Readiness to Change

Change, according to one quaint saying, is inevitable…except from a vending machine. The truth is that for most of our clients, change is very hard and most certainly not automatically inevitable. In the Motivational Interviewing literature, Miller and Rollnick often discuss the fact that motivation to change is enhanced when clients perceive discrepancies between their current situation and their desires or needs for the future. “Being with” your clients or patients means, in part, working with those persons in a helping role to assist them in realizing and verbalizing the discrepancy between where they are now with a particular health concern and what their goal might be – in short, facilitating the transition from status talk (where they are now) to change talk (where they might want to be or their intent). Once your clients are in the terrain of change talk, how do you know whether or not they are actually ready to move from intention to real change? If we hold our clients as naturally resourceful, creative, and whole (NCRW in coactive coaching terminology), then one answer is ask the experts – your clients – if they are ready. A simple tool for assessing readiness to change is the Readiness Ruler (see The Monarch System’s information and use guidelines for the readiness ruler concept, number 10, at our Resources’ page. This deceptively simple assessment concept is normally elicited by a direct question such as, ‘on a scale of 1 to 10, how ready are you to make a change,’ and/or, ‘on a scale of 1 to 10, how important is it for you to make a change’? From the answers to those questions, you can continue to work with your clients to support  them in their change process.