Welcome to today’s episode of The Communication Solution podcast with Casey Jackson, John Gilbert and Danielle Cantin. We love talking about Motivational Interviewing, and about improving outcomes for individuals, organizations, and the communities that they serve. This is part 1 of two part podcast about motivational interviewing in behavioral health.
Today we have a very special guest, Aly Gibson, the director at Frontier Behavioral Health, a community behavioral health organization, and we’re talking about Motivational Interviewing Concepts.

• Casey’s professional relationship with Aly Gibson
  
• Aly’s role at Frontier Behavioral Health as the Director of Child and Family Outpatient Downtown and the WISE Program, a wraparound with Intensive Services for Youth
  
• Aly’s work with the youth Medicaid population ranges from very acute to very severe issues
  
• Aly’s very first train trainer training with Casey
  
• How Motivational Interviewing is part of Aly’s life now
  
• How MI helped Aly feel less stressed, less torn in all directions, and more confident
  
• Alignment with deeper values
  
• The four processes in the third edition of Miller and Rollnick’s Motivation book
  
• The World Values Index
  
• The whole Focus Mountain concept
  
• Goals and ultimate values
  
• The behavior is in alignment with values
  
• Life’s complexity
  
• Executive functioning
  
• Resistance and sustained talk
  
• Emotional reactions
  
• Delusional happiness and connection
  
• Quality of life and relationships
  
• And so much more!
  

You don’t want to miss this one! Make sure to rate us or share this podcast. It would mean so much to us!

This has been part one of a two-part podcast. We hope you’ll join us for the second portion. Thank you for listening to the Communication Solution Podcast with Casey Jackson and John Gilbert. As always, this podcast is all about you. If you have questions, thoughts, topic suggestions, or ideas, please send them our way at casey@ifioc.com. For more resources, feel free to check out ifioc.com.

