Talking Ourselves Into Change
Motivational Interviewing works from a simple premise: lasting change comes from within. Through reflective, judgment-free conversation, MI counselors help clients uncover the motivation they already have.
Most of us know what we should be doing differently. Eat better. Move more. Get to bed at a decent hour. And yet, day after day, we default to the same routines — autopilot kicks in, and good intentions quietly fade.
So what actually breaks the cycle? Motivation.
Some look for motivation in habit tracking apps that prime us for change. Devices count our steps, log our meals, and chart our sleep. Awareness is at an all-time high. But knowing more about our habits hasn't made them much easier to change. Information alone doesn't motivate us (Kelly & Barker, 2016).
Some may increase their motivation through social accountability. Group classes, a partner, working with a nutritionist or personal trainer — these can all help. But a session once a week, or even twice, only goes so far. The real challenge is everything in between: the ordinary Tuesday when we're tired, stressed, and reaching for whatever's easiest.
The motivation to stick with a lifestyle change has to come from within ourselves. Self-Determination Theory says that when our actions align with our individual intrinsic goals, values and interests, we have the best chance of successfully changing a behavior (Ackerman, 2018). The key is to become aware of our own motivations to change, and to align these personally meaningful motivations with our actions. Why is this change important? Turns out, engaging with a client-centered counselor can help us grow our motivations to change.
Talking About Change
In the 1940s, Carl Rogers — often considered the founder of Humanistic Psychology — made a simple but radical observation: we change best when we feel genuinely understood. Not lectured. Not diagnosed. Just heard.
Rogers (1961) pushed back against the idea that professionals should remain clinical and detached. His message was refreshingly human: it's okay to care, and it's safe to show it. The most effective helping relationships, he argued, aren't built on expertise alone — they're built on empathy, acceptance, and mutual respect.
What made Rogers' approach so powerful was his belief that feeling accepted doesn't just make us feel good — it actually frees us to change. When we stop defending ourselves and start feeling understood, something opens up. Our view of ourselves begins to shift, and with that shift comes greater confidence, new possibilities, and a genuine willingness to grow.
At its core, Rogers wasn't just teaching therapists how to counsel. He was making a broader point about human nature: we don't change because someone tells us to. We change because we feel safe enough to.
William R. Miller built on Rogers' foundation, but came at it from an unexpected direction. While working with people struggling with addiction, he noticed a pattern: the harder he pushed, the more people resisted. Lecturing didn't work. Confronting didn't work. Unsolicited advice definitely didn't work. What did work was giving people space to explore their own reasons for change. He called this approach Motivational Interviewing, or MI.
Miller later teamed up with Stephen Rollnick to develop the practice further (Miller & Rollnick, 2023). At its heart, MI is a way of being in conversation — one designed to draw out our own motivation and commitment rather than impose it from the outside. Four principles guide the MI conversation:
Partnership. The counselor isn't the expert on our life — we are. MI works as a collaboration, not a prescription.
Acceptance. Borrowed directly from Rogers, this means creating a safe space where we can discuss anything without judgment. The counselor just honestly reflects our thoughts back to us.
Compassion. MI shifts the focus away from what's wrong with us and toward what we're up against. When we feel understood instead of criticized, our own strengths tend to surface.
Empowerment. The MI counselor grows our motivation by helping us recognize and appreciate our ability to handle challenges and successfully change.
Taken together, these four principles point toward the same idea Rogers arrived at decades earlier: we don't change because we're told to. We change when we feel genuinely supported in figuring it out for ourselves.
How Motivational Interviewing Works
The goal of MI is to draw out certain feelings about a behavior change. The MI counselor probes for our values, beliefs, hopes, feelings and motivations, then reflects these back, bringing the unconscious thoughts into the conscious mind. Through this process, we are able to discuss behavior change in the context of our values.
