Coaching Practiced

Section 7 Motivational Interviewing Introduction

David Tee & Jonathan Passmore

This section features a series of papers written by Jonathan Passmore exploring how motivational interviewing, an evidence-based therapy approach, can be translated to coaching psychology practice. Passmore has frequently argued that much value can be gained by coaching psychologists in drawing from the evidence-based well of counselling psychology and models of behavioural change. However, to take these concepts wholesale would be tantamount to ignoring the different nature of the presenting issues which are found in coaching, the different relational and contractual basis for the relationship and, finally, the differences in client expectations.

In this brief introduction, we will review the nature of Motivational Interview and its development before summarising the seven papers in this section. Let us start by exploring what we mean by the terms ‘motivational interviewing’ (PP) and ‘MI coaching’.

Motivational interviewing is a counselling approach that helps people resolve ambivalent feelings and aims to help them find their internal motivation to make a change. The originators have defined MI in the following terms: “Motivational interviewing is a directive, client-centered counseling style for eliciting behavior change by helping clients to explore and resolve ambivalence” (Miller & Rollnick, 2002, p. 35).

MI draws heavily on the Transtheoretical model (DiClemente & Prochaska, 1998) of behaviour ...