Clients seeking professional help from a counselor or therapist are often aware they need to change yet may not be ready to begin their journey.
Professional consultation aims to understand the challenges and concerns of the client while recognizing that they already have much of what’s needed within them (Miller & Rollnick, 2013).
For change to happen, an alliance must be created with the client that focuses on their strengths while evoking their readiness for change.
This article explores how to create that readiness to support the client throughout their journey.
Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Goal Achievement Exercises for free. These detailed, science-based exercises will help you or your clients create actionable goals and master techniques to create lasting behavior change.
Change can be initiated or experienced at an individual, societal, or organizational level. Understanding readiness for change can make the journey easier for those involved.
Coaching, counseling, and therapy typically involve change. The issues, problems, and needs that clients bring to each session often involve a “focus on altering how people feel, think and act so that they can live their lives more effectively” (Hagger et al., 2020; Nelson-Jones, 2014, p. 10).
The following are key questions that can support the client through change (modified from Michie et al., 2014):
Underlying each of these points is another one: What is the client’s readiness for change? Unless they are prepared and willing for change to happen, the process will either not begin or fall at the first obstacle.
“People don’t change until they are ready to” (Arloski, 2014, p. 267). Even when the client and the mental health professional see the need for change, it may not happen. Rushing in front of the client, saying, “So, what are we going to do about this?” may damage the chance of treatment success (Arloski, 2014).
It is vital to consider change as a journey for the individual, with several stages of change through which they must pass for a successful outcome (Hagger et al., 2020).
Change (anticipated or unexpected) within any organization can unsettle employees and should be planned and handled with care. While it is not always possible to predict what is ahead, it is vital to be ready for different possible futures. “The time to prepare for change is not when it hits. It’s before it hits” (Rinne, 2021, para. 4).
Ensuring the organization and its staff are ready for change is also about removing or, more importantly, avoiding impediments that will halt or block change, including (modified from Rinne, 2021):
Performing a change audit can help an organization assess its staff’s readiness, motivation, and willingness for change and challenges (Rinne, 2021; Harvard Business Review, 2019).
There are many models and theories for understanding, predicting, and promoting readiness for change.
The following approaches provide a helpful insight into the variety of techniques available.
The GROW model remains a popular technique for approaching change, despite having been around since the late 1980s (Whitmore, 2017). Like other approaches, it uses a series of questions to raise awareness, ownership, and, ultimately, readiness in the individual for change.
John Whitmore (2017), the creator of this powerful coaching model, suggests the acronym GROW as a framework that follows four distinct stages:
It is important to note that goals are set before assessing the reality. While counterintuitive, this promotes readiness and avoids (or at least reduces) the individual being limited by past performances (Whitmore, 2017).
The transtheoretical model (TTM) emerged from a complex and confusing array of psychotherapy approaches that attempted to predict and explain “what people need to do to make change happen” (Hagger et al., 2020, p. 137).
The five-stage model captures the journey an individual makes to achieve lasting change:
Clients “can be at a different stage of readiness in each specific behavior we look at” (Arloski, 2014, p. 167). For example, a client may be ready to exercise but not stop smoking. Readiness for change is therefore not all or nothing, but uneven. The client may cycle and recycle through the stages, sometimes slipping back, other times moving forward.
The self-determination theory proposes that humans have three fundamental needs that, if met, lead to intrinsic motivation, optimal functioning, wellness, and a desire for growth (Ryan & Deci, 2018):
“When needs are thwarted or frustrated, individuals experience ill-being, dissatisfaction, and negative affect, among other signs of non-optimal function” (Hagger et al., 2020, p. 109).
Satisfying each of the needs can lead to positive change. Individuals experiencing their actions as autonomous are likely to initiate and persist in their behavior. Interventions that support feelings of relatedness, autonomy, and competence highlight to the individual that their actions are freely chosen and personal (Hagger et al., 2020).
Motivational interviewing (MI) has been widely used and highly effective in challenging clients’ unhealthy behavior, such as smoking, poor diet, and drug use. MI is particularly helpful in overcoming ambivalence or unwillingness to change (Miller & Rollnick, 2013).
MI uses preparatory talk during sessions, encouraging open yet directed questioning to evoke conversation about change. In essence, the client talks themselves into being ready by uncovering their desire, ability, reasons, and need for change (Miller & Rollnick, 2013).
Several MI-influenced worksheets are included below.
These detailed, science-based exercises will help you or your clients create actionable goals and master techniques for lasting behavior change.
