We are in the business of helping people make positive health changes. Reluctance to make these changes will inevitably arise. Let’s pick apart what we often call resistance to understand it better.

In some nutrition counseling settings, clients have not chosen to meet with you. They have been told to or even coerced.

The specific skills we employ in our sessions allow us to effectively guide our clients toward positive health behavior changes. Most of these Tips are devoted to strategies and skills.

If you have chosen to transition your counseling style toward motivational interviewing, you may find that note-taking feels as if it detracts from being present with your client.

Brief Action Planning (BAP), developed by Steven Cole and others, is a communication format based on motivational interviewing and designed for health care settings.

As nutrition counselors, our goal is to help people attain better health through diet changes. We do this by engaging, focusing, evoking and planning.

Webster’s dictionary defines resentment as “a feeling of indignant displeasure or persistent ill will at something regarded as a wrong, insult, or injury.” It is very uncomfortable and yet can be useful if we attend to it.

In the last three Tips, we have looked at important processes that occur in all motivational interviews. The first three processes – engaging, focusing and evoking – are always present in true MI sessions.

Tip #114 introduced the four processes that are now used in the collaborative conversation called motivational interviewing: engaging, focusing, evoking and planning. Here we take a closer look at the evoking process.

Change counseling is most efficient and most effective when a clear focus is agreed upon.