Health Coaching for Behavior Change: Motivational Interviewing Methods and Practice

Integrative medicine includes the best of conventional medicine but redefines health to include the person's body, mind, spirituality and community with a special focus on the patient-practitioner bond. Borrowing from integrative medicine, this resource presents motivational interviewing skills and how they can be used to invite and elicit behavior change and impact health coaching outcomes. In this 35-page report, a physician and a health psychologist from the field of integrative medicine affirm how training in motivational interviewing, self-management and even spirituality and healing can enrich the health coaching encounter. Motivational interviewing is a client-centered counseling approach developed in part by Professor William R. Miller, Ph.D. and Professor Stephen Rollnick, Ph.D. In the United States, 36 percent of adults use some form of complementary or alternative therapies. When megavitamin therapy and prayer specifically for health reasons are included, that number rises to 62 percent, according to the National Center for Alternative and Complementary Medicine. Encouraging health coaches to explore alternative and complementary practices along with their clients are Karen Lawson, M.D., program director for the health coaching track at the Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota, and Ruth Wolever, Ph.D., clinical health psychologist and director of research at Duke Integrative Medicine. In this special report, Drs. Wolever and Lawson provide details on: -Facilitating the organizational shift from a conventional medical model to more of an integrative health medical model; -Resisting the "righting impulse" and other guiding principles to motivational interviewing that no health coach should be without; The three different communication styles of motivational interviewing; Four questions to determine an individual's readiness to change; Distinguishing between a directive and client-centered approach in motivational interviewing; The value of virtual and real space in the practice of health coaching; Duke Integrative Medicine's "Wheel of Health" and how it helps to assess an individual's readiness to change; -Why Duke integrative health coaches are required to implement their own personalized health plans; Setting SMART goals during the preparation and action stages; Practical details on the integrative health coaching approaches profiled in this report; and much more.