The ASAM Motivational Interviewing Workshop is an engaging and interactive practice-based workshop designed to introduce and expand participants' knowledge and competence utilizing Motivational Interviewing (MI) in addiction treatment settings. MI is a goal-oriented, collaborative counseling style that evokes a person's own motivations for and commitment to change. 

Physicians, clinicians, counselors, and all those speaking with patients with addiction often find that one of the main barriers to effective treatment is the patients' perceived lack of motivation to make changes. Without motivation on the patient's part, making or sustaining progress with treatment goals frequently stalls. MI is one technique that treatment clinicians can utilize to help patients make positive changes. 

Participants of this workshop will be introduced or reintroduced to the key concepts and skills of MI and explore ways to effectively integrate MI into addiction treatment to help promote positive patient outcomes.

What You'll Be Able to Do

1. Apply the spirit of Motivational Interviewing (MI) to clinical practice 
2. Organize clinical communications attending to the four foundational processes of MI (engaging, focusing, evoking, and planning)  
3. Compare and contrast MI congruent interactions with MI dissonant interactions  
4. Recognize, respond, and evoke to change talk and understand sustain talk  
5. Apply the basic MI skills of open-ended questions, affirmations, reflective listening, and summaries to selectively reinforce change talk  
6.  Identify further training opportunities for practicing the skills of MI