Introduction to Motivational Interviewing

Overview

Introduction to Motivational Interviewing

Communication and behaviour change

Being an advisor on animal health and welfare is not just about science and methodology. To have a meaningful impact and improve the lives of animals, encouraging and motivating animal carers to improve animal husbandry and adopt advisory recommendations remains a critical challenge. This places communication at the heart of animal well-being; communication is the bridge between advisor and animal carer that enables the passage of ideas and advice on implementing change, one that can inspire motivation, arouse action and enhance confidence.

Despite this vast potential, communication on animal well-being does not always stimulate the change we envisage in response to our ever improving expertise. When advising, we often intuitively sense that if we can just provide the ‘right’ choices and facilitate their implementation practically, change will follow. Unfortunately, when it comes to helping clients dealing with complex change, a helping response built upon ‘fixing’ a problem for a client often stimulates arguments against a behaviour rather than in favour of it (a phenomenon known as psychological reactance) due to the ambivalence clients commonly experience in the contemplation of change. This approach also offers little opportunity to meet the basic psychological needs necessary for inspiring motivation: autonomy (volition over behaviour), relatedness (to experience connection with another) and competence (perceived self-efficacy).

To successfully promote animal health and welfare, enhancing our communication skill set to avoid these pitfalls is critical to support our clients and empower them to engage in positive change.

Why Motivational Interviewing?

Motivational Interviewing (MI) fosters a mutualistic communication approach as the backbone of practice, helping us avoid these pitfalls when helping clients manage complex change. It is an evidence-based, collaborative conversation style developed in the medical sciences for strengthening a person’s own motivation to change. MI specifically explores and resolves ambivalence to influence the motivational processes that facilitate change by evoking a client’s own desires, reasons and willingness to change as a means of clarifying and strengthening their positive intent. Critical to this process is the relational context of empathy, acceptance and partnership, which facilitates the spontaneous emergence of client language of change, combined with technical communication skills that shape and enhance this language.

Workshop

This introductory workshop will offer participants the opportunity to gain an understanding of the verbal skills and communication processes that underpin the practice of MI, in addition to the ‘spirit’ of the methodology that informs its use. This will be achieved through a mix of experiential exercises, group discussion and presentation. Research at the University of Bristol on MI and veterinary communication, combined with wider research and theory on communication, motivation and behaviour change will support and inform the experience. Participants can expect to take away a better understanding of how to engage clients in conversations about change, combined with ways to practice and learn more about the MI methodology.​