Where your focus goes, energy flows!

“Where your focus goes, energy flows!”

What a great phrase to describe a part of what we are doing in Motivational Interviewing. A training participant shared this recently, and I love it!

As a motivational interviewer, I want to pay particular attention to what I’m focusing on in my clients’ conversation.

Am I focusing on my clients’ language around their stuckness and sustain talk?

Or am I focusing on their language around their desired change?

What we pay attention to grows, and where we focus, energy flows!

A Motivational Interviewing conversation is directional.

Motivational Interviewing is a guiding style of communication, and we are paying more attention to our clients’ motivations toward change rather than their arguments against change.

How do we do that?

Our OARS skills!

1. Open-ended questions: We get extra curious about their change talk, using evocative questions that elicit change talk. 

2. Affirmations: We highlight the strengths, abilities, and steps taken toward change.

3. Reflections: When we hear change talk and sustain talk, we reflect their change talk more than we do the sustain talk. We can also use double-sided reflections to acknowledge the sustain, while highlighting & redirecting toward their change talk. 

4. Summaries: By periodically collecting the change talk we have heard and giving it back to our client like a bouquet, we reinforce their change talk and continue to guide conversation in that direction! 

Motivational Interviewing Tip of the Week: We want to be really conscious of what client language we pay attention to over the course of a conversation. Be careful, because that curious, problem-focused mind of yours may accidentally explore and reinforce their stuckness! That’s not the direction we want to flow in! As we pay more attention to a client’s change talk, we can grow it! Where your focus flows, energy & conversation goes! Use your OARS skills to selectively focus more on the change talk you hear than the sustain talk!