When contemplating a change, we are often in a state of ambivalence: part of us wants to make the change and part of us doesn't (Clifford and Curtis, 2025). When experiencing ambivalence, we think change sounds good, but we still have some reservations. We may start voicing reasons to make a change but not make any commitments. For example, this excerpt highlights a man's ambivalence toward joining a tennis club after recovering from injuries he sustained during a severe car accident (Clifford and Curtis, 2025, p. 19).
"I know I've got to get back into a regular exercise routine if I want to gain back my full function. My physical therapist says I'm ready, but I just don't know now. I guess I don't want to push myself. There's a lot of stuff I just can't do. But I know if I don't do anything, it will just get worse."
Ambivalence is uncomfortable. It can feel exhausting to experience conflicting priorities without making a decision to move forward. MI refers to talk that supports the status quo as sustain talk. In ambivalence, sustain talk and change talk coexist:
"I'd like to try out a pilates class, [change talk] but I might make a fool of myself." [sustain talk]
Ambivalence is often rooted in a discrepancy between our values and our actions (Clifford and Curtis, 2025). Here's where a counselor's ability really matters. A skilled MI counselor guides us to see our own values and goals for change as well as our ability to be creative and competent to successfully change. Essentially the counselor holds up a mirror for us to see ourselves and our potential for change.
When the MI counselor reflects our personal reasons, desires, and plans for change, it makes them tangible and brings them to life. In this excerpt, the counselor helps the client explore his motivations for change by reflecting his talk (Clifford and Curtis, 2025, pp. 69–70).
You want to know what I'm really worried about? It's getting diabetes. I know it runs in my family and I want to do whatever I can to avoid it.
It's the diabetes that most concerns you. [reflection of change talk]
My dad had type 2 diabetes at the end of his life, and I just saw how awful it got. He was in and out of the hospital constantly. I don't want that.
You don't want that burden. [reflection of change talk]
Yeah, dealing with a disease like that is like a full-time job. I want to spend my retirement living my life, not dealing with doctors.
And right now feels like a critical time to make some changes for yourself. [reflection of change talk]
This excerpt shows how reflecting change talk promotes more change talk. When the counselor reflects the client's change talk, he is able to focus on his own positive reasons for change — avoiding type 2 diabetes. Honestly speaking about his reasons for change makes them tangible and motivates a willingness to change. In essence, MI helps us talk ourselves into a goal worthy of our valuable time, effort, and attention (Clifford and Curtis, 2025).
In addition to reflections, MI counselors use many conversational tools to evoke and grow our reasons for change. Affirmations help guide us toward change talk. For example, this excerpt shows how an affirmation helps encourage an HIV client to persist in preventing symptoms of malnutrition (Clifford and Curtis, 2025, p. 86).
Thinking about what and when to eat is a constant stress and some days I'm just too tired. [sustain talk]
You've been through a lot, and some days it wears you down; you're here today because you're someone who doesn't give up easily. [reflection and affirmation]
I can't give up. I have to do this. [change talk]
Tell me more about why this is important to you. [open question to evoke more change talk]
Notice how the client shifts to change talk when he is affirmed as "someone who doesn't give up easily". Importantly, affirmations are not empty praise, but real recognition of what someone has already done. Skilled MI counselors use affirmations so we can see our own strengths and grow in our confidence to change.
Open-ended questions are another important conversational tool MI counselors use to bring forth change talk. Open-ended questions evoke our strengths, skills and accomplishments in related situations to grow our empowerment and self-efficacy. Open-ended strength-based questions are specifically designed to build motivation by evoking our recollection of times when we had been able to perform under certain conditions, as in this example (Clifford and Curtis, 2025, p. 56).
I'm not sure if now's a good time to try to cook at home more. Things have been busy at work. [sustain talk]
You're swamped right now. It's completely up to you in terms of whether you want to move forward with this. You're right — it might not be the best time. Can you think back to a time in the past when you were successful making a change during a busy season? [strength-based question]
Yes. In college. I was working two jobs and I had a full load of classes. I only went out once or twice a week drinking with my friends, but with all I had going on, my grades started dropping, my parents started in on me . . . so I had to tell my friends to stop asking me to go out with them. I went to the bars a lot less and I went to the library a lot more.
