Motivational Interviewing Communication Skills Training Course

Course overview

Professionals often need to influence behaviour without relying on authority, persuasion pressure or repeated reminders. Whether the issue is a patient not following a care plan, an employee resisting a performance improvement action, a customer delaying a decision, or a colleague avoiding a difficult change, direct advice can trigger defensiveness. This Motivational Interviewing Communication Skills Training Course provides a structured way to hold conversations that surface a person’s own reasons, confidence and commitment to act.

Over five days, participants learn the evidence-based Motivational Interviewing (MI) method: its spirit of partnership, acceptance, compassion and evocation; the OARS micro-skills of open questions, affirmations, reflections and summaries; the four MI processes of engaging, focusing, evoking and planning; and techniques for recognising and responding to sustain talk, change talk and ambivalence. Participants practise agenda mapping, importance and confidence scaling, eliciting DARN-CAT change talk, rolling with resistance, exchanging information using Elicit-Provide-Elicit, and converting motivation into a realistic action plan.

The course is delivered through instructor demonstrations, transcript analysis, paired role-play, observation checklists, facilitated feedback and workplace-based scenarios. Participants record and review practice conversations against selected Motivational Interviewing Treatment Integrity (MITI) criteria, then build a personal MI conversation plan for a live workplace challenge. They leave with an OARS prompt guide, question bank, observation rubric, action-planning template and an individual skills development plan that can be applied immediately in one-to-one meetings.

This intermediate course is suited to managers, advisers, coaches and client-facing professionals who already conduct purposeful conversations and need a disciplined method for helping others make self-directed change.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Apply the four Motivational Interviewing processes to structure a purposeful behaviour-change conversation
• Use OARS skills to ask open questions, affirm strengths, reflect meaning and summarise commitment
• Distinguish change talk, sustain talk, discord and neutral statements within a live conversation
• Elicit DARN-CAT change talk using evocative questions, importance rulers and confidence rulers
• Respond to resistance with simple and complex reflections rather than persuasion or argument
• Use Elicit-Provide-Elicit to share advice, policy requirements or expert information without undermining autonomy
• Develop a collaborative change plan containing a specific next action, barriers, supports and follow-up date
• Assess a recorded practice conversation using selected MITI 4.2.1 behavioural criteria and create a skills improvement plan

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• People Managers — who need to address performance, attendance, development or behaviour concerns without escalating resistance
• Health and Social Care Practitioners — who support clients to make voluntary changes to health, treatment or daily-living behaviours
• HR and Employee Relations Advisers — who conduct sensitive conversations about conduct, wellbeing, capability and return-to-work plans
• Coaches and Career Development Professionals — who help clients articulate goals and commit to practical next steps
• Customer Success and Account Managers — who need to guide customers through adoption, renewal or process-change decisions
• Caseworkers and Support Advisers — who work with ambivalent individuals facing employment, housing, financial or service-engagement decisions

Requirements and prerequisites

Participants should already be comfortable holding one-to-one workplace conversations and listening to another person’s account of a problem, goal or concern. Experience in management, coaching, advisory, care, HR or client-facing work is useful because practice cases require participants to respond to realistic resistance and competing priorities. No previous formal training in Motivational Interviewing, counselling, psychology or behaviour-change theory is required. Participants do not need clinical credentials or specialist assessment tools. For live online delivery, they need a laptop or desktop computer, webcam, headset and reliable internet access for paired practice and optional recording review.

Training methodology

An MI-trained instructor combines concise teaching segments with demonstration interviews, annotated transcripts and structured skills drills. Participants work in triads as speaker, practitioner and observer, rotating roles and using OARS and MITI observation sheets to give evidence-based feedback. Cases cover performance, client engagement, health and service-adoption conversations, allowing participants to test the same method in different contexts. Each day ends with coached practice, and the final day includes an application-planning workshop in which participants prepare, practise and refine an MI conversation for a current workplace situation.

Course outline

Day 1: Foundations of Motivational Interviewing

• The purpose, evidence base and appropriate boundaries of Motivational Interviewing
• MI spirit: partnership, acceptance, compassion and evocation
• Directive communication versus guiding communication styles
• The righting reflex and its effect on resistance
• The four MI processes: engaging, focusing, evoking and planning
• Recognising ambivalence as a normal part of change
• Establishing autonomy, collaboration and psychological safety

Workshop: Participants analyse a workplace transcript for righting-reflex responses and rewrite it as an autonomy-supportive opening conversation.

Day 2: OARS and Reflective Listening

• Open questions that invite exploration rather than yes-or-no answers
• Affirmations that identify effort, values, strengths and past success
• Simple reflections for accurate listening and rapport
• Complex reflections for meaning, feeling, values and unstated implications
• Double-sided reflections for expressing ambivalence
• Summaries that link motivation, priorities and emerging commitment
• The reflection-to-question ratio and avoiding the question-answer trap

Workshop: In a triad role-play, participants conduct a ten-minute OARS conversation and receive observer feedback using an OARS scorecard.

Day 3: Evoking Motivation for Change

• Identifying change talk, sustain talk, discord and neutral language
• DARN-CAT: desire, ability, reasons, need, commitment, activation and taking steps
• Evocative questions for drawing out a person’s own reasons for change
• Importance rulers and follow-up questions that strengthen motivation
• Confidence rulers and eliciting prior success experiences
• Exploring values, goals and discrepancies without confrontation
• Responding to sustain talk through reflection, reframing and autonomy support

Workshop: Participants use an importance-and-confidence ruler case to elicit DARN-CAT statements and create a change-talk capture sheet.

Day 4: Managing Resistance and Sharing Information

• Recognising discord as a signal to change practitioner behaviour
• Shifting from persuasion to strategic reflection
• Amplified reflection and its ethical use
• Agreement with a twist and reframing techniques
• Coming alongside statements for entrenched ambivalence
• Elicit-Provide-Elicit for advice, policy and technical information
• Agenda mapping for multiple competing issues

Workshop: Participants handle a resistant performance or client-engagement scenario, then revise their response after peer feedback against MITI-consistent behaviours.

Day 5: Planning, Assessment and Workplace Application

• Recognising readiness signals and transition points into planning
• Developing SMART next actions without taking ownership of the plan
• Identifying barriers, supports, confidence and contingency actions
• Strengthening commitment language and implementation intentions
• Closing conversations with a collaborative summary and follow-up agreement
• Using selected MITI 4.2.1 global ratings and behaviour counts
• Creating a personal Motivational Interviewing practice and supervision plan

Workshop: Participants complete a recorded or observed capstone MI conversation and produce a workplace action plan, MITI-informed self-review and 30-day practice schedule.

Tools & standards covered

Motivational Interviewing Treatment Integrity (MITI) 4.2.1, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Miro

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions