We’re not trained monkeys!

One time I was carrying out some work for a large organisation that wanted to train a lot of people to do some assessment work. It annoyed me for some reason, and I’ve finally hit on the problem (OK, several years too late, but never mind!). The problem was that instead of teaching principles, [...]

March Pain-blog Carnival!

Today is the day! Head on over to How to Cope with Pain to review this month’s top blogs on pain. Always well worth a read and full of great information. Enjoy.

Motivational Interviewing in Health Care - book review

For me, motivational interviewing to help people change behaviour has been a great approach. The first book on using motivational interviewing for health conditions ‘Health behaviour change: A guide for practitioners’ by Rollnick, Mason and Butler (1999), is a wonderfully readable book, and inspired me to learn how to apply this non-confrontational approach to [...]

Best of January’s Pain Blogs

Head on over to How to Cope with Pain for this month’s ‘Best of’ blog posts. And while you’re there take a look around at the range of resources on offer - plenty for everyone!
How to Cope with Pain is now offering a monthly Pain-Blog Carnival during the last week of every month, to [...]

Change

This is just a quick ponder on the words we use in pain management.  Quite often we talk about ‘goals’ and ‘prioritising’ and ‘planning’ and ’skills’ - as if it’s an event that will come to an end.
‘Oh I’ve done my planning, and achieved my goals’.
The team I work with has started to consider whether [...]

Changing habits

Changing habits is an essential topic for people who are living with a chronic illness, and for their therapists. This series of posts, starting with this first one on changing habits, is a great clinical resource for therapists to use with clients, to support the change process, and to perhaps lead a person [...]

Motivating people to make changes (ii)

The second of a series about using values and empathy to help people make choices
The first installment in this series looked at why people might not be doing what we think they ‘should’ and how they might show this. This installment looks at developing rapport and reviews the essential interpersonal skills that are needed.
Rapport [...]

Motivating people to make changes (i)

The first of a series about using values and empathy to help people make choices
Most of our training in health care provision assumes that:

the people we will be working with are ready to receive our knowledge/expertise
we know more than they do (about what they should [...]

Motivate Healthy Habits

Rick Botelho and his Motivate Healthy Habits site is one of my favourite authors and websites on motivation and self management especially in primary care.
Take a moment or two to read through this site, it gives some of the foundation information on health change for individuals.
I’ve also included a great powerpoint presentation by Rick Botelho [...]