Let's talk Affirmations in Motivational Interviewing!

You don't want to miss this one! In this podcast we explore affirmations in Motivational Interviewing.

Listen up as we discuss:

The different type of AffirmationsReflections vs. AffirmationsPraise vs. Affirmations

and much more!

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All right. Hello everyone. And welcome to the communication solution with us here, the MIguys, and we are here to help you empower the individuals, organizations, and communities that you serve as always. And to do that today, we have. That's some of you might know about cold affirmations and we're going to dig into affirmations today from a variety of angles and for a variety of reasons.

So that's, as far as I understand, but anything else, Tammy, for adding. Well, before we get started, I wanted to make sure everyone knows who's on the line here. We've got John Gilbert who is hosting this party today. We've got Casey Jackson and I'm leading the party today. And I have Tami Calais who was also also participating.

But yes, today we are talking about affirmations in Motivational Interviewing. So affirmations are, it's kind of a big topic. I know we talk about it in our trainings but I [00:01:00] wanted to dive a little bit deeper into affirmations and maybe like, you know, where did they first come from? You know, what's the difference between affirmation and praise?

I think that's a common one that's gets kind of mixed up, but we can go also a lot of different directions too. So. Does anyone have a place that we want to start this conversation? Yeah. Tammy, just from what you said, you know, even from the part, I think it's great for us to look at the difference between a affirmations and praise.

I think there's parts that we can get lost in semantics. And I think there's parts where it is very helpful to kind of split things out. So we are using what we're talking about accurately and effectively, you know, the way we traditionally train it at IFIOC. The difference fundamentally between, do you want compliance or do you want behavior change?

And even though they sound nice, praise is nice. It's not mean it's not, it's not [00:02:00] with a whip and a chair that you're praising people. It's, there's nice and there's reinforcement to it. But one of the things that we look at is the praise kind of agreeing, approving of people, praising them. It tends to be that we're reinforcing that their behavior is something that we liked.

Or that somebody else needs to see or the system wants them to do. And we tend to praise people for that. It doesn't mean we couldn't praise them for doing what they want to do, but praise really is that. I'm grant, I'm granting you. I'm approving I'm I'm I'm my status gives more credence to your status.

You know that I can see it, that I'm witnessing it and I'm going to praise you for that. And then I'm going to keep saying it's not bad. It's not bad. It's structurally different in the way the brain processes that then the way an affirmation does, the reason why we look so much at affirmations is because the whole.

In motivational interviewing is we're trying to facilitate and foster longer-term sustained behavior change. So when you get into [00:03:00] praising people, you can reinforce a pattern. Where, when they feel praise from you that they want to seek that from you more often, that approval are they, do you see that I'm good at doing a good job and you know, which we see even, even with, you know, kids on the dance, little kids on a dance floor, a little kids in a softball game or something like that.

It's like as soon as they do something, the first thing they do is look in the stands to make sure mom dad's side and good job, good job. And, and, and again, that's not bad. It reinforces behavior. But does it create longterm sustained change? And affirmation is how do you build that structure from within,