• Express Empathy: When providers display genuine empathy they create safe spaces for individuals to share their experiences. The therapeutic relationship strengthens as individuals recognize that providers hear and understand them.
• Support Self-Efficacy: Outreach workers empower individuals by recognizing steps toward progress. For example, an outreach worker can affirm an individual’s accomplishment of cutting back alcohol use to three times a week instead of every day by asking how the consumer was able to do it.
• Roll with Resistance: People are less likely to change when they feel resistance. Providers want to avoid provoking resistance and instead try to diminish it. The provider using MI seeks to elicit the reasons the individual might want to change rather than the provider telling the individual why he thinks he should change.
• Develop Discrepancy: It is useful to help individuals examine how their current behaviors and choices fit with their values and goals. When there is dissonance between the two, individuals wrestle internally with their choices. Typically, the larger the discrepancy between desires and actions, the greater the importance of change. The provider’s task is to help the individual develop self-awareness of this discrepancy.

• Asking permission to talk with individuals instead of assuming they want to talk;
• Creating a safe and accepting space;
• Learning what is important to the individual and addressing immediate needs;
• Finding out what services the individual wants and has the motivation to pursue;
• Refraining from pushing individuals into services they do not want;
• Determining the individual’s stage of readiness to change a particular behavior;
• Using open-ended questions; and
• Pointing out the individual’s strengths.

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