Hello and welcome to the Communication Solution Podcast with Casey Jackson and John Gilbert. I’m your host Danielle Cantin. We love to talk about communication. We love to talk about solutions, and we love to talk about providing measurable results for individuals, organizations, and the communities they serve.
Welcome to the communication solution that will change your world. Hi listeners, this is Danielle Canton. We are here with the Communication Solution Podcast with Casey Jackson and John Gilbert, and we’re here to talk about motivational interviewing. It is has become one of my favorite topics. This approach is being used to transform companies, help so many people in this episode Today, what I wanted to do, Casey and John, is dive in a little bit as you’re experts in motivational interviewing, helping companies.
How do you actually use this approach in your personal life? Is it possible to use motivational interviewing for your personal growth and development? I’m kind of a geek around stuff like that, so I learn about this and I’m like, I wanna use it on myself and everybody I know. So it’s, you know, I would almost differentiate between using it on ourselves and using it for, you know, when you’re communicating with other people.
I what I’ll just kinda launch with my thoughts and John dive in. In terms of, if you break it down to the basic construct of motivational interviewing, it is, is behavior in alignment with values. So if you just take it there, then motivational being itself gets into how do you communicate to orchestrate that, facilitate that.
For long-term sustained behavior change. So when you take the basic components of it, it would just make sense that, well, if we’re just taking those basic components, I want my behavior to align with my values, you know, and I want to have longer term behavior change. So the basics of it is like, yeah, that, that makes sense.
When you get into the communication method, I think that’s where you can have. people probably splinter into different camps of, yes, you can use it on yourself. No, you can’t use it on yourself. How would you know the difference between the resistance talk, the sustained talk, change talk? I think all those components, are viable core constructs within motivational interviewing.
But I can tell you in my personal life, I use it every single day. There’s not a day that goes by that it doesn’t go through my brain. And I can talk more about that, but John, what’s, what’s your take as, as we toss that out there?
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That’s, and that’s my intention is what do you think about using it in, in personal growth for yourself? Yeah.
You know, What struck me, and I’ll walk you through kind of when I was newer as a train, probably within the first three to four years is when I was training, motivational interviewing. When I first thought about, I think it’s what John is differentiating, like when I started to use it with my son versus when I started to use it on myself and.
I’ll take the path when I started to use it with myself, like the construct with myself and I, and I remember exactly what the topic was. This was actually after my, the daughters were born, is when I could really specifically remember this with the twins and, cause I’m a little bit of an older dad and. I was traveling a ton, training, motivational interviewing, just traveling a ton way pre, pre, pre, pre covid.
A lot of time on the road and my just gaining weight from, you know, even though I was standing a lot, but just eating a lot and just not working out and all these things. The cholesterol was just not in a good place at all actually. It was horrible. and, and I remember, I still remember, and this was so specific that I, I just am not a morning person either.
So when I’m not a morning person and then when I train all day, I’m not an evening person as far as going and working out, I just mostly wanna go collapse on a bed in a hotel room and stream chopped for 12 hours and just fall into a coma, . So that’s what I tend to wanna do when I’m on the road, which is not a healthy pattern
So, but what I remember when I was running it through down my lens is I can get so crystal clear what my core values are. , which is about my integrity as a parent, as a father, my desire for health and wellbeing and how so many of my behaviors were in alignment with my values and around my health. My behaviors were not in line with my values.
How I broke it down even further. Because what we know is when you move to helping people get to a plan, you want confidence. , you want importance high and confidence high. So importance was very high for me. I knew I could exercise, but I just didn’t like to do it. And I, to this day, I still don’t like to do it.
But I remember this conversation when I was laying in bed in a hotel room and I used the importance, confidence ruler around myself. And when I got in the habit of doing, of going, if this is this important to you, you don’t have to go to the gym. You don’t have to work out for half an hour. , but do you have five minutes to just physically, literally, and I remember doing this.
I literally rolled outta the bed, outta the sheets, onto the floor and did five pushups because my confidence was really high. I could do that. And then when I did that, I ended up doing another 15 pushups, and then I rolled on my back and I started doing just some sits, which was better than if I, I’d laid there and debated it because I thought, can you just do five?
Can you just roll outta bed, hit the floor, do five pushups, and then get ready for. To go do a training and that is, that’s always my reset button, is I can just roll outta bed, hit the floor and do five pushups, which end up being 20 pushups. Then I end up laying on my back and doing at least 50 sit-ups and it’s better than doing nothing.
And it, it’s just, and that would increase my confidence to just kind of get into it. It’s just, don’t sign up for a gym membership. Don’t do all these things that you are not going to follow through. and, and so the way I would construct in my brain is how important is it to you to be there for your children in the long run and have a quality of health where they’re not taking care of you earlier than they need to?
That’s a 10 for me. How confident are you gonna do it? Well, if I can find something I can do, will you just do this? Yeah, I’ll totally do that. And that’s how you can try to get your behavior to start to line up with your long-term behavior. That’s so awesome. I, I was gonna inter interrupt you a couple times before you were done, but you just resolved it with a nice wrap up on, I haven’t heard you talk about confidence level high.
Yeah. So that’s really, really helpful and so important because like you said, you were you gonna roll outta bed and, you know, strap on all the gear to go to the gym? No. But you were like, yeah, I can totally just flop onto the floor . And then, you know, once you take that initial action, you’re gonna, you’re gonna actually probably do more, we’ll start with.
More than what you, and then I would never expect more than that from myself, especially in the beginning. But what happened is it was just such a routine. Then where I would get set up is because, you know, the, the, the double-edged sword of being such close friends with John is I knew I didn’t have the confidence to be as healthy as John is.

