What’s Coming Up

Over the next 4 weeks, we’ll work through the key components of motivational interviewing and how to tie that directly into the work you do as a clinical nutrition professional. 

We’ll cover 4 key areas of clinical nutrition and nutrition counseling:

1. How to Set the Stage – Create a strong foundation of motivational interviewing you’ll use in nutrition counseling, and will find yourself using in every other aspect of your work in patient care.

2. How to Start the Chat – Know exactly what language to use when you encounter a patient for the first time – or the fourth time – that will get them opening up to you and fully engaged in their own health needs.

3. How to Handle Resistance – Have a reliable set of tools to use when your patients aren’t as ready to talk change as you’d hope they would be.

4. How to Set Great Goals – Build the kind of goals your patients will not only respond to, but stick with.

Though the focus of each week will be on one of these topics, you’ll see a lot of overlap between them as you begin noticing how each builds on top of each other. This is intentional because the only way you’ll start using these principles on autopilot is when you start seeing, doing and using each of them repeatedly.

Each week is designed to build on the one before, taking you through each phase in a counseling conversation with new skills you’ll want to put into practice immediately. The course work will help you get comfortable with motivational interviewing and speaking with your patients. The case studies will push your clinical judgement as you learn to incorporate your patient’s medical histories into nutrition education.

Before we get into the dirty details, let’s take a look of what we’ll be talking about over the next 4 weeks.

SETTING THE STAGE

This week is about looking at the big picture. Motivational interviewing is a great foundation for working through the Nutrition Care Process (NCP). And even if you don’t use a defined ADIME approach when working through your patient care plans, the motivational interviewing you learn here will support you at every stage of your clinical assessment.

STARTING THE CHAT

The focus this week is on using questions to begin having a meaningful and productive conversation with your patients that uses their current state of health and your clinical judgement to support their overall health. It seems simple enough, but we set so much of the tone of a conversation in the way we ask our clients to answer questions about their lives, their values and their goals. But we also don’t learn how to leverage our language or ask questions that promote honest feedback. This is where you’ll learn how to improve and capitalize on both of those skills. 

MANAGING RESISTANCE

This week is about recognizing resistance, working through it, and knowing when to accept it. At some point during your time working with patients, you’ll inevitably encounter folks who are not ready to change and push back on all your good efforts to help them improve their health status. You’ll understand when to use “tough love” and when pushing back just won’t work. Spending time understanding how to work through these situations now, will make you better at helping your patients get to the other side of them later.

SETTING GREAT GOALS

In this final week, we’ll focus on how to break what can often be big and difficult lifestyle changes into small, manageable steps that set your patients up for wins. At this point, you’ve gotten a strong handle on the basics and will start using the skills you’ve learned to show tough love when it’s needed, and when it’s time to sit back and let our patient lead the conversation. This in turn, will help you identify the goals your patient would like to set and support them in setting them in the way they need.