This two-day workshop will provide participants with the foundational knowledge and skills to use Motivational Interviewing (MI) with their clients. Across a broad range of care settings, successfully engaging and harnessing clients’ own motivations for making important life changes is a key ingredient for success. The most efficient way to understand the dynamics of the MI model, and to develop competency, is through practice — learning by doing. Therefore, these sessions are highly interactive, incorporating structured learning activities including case examples, audio/video-recorded work samples, small group exercises, and “real”-plays. In this workshop participants will be progressively guided to improve their skills from basic to more advanced levels. Most importantly, they will be able to transfer and incorporate newly learned MI skills into real-world interactions. 

 Over the course of this workshop, participants will become familiar with the basic theory of MI, the skills for fostering an effective working alliance, and practice ways of responding effectively to challenging client statements to de-escalate conflict. Emphasis will also be placed on fine-tuning participants’ ability to recognize, evoke, and respond to client “change language,” an essential skill for fostering awareness and motivation. The materials and examples will be tailored to scenarios involving housing and homelessness issues. 

Learning Objectives:
In this workshop participants will: 

1. Develop proficiency in using Motivational Interviewing (MI) with clientele struggling with homelessness 
2. Recognize the essential features of the MI communication style and how it differs from other approaches 
3. Learn strategies to focus conversations on relevant factors related to homelessness 
4. Become skilled at engaging reluctant clients and forming a powerful and productive alliance at the very first meeting 
5. Increase practitioners’ capacity to de-escalate conflict and respond to challenging client statements in a way that reduces defensiveness and moves interactions forward 
6. Be able to recognize, evoke, and reinforce clients’ own reasons for changing risky, problematic, and self-defeating behaviors