Motivational Interviewing: Evidence-Based Skills to Effectively Treat Your Clients – Christopher C. Wagner

Motivational Interviewing: Evidence-Based Skills to Effectively Treat Your Clients – Christopher C. Wagner

Do you have clients who:

Can’t seem to get started on making positive changes in their lives or begin but get bogged down?

Can’t quite find their direction or stop focusing on how others are to blame for their situation?

Resist nearly everything offered in support of helping them make their lives better?

All of these are common challenges across a range of settings, populations and clinical concerns.

Motivational Interviewing (MI) has emerged over the past two decades as a leading approach for addressing a core clinical concern – motivation.

Incorporating the latest MI developments, this workshop focuses on the key elements that can transform your practice to escape struggling with clients and make real change in people’s lives.

• Learn how the MI process works and its application in different clinical situations
• Discover why friends and family often contribute to motivational challenges that clients experience
• Identify and avoid some traps that well-meaning helpers can fall into
• Recognize how to thread the needle and help clients find new ways of thinking, feeling and behaving

Watch motivational interviewing expert, trainer and author, Chris Wagner, Ph.D., for this action packed recording! Learn how to effectively focus clients’ attention on embracing change and successfully anticipating and surmounting obstacles they face as they pursue it. You will leave this course inspired and prepared to help your clients get unstuck and begin creating more fulfilling lives.

1. Correlate the relational and technical components that allow MI to improve clinical outcomes through a positive and supportive way.
2. Model how the 4 processes and OARS skills of MI help change happen in clients.
3. Explore ways to elicit, recognize and respond to change talk in order to improve treatment outcomes.
4. Practice specific ways to help clients resolve ambivalence, and talk themselves into change.
5. Develop clinical strategies for working effectively with clients who seem “resistant” to change.
6. Choose how to effectively use MI to help alleviate symptoms of anxiety, depression and addictive behaviors.

Get Motivational Interviewing: Evidence-Based Skills to Effectively Treat Your Clients of author Christopher C. Wagner

Motivation

• What is motivation?
• How ambivalence fits
• Stages of change

Motivational Interviewing (MI)

• Conversations about change
• Resolve ambivalence about change
• Relational and technical components that make MI work
• Research limitations and potential risks of MI in treatment

The 4 Processes of MI

1. Engaging: The Relational Foundation

• MI spirit: PACE
  • Partnership
  • Acceptance
  • Compassion
  • Empathy
• Learn to listen reflectively – the backbone of MI
• Core MI Skills: OARS
  • Open-questions
  • Affirmations
  • Reflections
  • Summaries
• Clarify values and goals

2. Focusing: The Strategic Direction

• Find a focus
• Match your agenda to the client’s concerns
• Exchange information

3. Evoking: Preparation for Change

• Importance of change talk – a key ingredient of MI
  • Listen for and respond to change talk
  • Listen for specific kinds of change talk:
    • DARN (preparatory change talk)
    • CATS (mobilizing change talk)
  • Elicit more and elaborate on change talk
• Respond to “resistance” in clients
• Develop discrepancy
• Evoke hope and confidence

4. Planning: The Bridge to Change

• How and when to plan
• Call on the CATS
• Summarize and then ask a key question

Putting it All Together

• Test skills by coding a MI video in action

MI and Clinical Problems

• Depression and Anxiety
  • Enhance treatment engagement
  • Potentiate Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
  • Suicidal clients
• Addictive Behaviors
  • Substance use
  • Other addictive/compulsive behaviors
  • 12 steps