Michelangelo, magnificence, and the attitude of being ‘in’ Motivational Interviewing

In one School of professional coaching training, the Coaches Training Institute, one of the cornerstones of their co-active model of coaching is cogently phrased; the model holds that every person or client or person being coached/interviewed is Naturally Creative, Resourceful, and Whole (NCRW). To engage in coaching communication is to take up this NCRW attitude with every client. In essence, the expression means that behaviourally, nothing about the clent is broken or in need of fixing; instead, the client is whole, a remarkable entity of humanity. Each person inherently or naturally has her or his own level of creativity and resourcefulness. Thus, each person is held to be NCRW from the moment we meet the person and throughout all our interactions with him or her.It is a very different way of being in communication because it puts so much trust and belief on our clients’ potential for change. Miller and Rollnick refer to this same attitude as the Michelangelo Belief and they phrase the belief as this, “the capacity and potential for change and adherence is within every patient.” We remember a photographer who did a lot of large group shots. Once he had all of us assembled, suitably stanced, posed, and in focus, he would come out from behind his camera, smile softly, and it felt like he looked each one of us in the eye when he said, “now, draw yourself up into your greatest magnificence….” To a person it resonated as a wonderful entreaty of expressed belief – imagine, we each had a greatest magnificence upon or to which we could exude our best self. Out of the cragged marble of Italy’s Mount Carrara have come some of the most exquisite architectural structures in ancient Rome as well as breath-taking sculptures – like Michelangelo’s the Pietà or his David – from the Renaissance. Often, in awe of Michelangelo’s work, it is said that all he had to do was remove the parts of the marble that shouldn’t be there and the intrinsic statuary would be what remained. Figuratively, in relating this process to Motivational Interviewing, there is some parallel truth to this understated sculpting process. We do work with people to bring out each person’s magnificence and their wholeness to give room for their creativity and resourcefulness to be given full expression in making the changes they want to make in their lives. The sculpting we do begins with us consciously taking up the NCRW attitude or Michelangelo belief for or in our clients; what follows is a shared communication process with them in using open-ended questions, acknowledgements, reflective listening, and offering advice only with permission.