You know, because that’s a, that’s a lifestyle commitment that he has. And so the level of intention he has around working out the level of intention of eating healthy, Seemed insurmountable to me. I mean, I admired it. I wanted to have that dedication to it. I’ve gotten closer from where I was to where I am now, but honestly, that was my conversion.
John and I were, that’s when he and I used to co-train a ton together and, you know, and, and travel a lot and co-train. And I remember when he showed me, One single video on, plant-based eating. And from that day forward, I haven’t eaten meat. So it wasn’t, it wasn’t like, you know, the slaughtering of baby lambs or, you know, those perspectives.
It was just, it was so mathematical around health and disease that it was like, well, Would you put down cigarettes? If you saw all of this and I, I’m somebody that would, cuz I do care enough about my health, so that’s something I would’ve never . My confidence probably would’ve been a zero if somebody said, you’re gonna go plant-based diet and not eat meat anymore.
I probably have said, oh yeah, that’s not gonna happen. But I watched one particular video and it was just like, it was a no-brainer because to continue that, my behavior would not have been in line with my values and goals as far as my health. Like I don’t. To bring the top 15 diseases onto my body by choice.
Like why would I, that’s just , that’s insanity. Like, I would never do that. So then it was like, oh, I don’t, you know, then I talked to John about, well, what was plant-based diet look like? And, and all the, the naive questions about, you know, well, how do you get in it if you’re not eating meat, where’s your protein?
And all this stuff. And it’s like, oh my gosh, this is so much easier than I thought it was gonna be. And so it was just like, but the importance was so. Sky high to think, I don’t want to, I don’t wanna bring disease into my body by the way that I eat. Like, that was just, that just seemed ridiculous to me.
And so something that I would’ve thought I would add zero confidence on was immediate. My behavior changed. And that’s been, shoot, I don’t, you wouldn’t know John, but I, I would say probably eight years now that I’ve been, predominantly a vegetarian or pescatarian diet.
You know, and I would almost take it a step back as you’re, as you were explaining, walking through that, John, I would take it a step back even further, and this is. From, you know, when I was prepping for that conversation with Dr. William Miller, and being able to interview him in reading the whole book on second thought, I think I’d taken him a step back further when we’re thinking about motivational interviewing in behavioral health to just the, the amount of ambivalence that any human being has on any given day.
like how many choices do we have on any given day? And I think that takes it even back to a, a broader range because yes, people wanna change behavior. Yes, I want to be more motivated. Yes, I wanna find things that are important. Yes, I want my behavior alignment with my values. But when you think about the construct of motivational interviewing in behavioral health, it’s how do you help people work through their own ambivalence, even prior to even getting to a plan?
And I think that the level of application. Of just realizing that this method of communication looks at the fact that we are given so many different choices on any given day. You know, do I stay in the job? Do I stay in the relationship? Do I leave the relationship? Do I have children? Do I, you know, stay in this friend group?
Do I, you know, continue to post these things online if anybody’s paying attention? Do I need to stay? What, what I believe this political belief is? You know, we just have so much internal debate on any given day. to have some sort of a blueprint or a structure to be able to help reconcile those and not wonderful just spitting in the wind.
You know, like, does this, is this a, is my behavior having a net effect on anything that’s improving the quality of my life? Where I tie this back to what you brought up, John, is whether you go with the cynic side of it or with the focus mountain side of it that you know I worked on. Either way, what you’re looking at is fundamentally am I becoming closer to who I want to be?
or have decades passed, and in some ways I just feel like, have I had any growth whatsoever in my life? Am I just in a different environment feeling and thinking the same thing? Or am I recreating the same relationships over and over and over again? Or am I having a lack of relationships over and over and over again and am I still blaming outside of myself?
You know, and thinking, I just can’t find good quality people to socialize with or to date, you know, I, I just . I think that’s just the nature of the human experience on one hand. And then you superimpose that with a mainstream American culture, which is becoming more of a mainstream global culture about how divisive and how blanketing social media is that people start to lose sight of who they actually are.
And then we’re really in a conundrum. because then you think, how do you get outta this situation where people can’t even think for themselves because they’re deferring to somebody on their phone that they don’t even know to make decisions for how they put on their makeup. Like, it’s like, whoa, that’s, that’s just fascinating that we’ve lost that much side of who we are.
So, so I can go really macro mezzo with this to the, you know, really looking at a, at a, you know, social cultural perspective. And then I can just drop it straight back down to how do I resolve my ambivalence about really, Critical things in my life. How do I make decisions in a way that I feel okay with that decision a year from now, five years, 10 years from now?
