Personal motivation, a passion to change, is essential whenever you’re up against persistent, resistant problems. In fact, it’s the only common success factor across a wide variety of psychotherapies. You can treat an addiction or stubborn personal habit in many different ways, but none of them will succeed unless they somehow stimulate the individual’s desires, values, or moral imperatives to change. People need to have a personal reason to want to change or they won’t.
 
So, how can you motivate someone who isn’t motivated? The short answer is, “You can’t.” That’s the bad news. The good news is that people are always motivated. They just aren’t always motivated to do what we want them to do. The key is to tap into their existing values, rather than trying to create new ones.

Psychotherapists as varied as Sigmund Freud, Carl Rogers, Aaron Beck, and William Miller have all employed careful questions to help people discover their values on their own. They’ve used their ears instead of their mouths as their preferred influence tool. In this post I’ll share a couple of examples of how to use this approach.

William Miller calls his technique “motivational interviewing,” and I find it curiously powerful with both teenagers and senior leaders—as well as with most people in between. It avoids lectures, sermons, and data dumps—the strategies many of us gravitate to—in favor of questioning and listening. In this post, I’ll give a teenager example. In my next, I’ll show how I use this method with senior leaders.

A Teenager Example. Your son doesn’t like school, doesn’t like homework, doesn’t read much, and avoids everything that smacks of self improvement. It’s tempting to resort to nags and rants. Have you ever done this? I know I have. So, what would William Miller have you do instead?

He’d have you ask your son about his future. Pick a time when neither of you are focused on his studies, when things are copasetic between you, then open a discussion with a comment like, “I’m curious about where you see yourself in five or ten years. I have so much faith in you, and you have so much potential, I wonder where you want to take it.” Then restrict your responses to supportive phrases like, “That’s interesting, tell me more,” or “How cool. Why does that interest you?”

Of course, your son might reply with an “I dunno,” in which case you might try a couple of probes like, “It’s hard to ever know for sure, right? But what goes through your head? What kinds of careers or jobs sound sort of fun to you?” Do your best to get your son talking and don’t interrupt.

After your son has talked himself out, after you feel you’ve really heard from his heart, then change the topic a bit. Ask, “What do you see as the biggest obstacles to turning that dream into a reality?” Then again try to draw him out. Don’t criticize or talk for him. Let him lay out all the challenges he sees. The goal is to let him “self discover” the obstacles he needs to overcome. If his aspirations are similar to most teenagers, they can only be accomplished through a good education. But let him say that.

Finally, offer your help. Tell him you want to help him overcome these obstacles. Ask him to write out a plan. He may need your help with the plan, but try to give him as many choices and options as possible. The more the decisions are his own, the more he’ll accept and follow through on them.

Next week: how to use motivational interviewing with senior leaders.