneficial for clients to explore their own experiences, perceptions, and motivations. By being in the presence of a “good listener” and having the...

When we think about what is the most effective way for us, as practitioners, to respond to a client as they attempt to explore making a change, many initial thoughts and ideas may emerge. What we do know is that before a person speaks, they have a particular message or...

Overshooting and undershooting are useful reflection techniques where statements can be offered back to the client for more personal exploration on a particular topic. As I mentioned above, these techniques can be particularly helpful when there is emotional content involved. There are so many ways we can describe emotion, and...

Reflections can be extremely simple or very complex. At times, just repeating back to the client what they just shared can keep the conversation moving forward. The example below illustrates how the clinician repeats back to the client almost exactly what was said: Client: I’m feeling very anxious today. Clinician:...