Mindful Monkey.

Motivating People

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Here are a few ideas that came up during the Motivational Interviewing workshop we are in the middle of facilitating. Miller and Rollnick define:

MI is about arranging conversations so that people talk themselves into change, based on their own values and interests

Time and time again I find myself thinking:

People change as a result of how we listen to them, rather than what we tell them

We often find ourselves in a situation where our job is to stimulate change, we are supposed to ‘persuade’ people to change in a way that will benefit them. I have found a useful way of looking at this process:

Persuasion is not about getting a person to do what you want them to do, it is about getting them to want to change.
It is not about coercion, it is about desire, the desire for change is induced within the client

I will be running a 2 day Essential Motivational Interviewing Skills in Nottingham on the 16th & 17th of December 2014.


Really Listening…

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Do you ever get that thing where you remember something you did in the past and cringe? There is a reason why this might be such a universal experience: we are wiser now than we were then.

One thing that makes us wiser (we hope!) as we get older is that we’ve had more opportunities to make mistakes. And mistakes are a powerful way to learn. One of the standout things for me is about learning to really listen.

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It seems to me that often when we miss an opportunity or get things wrong, it is when we weren’t listening well enough. What kind of listening are we talking about?

The common way of listening is through the filters of what we already know, of what is already important. If we are able to listen to our experience with fresh eyes, fresh ears, open heart, we can see new possibilities and learn new things.

This is one of the big secrets of living and communicating with others.  How can we cultivate this? In connection with meditation we sometimes come across the phrase “seeing things as they really are”. It sounds wise but we are not so sure what it means. As we spend a bit of time practicing we notice this ability to experience things in a spacious, open way, beginning to unfold…


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