Building Motivation: What is Motivational Interviewing?
Motivational Interviewing is a technqiue you can use to help mentees explore what is important to them and make changes for themselves. This video will explain more about the purpose of MI.
Video Transcript
Hi. I’m Dr. Alex Werntz, a clinical psychologist and researcher with the center for evidence-based mentoring at the Univeristy of Massachusettes/Boston and I work with MentorPRO. Thank you so much for your interest in our course on Building Motivation: An Introduction to Motivational Interviewing. This course is for mentors who are excited to work with their mentees in behavior change. If your mentees have set goals. Maybe they want to live a healther life. Maybe they want to improve their math skills. You, as a mentor, can actually help them learn these skills
You will use motivational interviewing techniques that you will learn here today to help you build their internal motivation for change to reach their own goals that are important to them in life.
Motivational interviewing is a conversation about change. So MI was originally developed to help folks strength their own internal motivation for behavior change. For behaviors like, just more healthy behaviors, like exercise or eating healthy. Um. Addiction. And also, mental health. Um. MI has been used, um, and been found particularly helpful when someone is ambivalent about changing their behaviors. What’s important to know is that a lot of us know what is good for us and bad for us; however, that knowledge doesn’t necessarily translate to change. So, you can imagine probably most people who smoke know that smoking isn’t good for them. Most people who use substances probably also know that substances aren’t too good for them, but they still do it anyway. This knowledge is not enough to actually change peoples behaviors.
So, MI gives you tools as a mentor to help support your mentee identifying why changing a behavior might be helpful and then figuring out how they can best make those changes. MI encourages people to leverage their own autonomy to make decisions that are right for them. MI is not a technique to trick your mentees into doing something that you think is good for them. MI is truly a way for you to help mentees explore what is important to them and make those changes for themselves.
Next, you will learn about the mentee/mentor relationship qualities that will make Motivational Interviewing most effective.