What is Motivational Interviewing?

Motivational Interviewing is a way of conducting conversations about change to strengthen clients’ motivation and commitment. Four decades of research on MI, including more than a thousand controlled clinical trials, have yielded some surprising findings.

Motivational Interviewing (MI) is an alternative to the usual approach of educating clients and trying to persuade them to change. Simply advising clients to change is usually ineffective and can even entrench the status quo.

MI has been found to be useful in helping people change across a broad array of problems in counseling and psychotherapy, health care, coaching, social work, and education.

MI is also relatively brief. It has been tested within primary and speciality health care visits, and even a single session can be enough to improve treatment outcomes and trigger change in longstanding behavior patterns. In comparative trials, MI often yields results comparable to those of more intensive interventions.

MI combines well with other evidence-based interventions and is not an isolated technique. It is also learnable, and the ability to master MI is unrelated to years of graduate education. MI crosses cultures and is now being taught and practiced in more than 50 languages on six continents.