An interview I recorded a few months ago, just went “live.” Season 6, Episode 1: Unlocking Transformation: David Mee-Lee’s Wisdom on Behavior Change and Person-centered Care
CASAT is The Center for the Application of Substance Abuse Technologies, a Center within the School of Public Health at the University of Nevada, Reno. In their sixth season of CASAT Conversations, “we sit down with professionals who have spent decades in their fields like mental health, addiction treatment, business, sociology and more. In this special season, our guests share valuable wisdom from their careers, reflect on what has kept them grounded and inspired, and offer advice for future generations.”
Here are a few excerpts from that podcast. I bullet-pointed the narrative.
Tip 1
Don’t “help” people. Help them “help” themselves.
Question in the interview: What guidance would you offer to inspire the next generation of professionals?
- When people get out of training they are in “I'm going to change the world” mode. “I've got the latest knowledge, I want to start applying all of this stuff.”
- It is easy to get into a situation where you are doing things to people and while well-intentioned, you are running at a problem as fast as you can.
- Easy to get burned out as you discover that all of your efforts don’t change the world, patients and clients.
The advice I would give is to first recognize that you can help contribute to a person’s change process but the treatment and the part you play is really just a tiny piece. Your job is to engage the person, inspire and attract them into a self-change process where:
- They are going to make the right choices in the dark of night when nobody's watching, not just when you have them in treatment or at your session.
- They can then sustain any change from their own self-empowered position and life choices.
So your job is really not to help people, but to help people help themselves.
- In any moment that you are interacting with a person, you're asking yourself, "How, in this moment, am I helping them to help themselves?" Not, "How am I helping them?"
- If you help people to help themselves, you have really contributed to their life. It's the old fisherman thing: Do I give a fish or do I help them to learn how to fish?
- You have an important role to play in treatment, but only in so much as you help people to help themselves and engage them in a self-change process, not in being the almighty one to fix people.
Tip 2
To help people change, start with yourself.
Question in the interview:
“How would you engage someone who is not willing to change and even owns it in their identity as a philosophy?”
It's true not just with people who are proud of not changing their attitudes as an identity and philosophy, but it's true of all change behavior.
- You have to start where the person is at.
- Prochaska and DiClemente’s Stages of Change model is very useful to help you join with people where they're at. You might want them to be at Action for changing their language, behavior or attitudes.
- But if they are at Precontemplation where it's not even on the radar screen or they don't even see any problem, you can't start by interacting with them as if they should be at Action for something they have no interest in changing.
- They are not being resistant or in denial. Change is just not on their radar screen.
Your job is to accept them where they are at and then find ways to attract them into a change process.
- How might I move them from not being interested at all to where they might be ambivalent and thinking maybe there is something to that?
- For example, in the political realm or in the stigma realm, how can I move them from “Not interested at all” to “Well, maybe I should consider that.”
- One of the ways in medical school addiction training is to have a person in long-term recovery talk to the medical students about their journey from active harmful addiction to recovery.
- It gives students a glimpse, through that story of a real person’s pain of addiction, and their joy of recovery.
- That inspiring story might not move a student all the way to want to work with people with addiction. But it might move them from Precontemplation (not interested at all) to Contemplation — maybe I need to change my attitudes about addiction from thinking “They're a bunch of losers who are weak-willed” to "Maybe it's an illness that I, as a helping person and a medical student could really be part of."
- Attracting people into a change process, not mandating or shaming people into a change process.
None of this process will flow unless and until you have examined your own attitudes, beliefs and skills to be:
- Curious about the individual, non-judgmental and to practice deep-listening, starting with compassion, acceptance and respect for that other human being.
- The antidote to an attitude of “I'm going to change the world and make these people think and behave better” is a Rumi quote:
“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” ― Rumi
Read the entire February blog on David Mee-Lee's Tips n Topics here →
Authored by Dr. David Mee-Lee, “Tips & Topics” is a monthly blog covering three sections: Savvy, Skills and Soul, with additional sections varying from month to month. Topics include Stump the Shrink, Success Stories and Shameless Selling.