Motivational Interviewing is a brief, collaborative conversation style designed to resolve ambivalence and strengthen your own motivation to change — the opposite of being told what to do.
What MI helps with
- Addiction & substance use
- Smoking cessation
- Medication adherence
- Lifestyle change
- Behavioural health in primary care
- Pre-treatment engagement
How MI works
- 1Engage with deep listening and accurate empathy — no warnings, no lectures.
- 2Focus on a change goal that matters to you, not to the clinician.
- 3Evoke your own reasons, ability and need to change — the more you argue for change, the more it sticks.
- 4Plan small, concrete next steps once readiness is high enough.
Core techniques
- OARS (open questions, affirmations, reflections, summaries)
- Evoking change talk
- Rolling with resistance
- Decisional balance
- Importance & confidence rulers
- The spirit of MI
MI FAQs
Is MI a full therapy or a conversation style?
Both. It is a complete brief intervention in its own right and a conversational skill set that improves outcomes when bolted onto CBT, DBT, ACT or medical care.
Does MI work for addiction?
MI was developed for problem drinking and has the strongest evidence base in substance-use treatment of any brief intervention. It is now used worldwide for smoking, drugs, gambling and medication adherence.
Start MI today — three ways
- · Free 24×7 AI Psychologist — practise MI techniques anonymously, in 100+ languages.
- · MI Mastery in 30 Days — for clinicians, counsellors and trainees, with AI mock-client sessions and a capstone certificate.
- · Book Dr. Nitnem Singh Sodhi for an online or in-person consult at Apollo Clinics, Lucknow / Gorakhpur.