What do you do if your clients lack motivation to pursue innovative career plans?

1 What is MI and why use it?

Motivational interviewing is a collaborative conversation style that aims to strengthen a person's own motivation and commitment to change. It is based on four core processes: engaging, focusing, evoking, and planning. MI helps you build rapport with your clients, clarify their vision and direction, elicit their reasons and desire for change, and support their action plan. MI is especially useful when your clients face uncertainty, doubt, or fear about pursuing innovative career plans, as it helps them resolve their ambivalence and find their own solutions.

2 How to engage your clients

Engaging is the first and essential step of MI, as it establishes a trusting and respectful relationship with your clients. You want to create a safe and supportive space where your clients feel comfortable to share their thoughts and feelings. To engage your clients, you need to use the OARS skills: open-ended questions, affirmations, reflections, and summaries. Open-ended questions invite your clients to express their views and perspectives, affirmations acknowledge their strengths and efforts, reflections demonstrate your understanding and empathy, and summaries recap the main points and transitions.

3 How to focus your clients

Focusing is the process of finding and maintaining a specific direction for the conversation. You want to help your clients identify and prioritize their goals and interests, especially those related to innovation and creativity. To focus your clients, you need to use the agenda-mapping technique, which involves asking permission, offering choices, and negotiating a focus. Agenda-mapping helps you collaborate with your clients on what they want to talk about and how they want to approach it. It also helps you avoid imposing your own agenda or assumptions on your clients.

4 How to evoke your clients

Evoking is the process of drawing out your clients' own motivation and reasons for change. You want to help your clients explore their values, needs, and aspirations, as well as the benefits and costs of pursuing innovative career plans. To evoke your clients, you need to use the decisional balance and the readiness ruler techniques. Decisional balance helps you elicit the pros and cons of change and no change, and highlight the discrepancies between your clients' current situation and desired outcome. Readiness ruler helps you assess your clients' confidence and importance of change, and elicit their change talk.

5 How to plan with your clients

Planning is the process of developing and implementing a specific and realistic action plan for change. You want to help your clients translate their motivation into concrete steps and strategies, as well as anticipate and overcome potential barriers and challenges. To plan with your clients, you need to use the SMART goals and the coping plan techniques. SMART goals help you set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound objectives with your clients. Coping plan helps you prepare your clients for possible setbacks and difficulties, and brainstorm solutions and alternatives.

6 How to practice MI

Motivational interviewing is a skill that requires practice and feedback. You can improve your MI competence by following some tips and resources. First, you can review the MI spirit and principles, which are the foundation of the approach. The MI spirit consists of partnership, acceptance, compassion, and evocation. The MI principles are expressing empathy, developing discrepancy, rolling with resistance, and supporting self-efficacy. Second, you can use the MITI 4.2.1 tool, which is a coding system that measures the quality of MI. It evaluates your use of the OARS skills, the MI-consistent and MI-inconsistent behaviors, and the global ratings of the conversation. Third, you can join a MI learning community, such as the Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers (MINT), which offers training, coaching, and peer support for MI practitioners.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?