Coaching for Wellbeing with Motivational Interviewing
with Dr Chris Johnstone, Specialist Coach and Trainer for Resilience and Wellbeing
This online course features six main course webinars hosted on an online resource with additional video and other materials.
Do your clients sometimes struggle to reach wellbeing goals? Do they stall or slip back after good initial progress? This online course introduces an evidence-based coaching style shown to help people tackle health-harming habits and succeed with wellbeing-related behavioural change. While Motivational Inteviewing was initially developed in the field of health psychology, its principles and core tools can be applied to any type of conscious goal-directed change. This short video (5 mins) here gives an example, with Chris Johnstone coaching a puppet called Dan who wants to give up smoking.
For a further free taster, you can join our free online course introducing Coaching for Wellbeing with Motivational Interviewing. This free course is an ideal introduction to our more in-depth six-module recorded online course.
This course is designed for practitioners who address wellbeing in their work, including health professionals, coaches, teachers, complementary therapists, counsellors and psychotherapists. It will also be of interest to anyone keen to more deeply engage their client’s motivation, as well as learn a proven approach to supporting behavioural change.
In this online course you will learn:
- Core practices and principles of Motivational Interviewing, an evidence-based coaching style
- A deepened understanding of how to help clients work with and through resistance and mixed feelings.
- Tools to access deeper sources of motivation in yourself and your clients
The course involves:
- Six recorded webinars of 75 mins each, plus two additional bonus webinars on skills development.
- An online resource with the webinar recordings, audio examples of motivational interviewing in practice, further reading, downloadable handouts and a discussion forum. Participants have long term access to this resource, making it easy to revisit materials at a later date.
Trainer bio
This course is led by Dr Chris Johnstone, who has coached people using Motivational Interviewing for over twenty-five years. Training as a medical doctor, he became interested health-related behaviour change in the early 1990s, working as a GP and then in the addictions recovery field before focusing more on coaching and training for resilience and wellbeing.
Chris lives in the north of Scotland, where he teaches Positive Psychology, Resilience Skills and Motivational Interviewing online at CollegeofWellbeing.com
Course Outline
Webinar 1: Introduction to Motivational Interviewing,
This first webinar introduces Motivational Interviewing as a coaching and conversational style, summarising evidence of its effectiveness and describing how it can be particularly helpful when our clients seem less than fully engaged. We’ll look also at supporting and related insights useful in conversations supporting health-related behaviour change.
Webinar 2 : Engaging enthusiasm when facing resistance or mixed feelings
We start with two important insights about motivation – first that it fluctuates, and second that it can be influenced by conversation. Applying a relational model to understanding resistance in clients, we look at how we can either increase or decrease their engagement through our choices about how we listen and what we say.
Webinar 3: How to avoid the premature focus trap
It is possible to reach too quickly for the certainty of a goal, only to find out later that the person we’re working with doesn’t have their heart in it. This webinar explores ways of avoiding this ‘premature focus trap’, introducing practices that help us strengthen the starting point of empathy. We introduce ‘culture setting statements’ that help build rapport, and explore different ways we can reflect what we hear to more accurately hone in on a focus our clients are willing to commit to.
Webinar 4: Evoking stronger and deeper motivation for change
This session looks at how to track and follow motivational signals in our clients, and then to draw out ‘change talk’ that reinforces their determination and resolve. Motivational Interviewing has been described as a way of supporting people to make their own argument for change – we will look at how to interview in a way that seems effortless and natural, yet is highly targeted in its goal of helping those we work with resolve ambivalence and engage more fully with their will.
Webinar 5: Building courage and confidence to open up a way
Strengthening will and finding a way are two different sides of the change process that influence each other. This session explores how motivational interviewing can be used to help people access their strengths, grow in confidence and take practical steps forward in their change journeys. We also look at the ‘maintenance stage of change’, with ways to consolidate progress and reduce the risk of sliding back.
Webinar 6: Drawing it together and taking next steps
This last webinar takes an overview of the ground we’ve covered and focuses on how to consolidate and embed benefits from this training. We’ll also look at potential next steps and resources for further training.
Here’s what past participants have said about the six-module course.
Before taking this course, I had no previous experience of using Motivational Interviewing techniques in coaching. After the 6 weeks of learning I now feel confident in using MI, and have seen progress in clients. The quality of the material and presentation, plus additional stuff on Ruzuku is an excellent package. Patricia Taylor, Coach
I found the Course a rich learning experience which expanded my basic knowledge of MI. I love this approach to helping people and Chris’s teaching style reflects MI and is very supportive and encouraging. Coaching often involves helping people manage change. MI is a model that is flexible and collaborative and I am finding that using the tools and spirit of MI it enables me to walk beside a coachee as they find their own motivation and confidence for change. Maggie Eaton, Third Age Transition Coach www.maggieeaton.co.uk
Excellent online webinar series, that offers practical, useful and immediately applicable tools and techniques. Interesting and insightful discussions and approaches to maximising an individual’s commitment and self-motivation to achieve their own changes. The webinars were engaging, well led and extremely useful and supportive. I loved it and would highly recommend. Lynn Galletly
You can join the recorded version of the course for £165 (approx $230 or €191) by paying at this link: https://app.ruzuku.com/courses/45324/about
A concession rate of £95 (UK) or $130 (US) is available for people in financial hardship, on a low income or who are full time students. Please contact us if you’d like to request this.