Wrestle with yourself so you don’t wrestle with your client!

With Motivational Interviewing, we often say, “We are dancing, not wrestling”.

Imagine the metaphor of wrestling with your client– pushing, pulling, persuading, trying to make a change happen. Exhausting!

But using Motivational Interviewing is like dancing. MI is about gentle guiding (evoking!), falling in sync with our clients through an artful partnership of support, evocation, empathy and curiosity.

We are not wrestling with them about the change process, we are engaging in a dance!

Recently, I had a training participant share an ‘aha!’ moment about this metaphor.

He said, “We have to wrestle with ourselves so we don’t wrestle with our clients.”

We have to wrestle back parts of us that want to fix, change, give advice, persuade…parts of us that want our client to be in a different place than they are.

How do we do this?

Ground into the spirit of Motivational Interviewing!

Remember, we are a partner in the change process, embodying acceptance, compassion, and curiosity as we evoke their motivations for change. We are striving to support their autonomy and choice, elicit and highlight their strengths, and empower them to identify their values, motivations and ideas for what and how they want to change.

Motivational Interviewing Tip of the Week: My invitation to you is to be aware of the parts inside of you that want things to be different than they are for your client, and reground into the spirit of Motivational Interviewing. In this way, we ‘wrestle back’ our fixing reflex, and instead, ground into acceptance, compassion, partnership, empowerment. Only then can we truly dance with our clients!

Watch my full video here!