About this Episode

Welcome to today’s episode of The Communication Solution podcast with Casey Jackson, John Gilbert and Danielle Cantin. We love talking about Motivational Interviewing, and about improving outcomes for individuals, organizations, and the communities that they serve.
In this episode, we dive deep into the concept of hope and its connection to motivational interviewing. We explore how hope plays a vital role in motivating individuals and organizations to create positive change. The discussion touches on ethical considerations and the potential misuse of motivational interviewing. Throughout the conversation, the hosts emphasize the transformative power of hope and its ability to catalyze change in both personal and professional contexts.

In this episode, we discuss:

• The episode introduces the role of hope in motivational interviewing and its connection to positive outcomes in various fields.


• Casey discusses the characteristics of helping professionals that contribute to positive outcomes, highlighting the alignment with motivational interviewing principles.


• The concept of the placebo effect is explored in relation to hope, revealing its significant impact on health outcomes.


• Casey shares historical anecdotes related to the power of hope, including the story of Mesmer and hypnosis.


• The discussion delves into the dimensions of hope, emphasizing the role of optimism and self-efficacy.


• The hosts examine the relationship between hope, optimism, and motivational interviewing, emphasizing the importance of believing in an individual’s potential for change.


• Casey stresses the need for fidelity in implementing motivational interviewing to achieve consistent and measurable results.


• Ethical considerations regarding the application of motivational interviewing are discussed, with a focus on avoiding manipulation.


• The hosts emphasize the need for organizations to align their behavior with their values to create cultural change.


• The episode concludes with an invitation for listeners to engage in discussions and share their thoughts on motivational interviewing and related topics.

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Thank you for listening to the communication solution. This podcast is all about you. If you have questions, thoughts, topic suggestions, or ideas, please send them our way at casey@ifioc.com. For more resources, feel free to check out ifioc.com.

Transcribe

Hello and welcome to the communication solution podcast with Casey Jackson and John Gilbert. I’m your host, Danielle Cantin. Here at the Institute for Individual and Organizational Change, otherwise known as IFIOC, we love to talk about communication. We love to talk about solutions and we love to talk about providing measurable results for individuals, organizations, and the communities they serve.

Welcome to the communication solution. That will change your world. Hi everyone. I’m Danielle Cantin with the Communication Solution podcast. I’m here with Casey Jackson. How are you, Casey? Doing great. Awesome. Thanks everybody for joining us. We’re really excited today to talk about a concept that is very near and dear to my heart and weave it into motivational interviewing.

 Casey, on one of our previous podcasts,  we talked about the MINT forum. It’s a conference, motivational interviewing network of trainers international happens every year you go,  And in that episode, you mentioned something that I’m very intrigued with, and I’d like to talk about hope. And you mentioned that Dr. Miller,  was talking about hope and the value of hope. I’d love if you could weave in that concept. Does it relate to motivational interviewing? Did he say that it relates to motivational interviewing and kind of help? Positioned hope within this construct,  for communicating. 

There’s, there’s a lot to unpack with that.

 So it was fascinating, just like the, the conversation that you and John and I had had about the book that Miller, Dr. William Miller and Dr. Teresa Moyer’s just published around or relatively recently published around,  the characteristics of. The professional and how they impact outcomes. So that was not based in motivational interviewing.

That was just like what produces positive outcomes. But when they, when they did the research and looked at 70 years of data, 70 years of data of what, where were the outcomes, the most positive in healthcare, mental health, substance use, what were the factors? It wasn’t the model. It was the characteristics of the helping professional.

So that wasn’t motivational interviewing, but what Miller was talking about is when you look at the top five. The top five characteristics are the things that we teach and we train and motivational interviewing. So that was, so it was like, wow, now you can see where the data crosswalks. I think there’s a similarity to, because now the next book that Miller’s going to write and he’s researching right now is around hope.

So he’s looking at all the data around that. And he’s, he just presented his,  preliminary findings and he hasn’t even started writing as much of the manuscript yet, but just still gathering data and starting to jot down notes. And it was. Fascinating. So, like you had said before, you know, we can kind of get off on the side of, of hope and, you know, the human spirit and lean into that.

And there’s so much magic and potency and power to that. There are several things that he had talked about and, and, and I think that it’s hard. You’d be hard pressed to be able to be highly skilled or proficient at motivational interviewing and not have more of an optimistic perspective. And, and optimism is just one of the qualities embedded in hope,  that there’s an optimism to hope.

If you bridge it to the science, this was so fascinating to me. And this is where he was kind of chuckling about it, that for as maddening as it is to researchers, it is such a powerful reality and that’s placebo. Researchers just get, and practitioners are just. It’s, it’s just annoying that placebo effect has so much potency because, you know, no matter what the issue is, if people think it’s going to work or think that it could have potential to help, that is the power of the mind or the power of the brain.

So even though you’re just getting the sugar pill, you don’t have as much pain as other people that didn’t take that sugar pill because they think it’s some magic medicine that the placebo effect is real and you cannot escape. The research that shows how effective placebo effect is, it’s consistent and it’s maddening because 

yeah, 

that’s what he’s talking about 

here.

If you’re in a scientist, he was laughing at the, 

yeah, it just kind of checked me this like, you know, for as much as we get annoyed and we want to kind of dismiss placebo, the data keeps drawing us back to placebo effects. So placebo effect was partially what he was talking about in terms of a comprehensive assessment of hope because placebo effect is.

Rooted in the fact that people hope they could get better, and they hope this pill or this intervention is going to make a difference. And their hope is so strong that their outcomes improve consistently with placebo effect. So you can’t ignore that.  And then he talked more about the research around.

He even shared a story that was. Pretty fun. I didn’t know this history, but I knew about Mesmer, which is where hypnosis came from. And, and I can’t remember his first name, but I think it was Joseph Mesmer, but can’t remember his actual name, but it’s where mesmerized came from,  and hypnosis came from because he could take groups of people and magnetize them and that would, and they would get healthier and they were getting better outcomes.

And,  so, and it was kind of ticking off the king because it’s like, this isn’t. This isn’t magic. Is he magic? Like what’s going on? How can you just magnetize people and put him in a room and animal magnetism and all these things he’s doing and people were feeling better and reporting better outcomes.

And so what he did is he paid a researcher, which happened to be Benjamin Franklin to research this and find out, is this true or not true? And even Benjamin Franklin was a little annoyed because he just, He disproved that Mesmer was being able to do the things that he said. So he disproved Mesmer, but what he couldn’t disprove is that the actual reported outcomes of the measurable outcomes were better.

So it was just, which it just goes back to that placebo effect that people think they can get better or want to get better or believe they can get better and believe that you’ve given them something that will help them get better. That has a dose effect. That has an effect on people and that’s, that’s rooted in health.

So, so you look at some of the research just around placebo effect and that is based off the thing that people believe or want to believe strongly enough that this could help them, that they physically or psychologically improve to some extent. That’s interesting. That’s in a concept of hope. 

That’s interesting to tie it to motivational interviewing from my perspective, which is definitely novice, right?

It’s, it’s, it’s understanding that the people that get involved with training. And teaching motivational interviewing are definitely, like you said, optimists, and they have that hope they have that belief, right? Isn’t that a premise of motivational interviewing? You have a belief that t