This jam packed podcast is full of great stuff!

Have you heard of the Righting Reflex? The righting reflex in communication is a concept IFIOC teaches in our Introduction to Motivational Interviewing classes, as it's our natural instinct to keep ourselves in balance or with a compassionate heart, help others stay in balance. (We dive deeper into the Righting reflex in the podcast).

The righting reflex in communication is a tool that can help your conversations be more effective and efficient when discussing change or reducing resistance.

We cover so many great things including:

The history of the Righting ReflexThe Righting Reflex comes from a desire to helpCuriosity vs JudgementUnderstanding our own biasAnd so much more!

Check out the Transcript! Righting Reflex and Relationships

00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the communication solution podcast today. We've got Casey Jackson on the line, John Gilbert, and I'm Tammy here atIFIOC. We love to talk communication. We love to talk motivational interviewing, and we love talking about improving outcomes for individuals, organizations, and the communities that they serve.

Welcome to the conversation today. And we'll be addressing the righting reflex and communication, particularly in relationships and maybe that's friendships. Maybe that's romantic relationships. We can talk about this a little bit more, but in relation to. Uh, seems to be a little more personal than professional is what I'm gathering from this.

So, uh, for anyone that would like to start us off, what are your initial thoughts? We could define our terms. Casey, you had looked at some stuff to see if you knew the history of this or how it was created. We could start there, or I [00:01:00] don't know if there's another place you want. I'd be curious to start with more of the history of how, where did this come from?

We talk about it in IFIOCs trainings, but yeah, I, you know, one of the things that, the vast majority of things, I just, as a trainer, or just as somebody whose knowledge, I just want to know what I'm talking about. So it's something I looked up quite a while ago and I think. When I was first learning, am I in training?

You know, getting trained on Motivational Interviewing and training. And my, I just thought Righting Reflex was something that was an Motivational Interviewing term. Um, and, but then when I was looking about teaching that I wanted to look up some pictures and that which led me down a whole rabbit hole and, and it, it is a reflex. It is a, it's a human reflex.

Um, the righting reflex, it is a combination of things with our sensory input that helps us to stand up straight, um, to not fall over. Yeah. So there is a, how do we, how do we stay centered? And so between our, our vision between our hearing, between [00:02:00] our vestibular system, there's multiple systems that help us.

Literally, we're such an awkward tall thing that, that we don't fall over as we're putting one foot in front of the other has to do with this whole complex thing about writing reflex it, the one that, and that wasn't even where I originally started when I was doing kind of my, I want to understand what this means.

It was the most popular things that came up were around cats. Um, That a cat will physiologically write itself in the air. If it gets tossed up in the air or it falls out of a tree, that little body and all the muscles in it will wiggle every way it can to make sure that it lands on all fours. Um, and so literally it will write itself in the air and land on its feet.

Um, so that's, that's the source of it. And so when you think about that in relationship with motivational interviewing, it's when we start to fall out of our own orientation, It's how do we get back oriented to where our center is? Um, so it's usually when something is triggering us and the way we teach it [00:03:00] at IFIOC, is that when something is triggering your values,