It felt like too much was on the line, and a change had to be made.
Exactly. College is expensive and I know why my parents were angry.
You respected your parents and didn't want to waste their money. What did you learn about yourself in that experience? [strength-based question]
I learned that when things are bad enough, I can make a change if I have to.
You have what it takes. [affirmation]
I guess I do.
How does that experience relate to the change you're thinking about now — cooking at home more?
Here the counselor asks a strength-based question and follows up by affirming the client's ability to make a change. When guided to talk about our strengths, skills, and accomplishments, we build self-efficacy and move one step closer toward making a behavior change.
Once a motivation is becoming more tangible, the MI conversation shifts to developing a plan that actually fits our life. The MI counselor guides the conversation toward client-centered goal setting. Since we know our own schedule, habits, and limits best, the counselor calls forth our own wisdom and insight. Supporting client autonomy, the counselor is careful to ask permission first before providing ideas. This example shows the counselor helping the client create a plan for eating more fruit (Clifford and Curtis, 2025, p. 201).
You seem motivated to get in the habit of adding more fruits and vegetables into your days. How do you think you might go about it? [open question]
I noticed mandarin oranges are in season right now. I like them because they aren't too messy and they're easy to take with me. I really like fruit; I just know it needs to be easy or I won't do it.
For fruit, it needs to be grab-and-go. Mandarins are perfect for that. [reflection] Would you be interested in hearing some other ideas? [asking permission]
Sure.
Some of my clients will cut up a banana or pour berries on top of their cereal in the morning. Dried fruit is another option. All the vitamins, minerals, and fiber are intact and it's easy to add to salads, trail mix, or even tuna sandwiches. [offer] Which, if any, of these ideas would you like to explore further? [open question]
Once a plan for change is established, the MI counselor nurtures self-compassion, which promotes health-promoting behaviors (Sirois et al., 2015). Adopting a "trial and error mentality" reduces our feelings of guilt and shame when things don't quite go as planned. A curiosity mindset is encouraged where change attempts are seen as little experiments. Each trial is an opportunity to learn about ourselves: our ability to change and the impacts of change.
Final Thoughts
MI operates from a simple but radical premise: we already have what we need — the values, the motivations, the capacity for change. The MI counselor's job is to help us find what's already there, and support us on our change journey. Plans become experiments rather than tests we can fail. Setbacks become information rather than proof that we can't do it. And motivation stops feeling like something we either have or don't — and starts feeling like something we can grow.
At the heart of building motivation through MI is change talk. When the MI counselor reflects change talk, it brings these seeds of motivation into the light, so they can grow and thrive. The MI conversation helps us cultivate more self-compassion, because life is messy, change is hard, and we are all human. The MI conversation boosts our confidence in our ability to create patterns of sustained change.
The most powerful technology for behavior change isn't an app — it's a conversation. The MI conversation uncovers motivation to change through understanding, support and empowerment. The motivation was ours all along. Sometimes we just need the right conversation to find it.
References
Ackerman, Courtney E. (2018, June 21). Self-Determination Theory and How It Explains Motivation. PositivePsychology.com. https://positivepsychology.com/self-determination-theory/
Clifford, D., & Curtis, L. (2025). Motivational interviewing in nutrition and fitness (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
Kelly, M. P., & Barker, M. (2016). Why is changing health-related behaviour so difficult? Public Health, 136, 109–116. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhe.2016.03.030
Miller, W. R., & Rollnick, S. (2023). Motivational interviewing: Helping people change and grow (4th ed.). Guilford Press.
Rogers, C. R. (1961). On becoming a person: A therapist's view of psychotherapy. Houghton Mifflin.
Sirois, F. M., Kitner, R., & Hirsch, J. K. (2015). Self-compassion, affect, and health-promoting behaviors. Health Psychology, 34(6), 661–669.