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There is a delightful, fanciful prose-poem by Louis Jenkins; it’s called, appropriately enough, Walking Through A Wall. Jenkins draws the reader’s attention to the wall texture, how to approach the wall, his experiences with walking through walls, and the feeling of exhilaration when the Wall-Walker emerges from the wall:

“The best approach to a wall is, first, two hands placed flat against the surface; it’s a matter of concentration and just the right pressure. You will feel the dry, cool inner wall with your fingers, then there is a moment of total darkness before you step through on the other side.” read more…

Sometimes our clients’ resistance is about staying in that place in which they are most familiar, the way it’s always been, the status quo, the ‘beast they know.’ That place is also called the Comfort Zone. There appears to be a safety component to staying where we know we can’t get hurt, where risk seems to be minimized, and where there is no movement. We all need a comfort zone and we all need the ability to return to safe-haven when we need to do so. And, it might be that some of our clients are nestled here because fear paralyzes them or because anything else seems impossible. What if we could stimulate our clients to dip a toe outside of their comfort zone and into the pool of possibility, or, at least peek out a window of opportunity toward their next step in the behaviour change process. Consider this representation of what that next step might offer: read more…

One of the more intriguing advertizing initiatives launched by Dove was its Beauty Patch enterprise. For the past decade, Dove’s Real Beauty campaign has used female empowerment as an advertising tactic, an apparently altruistic strategy to entice customers with the concept that women are more beautiful than they think they are. The Beauty Patch crusade is one in which six women were asked by body image psychologist Dr. Ann Kearney-Cooke to wear Dove’s RB-X ‘beauty patch’ for 12 hours a day over the course of two weeks. During that period, the women were invited to keep a daily video diary. read more…

From our experience, it seems like many of the health issues that our clients present to us – dietary habits, struggles with body weight, smoking behaviours, oral health behaviours etc – are less about those particular manifestations than they are about deeper issues. We would offer that these are more symptomatic behaviours that stem from clients relationships to themselves or some aspect of themselves. For example, struggles with body weight might be about a client’s relationship to his or her body and/or to her or his relationship to food. Often, we spend a lot of time working on these transparent symptoms without really getting at the root of or behind the veil of the symptomatic behaviour. read more…

Sometimes, our clients can have an overwhelming feeling of being stuck or overwhelmed or helpless. And sometimes that feeling is a result of past experiences or stories that they have made up about their situation. Consider this humorous example of how devastating such perceptions can be… read more…

Almost by chance, I happened upon a fascinating video done by Dr Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston. She is a best-selling author, speaker and research professor who has spent the past decade studying vulnerability, courage, worthiness, and shame. Her video, The Power of Empathy is, in our view, a superb and succinct illustration about empathy and its differentiation from sympathy: read more…

Part of the art of working with people and motivating them, or even better, stimulating their own motivation toward a change or changes in health behaviour/s is breaking down apparent barriers and resistance to change. We are all self-conditioned to envelop ourselves in our own silos of belief and customary behaviour. read more…

In the new, 3rd edition of their book Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change (Guilford, 2012), authors and MI architects, Miller and Rollnick provide a refreshing explanation and discussion about this powerful approach to facilitating change. The book is substantively restructured around the new four-process, step-model of MI – engaging, focusing, evoking, and planning read more…

I read recently, of all places in a Jack Reacher novel, that “ninety per cent of asking questions is about listening to answers.” It’s true for all manner of communication and dialogue from teaching to detective work and certainly through to motivational interviewing. read more…

This blog is a bit unusual in that we want to use an example from a series of presentations called, “Cancer Care Talks: Strategies to Empower Your Wellness.” The talk is entitled, Survivorship: How do You Want it to Be? and the reason we want to highlight it is because it demonstrates vividly how patients and health professionals can shift read more…