Dr. Stephen Rollnick, Motivational Interviewing Co-Founder

Stephen Rollnick (0:00)

We have discovered that, instead of trying to persuade people why or how they should change, it's far better to basically, to create a conversation in which they do it, for themselves, okay? And in order to create that conversation, you need to come alongside someone, and you need to view them as a person who's got the motivation inside them and the strengths inside them.

Michael Gervais (0:35)

All right, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm Michael Gervais, and by trade and training, I'm a sport and performance psychologist, as well as the co-founder of Compete to Create. And the whole idea behind these conversations is to learn from people who are on the path of mastery, to better understand how the extraordinaries think and do, how they organize their inner world, how they organize their outer life, to be able to experience and understand the nuances, both of mastery of self and mastery of craft.

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Motivational Interviewing is a psychological construct that's designed to help people explore ways to create change.

The main tenet is the client owns his or her solutions. But the Motivational Interviewing approach helps to decrease ambivalence within a person and at the same time increase the drivers that sit underneath making change. And the strategy, of course, you're going to know that I love this. It's non-judgmental, non-confrontational, non-adversarial. And at the same time, it's very hands-on about helping somebody move toward their design. Their desired goal of making change.

It's one way to really create space within very challenging and difficult conversations. And Stephen's found that when conversations about change go poorly, it's typically because the more you try to insert information or advice into others, the more they tend to back off and resist. And I bet you can relate to that.