In this episode of the Move to Value Podcast, we continue the conversation about Motivational Interviewing with Sebastian Kaplan, PhD, who talks in greater detail about Motivational Interviewing, touching on empathy, provider burnout, and optimal patient care.
Dr Kaplan has additional Motivational Interviewing resources available here: https://www.guilford.com/author/Sebastian-G-Kaplan
If a provider would like to incorporate MI into daily practice, where would a good starting point be?
Well, a few places to start. I mean, if people like to read, obviously there’s a lot of books out there on motivational interviewing. The two main authors are the founders of MI are William Miller and Steven Rollnick, and they have written many of the texts out there. And its now, the main motivational interviewing text is now in its third edition. They’re in the process of writing the fourth edition currently. And so that’s, it’s a great book. It’s not overly jargonized or dense with all kinds of statistics. It’s a really approachable, easy read. Guilford Press is the one that is the publishing company that has the majority of MI books out there. Both in general and kind of a general sense, but also there’s, like there’s an MI in healthcare book that’s out there. There’s MI for all kinds of, you know, applied settings and problems. So, that would be one.
The other thing though, and is to find a MI trainer, you know, like myself. Or there’s a, we have a website, motivationalinterviewing.org. And on that website, there are, you know, hundreds and hundreds of trainers all over the world and you can reach out to somebody and we’re a very friendly, you know, friendly bunch and we’d be more than happy to steer people in the right direction.
A lot of people go to a workshop, you know, one-day or two-day workshop. You know, I think there’s a lot more flexibility in training now with Zoom kind of experiences and that sort of thing. But, and so, there’s some reading, a workshop would certainly be useful. But ultimately what we know about training, there’s been some studies done on the training of motivational interviewing specifically, is that for those people who really want to get it and really want to develop proficiency with MI, what’s most needed is somebody who listens to samples or examples of MI conversations that the learner is trying to do and giving that person feedback. You know, getting that coached feedback is really the key.
What is the righting reflex and how can we avoid that trap as a provider?
Yeah, so the righting reflex, this is something that Miller and Rollnick came up with, you know, as far as a term. And righting it’s helpful to know is r-i-g-h-t, so like the word right, to get it right, or to do right. So, the righting reflex. And it is, it comes from a very well-intentioned place. Any healthcare provider, or not any, I would imagine the vast majority of healthcare providers went into whatever field of specialty that they’re in at some level because they wanted to be helpful to other people. And over the course of our training and our experience, we probably know a lot about what is helpful for humans to be healthy. And so, what the righting reflex is, is when is the potential for any healthcare provider to jump in really quickly in a conversation with all the reasons why a person should make a change. And really kind of focusing solely on that information giving, or the sort of encouraging and cheerleading and all those types of things, that are, that still kind of maintain that traditional hierarchy of expert, patient, you should change because I’m giving you this information or because I’m telling you slash encouraging you. So that’s really what the righting reflex is. It’s not a, you know, a bad quality or characterological flaw. It is...