Whether it’s sign up for gym, whether it’s having children, whether it’s, you know, what’s school to put them in, whether it’s to, you know, do I continue to hang out with this friend group when I know it’s not good for me? You know, do I continue to drink like that? I mean, just all those things that people deal with on any given day.
It’s like this wonderful, it’s like this wonderful construct that you mentioned. Blueprint. It’s like a blueprint. Yes. For like how do I get through the day? Yes. Really, really deeply rooted in my values. Yes. And who I like what you said, who I want to become, who I want to be. Always striving, growing to be more and more of that person.
So it’s really wonderful. It’s like I’m hearing it’s, it’s a blueprint. Whereas when you think of motivational interviewing, you could think of the communication piece, right? Yes. And how people, yes, yes. Help facilit. You know, people coming into their own thought process, well use the same principles and approach for yourself.
Exactly. And you could either have like a literal conversation, like you may have had that conversation in bed out loud about, yay, get on the floor. Yes, my confidence is high. Yes. Or it could have been inside your head, but either way, you know, John, John explained it as, you know, he reflects a lot, so maybe his isn’t verbal, but everybody’s got their.
Approach to how they would guide themselves through life, through their own ambivalence. That’s exactly it. Yeah. And you know, I, I, when I think of classes that I actually even developed , they, they were, because of what I did in my personal life, the first time that I started doing a parenting class. Was because of the way that I’d adjusted my parenting based on this, when I started doing relationships workshops, it was literally because of how profound it was on my relationship, on my marriage.
So it and, and when specifically, just like with the rolling outta bed and hitting the floor thing. To this day. The reason , the reason why I apply it every single day of my life is because I have twin 13 year olds, and I’m married. So every single day there’s potential for conflict. And there’s every single day there’s potential for growth.
And it’s not about how, this is what John’s point was. It’s not how I use mi on them because that’s not motivational interviewing in behavioral health. It’s ironically, is my behavior in align with my values. It’s not how do I get them to do what I need them to do because that fundamentally is not motivational interviewing.
It’s fundamentally, am I being the spouse that I am re that I see self-respect in myself or how I’m handling this situation. Because on any given day, there’s what I want to do and there’s what’s healthy and usually what I want to do as a parent, sometimes I just want to have a reaction. I wanna say, do your stupid home.
Don’t argue with me. Those are, that’s the first thoughts that go through my brain because that’s the way I was raised. That’s culturally watching a TV show, that’s the way we were raised. So stop your brain for a second and go, if you watch that, does that align with who you want to be as a father? No, it does not.
Then don’t say it. What would align with it? Well, I want to empower them. So what do you need to do to make sure that you’re embodying that? Not what do they need to do? Right to be compliant with who you want them to be. That fundamental shift is a very complex shift, especially like in a marriage or in a relationship because it’s like, well, you said you promised, we said this, we agreed to this.
All these things where you’re blaming outside of yourself, which fundamentally is going to create resistance. It’s just math instead of stopping and going. That is not the kind of partner that I want to. I wanna be a partner that I can look at my behavior and go, okay, that behavior is above reproach and you cannot control your partner.
That’s all you have control over. And that is that that blueprint is a. Monolithic shift in thinking. If you think about it, it’s, it’s also in relation to yes, being a father, a husband, but also your career, your business, or whatever it is you’re doing, because that’s what I love. And, and we heard loud and clear, right from, from listeners, viewers, all the people you train in your community, they want this, they want this topic motivational interviewing in behavioral health.
Yes. And that’s why you’re gonna do, the new training, be the. Yes. It’s like how do you use motivational interviewing in you, for your personal growth and development and motivational interviewing in behavioral health? People need this so badly and it will benefit everything that they do, even in business or the workplace. When you kind of put yourself first.
Is that a fair assessment? Oh my gosh, absolutely. Yeah. Every, I know everybody’s kind of going gaga over this, this new training. So I think it’s pretty cool that we’re doing this podcast and, and exploring it more and that you’re, you’re really bringing this approach to people. So, and I’d really like to expand more cuz I had about 5,000 different thoughts of how many different angles of this to take.
If people are interested, I know I could dive into. A lot more, as this is a wide open area, when we get into just the tip of the iceberg of this in personal development that we alluded to a lot of things we could dive into there, that I won’t even mention like a second podcast.
This is Ben, part one of a two part podcast about motivational interviewing in behavioral health. We hope you’ll join us for the second portion. Thank you for listening to the Communication Solution Podcast with Casey Jackson and John Gilbert. As always, this podcast is about empowering you on your journey to change the world. So if you have questions, suggestions, or send them our way at casey@ifioc.com. That’s CASEY@IFIOC.COM. For more information or to schedule a training visit IFIOC.com Until our next Communication Solution podcast, keep changing the world.