Every leader, coach, therapist, pastor, and parent has experienced the frustration of watching someone they care about make choices that are clearly harmful — and finding that every attempt to point this out makes the situation worse. The more you explain the consequences, the more defensive they become. The more you argue for change, the more they argue against it. The technical term for this dynamic is the righting reflex — the natural human impulse to correct what is wrong — and it is one of the most reliable ways to entrench the behavior you are trying to change.
Motivational Interviewing (MI), developed by clinical psychologists William Miller and Stephen Rollnick in the 1980s, is built on the recognition that this dynamic is not a character flaw in the person resisting change — it is a predictable response to a particular kind of communication. And it can be changed by changing the communication.
The Core Principle: Ambivalence
MI begins with the observation that most people who need to change are ambivalent about changing. They simultaneously want to change and don't want to change. They can articulate reasons for change and reasons against it. This ambivalence is not weakness or denial — it is a normal human response to the genuine costs and risks of change.
The mistake most helpers make is to take one side of the ambivalence — the change side — and argue for it. The predictable result is that the person takes the other side. MI instead creates a conversational space where the person can explore both sides of their ambivalence without feeling pressured, and where the practitioner's role is to evoke the person's own reasons for change rather than supply them from outside.
The Four Processes
MI is organized around four sequential processes: engaging (establishing a working relationship built on trust and genuine curiosity), focusing (developing a shared understanding of the direction of change), evoking (drawing out the person's own motivation and reasons for change), and planning (developing a specific commitment to action when the person is ready).
The evoking process is the heart of MI. It involves listening carefully for "change talk" — statements the person makes that reflect desire, ability, reasons, or need for change — and reflecting and amplifying those statements rather than the "sustain talk" that argues for the status quo.
MI in Coaching and Pastoral Care
Dr. Dent uses MI principles across coaching, counseling, and pastoral contexts because it respects the autonomy of the person being served. It does not impose a vision of what change should look like. It trusts that the person has the capacity to identify what they need and to move toward it — when the relational conditions are right. That trust, consistently communicated, is often the most powerful intervention of all.