Question from one of you! Motivational Interviewing and Group communication

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Wow this podcast is full of great information about using Motivational Interviewing with groups or in a group setting. This question came from one of you, our listeners! Kati works in a school setting and was curious how Motivational Interviewing could be used in groups.

In this Podcast we discuss:

How to use Motivational Interviewing in groupsTips: don't fall into the expert trap, get engagement first, EPE (Elicit, Provide, Elicit)The spirit of Motivational Interviewing and whats your intentionRefocusing groupsAnd so much more!

Want a transcript? Read below!

[00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to the communication solution podcast. Here at IFIOC, 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. Today, we've got Casey Jackson on the line, John Gilbert, and I'm Tammy.

Welcome to the conversation.

John Gilbert: Hello everyone. And welcome to another conversation with us here at the communication solution. You know, each one of us from our intro and we today have a really interesting topic that is going to come from a listener that we really appreciate Katie.

If you wouldn't mind, Tammy just orienting us to what Katie had asked us, and then we can go from there with what, to a respond to.

Tami Calais: Yes. Sounds good. So Katie actually wrote [00:01:00] in the question she was asking about, can you use Motivational Interviewing as a tool for group communication?

She said that her background is in behavior interventions in a public school setting, and she would often end up working with students in small groups. She's done some reading on synergistic change, talk in a group setting, but I'd love to know if IFIOC has any more information on it. So that is our conversation today, Motivational Interviewing in group settings.

Casey Jackson: So I can tell you for me, this is a question that has kind of percolated at times from the beginning. Ever since I started training it, not a common question, but it, it will surface fairly often. And kind of the two names the forefront of Motivational Interviewing and groups is Chris Wagner and Karen Ingersoll who wrote a book on Motivational Interviewing and groups.

And John was talking about, there's a coding tool that [00:02:00] Johnny can reference as well to talk about a bit too, but prior to even knowing the things that had been written about Motivational Interviewing in groups is I was thinking about how, how I was using motivational interviewing in group therapy sessions in family therapy.

What I realized in explaining to people is that first of all, you need to really be pretty skilled at Motivational Interviewing individually, because there is a complete different level of complexity that I found in using it in a group setting. The way I started to look at this was like, I remember getting called in asking to work with this group of Youth that were justice involved.

And they said, we know we wanted to learn how to use Motivational Interviewing can use Motivational Interviewing with these guys in the group and all these concepts. And so what I was talking to them about is the way that I think of a way to look at Motivational Interviewing, in groups is if you treat the group as a brain with all these little brain cells in it, and there's going to be ambivalence inside that brain.

And so it's not like you're talking to them [00:03:00] in mass. I mean, there's still this level of engagement, but you have a sense of how the majority of them are feeling and that the majority, and probably have mixed feelings about being in that group, especially if it's a BI classroom or that, you know, a small group from a behavioral classroom.

You can think there's part of it. That's just like,