Compassionate

“MI begins with the assumption and honouring of personal autonomy: that people make their own choices, and that such power of behavioural choice cannot be appropriated by another” Miller and Rollnick (2009).

Values

MI helps people bring into awareness and clarify the things they truly value in their life. It helps them to ask themselves a question; ‘given that these things are so important to me, am I happy with the life I am living?’.

Directive

MI employs core communication skills, such as questions and reflective listening, to direct people to explore whether there current behaviour is consistent with what truly matters in their life.

Resistance

MI is highly sensitive to discord in the relationship and makes it a central task to create an empathic space to ensure a strong alliance. With this strong alliance, MI tries to help people give voice to their reasons for change, whilst diminishing their reasons against.

Simple

MI is elegantly simple – but not easy. Some authors have suggested that becoming competent in MI can take up to 200 hours of supervised practice (Tober and Raistrick, 2007).

Effective

MI is one of the best researched behavior-change interventions with over 200 Randomised Controlled Trials addressing a wide range of health behaviours from substance use through to improving parenting skills. The U.K. National Institute of Clinical Excellence have recommended it as a behavioural intervention  for a number of populations, including drug using adolescents, gay men at risk of HIV and for all people that misuse alcohol.