Imagine. As a teacher you assign a paper. It’s not an onerous assignment, and the topic is actually a fun one for the students to explore.
Despite your clear instructions and explanations about how to plan for assignments, and your efforts to make the work meaningful, the pattern is very frustrating. On the due date, the same 10 students have put the work in, perhaps another 10 made a perfunctory effort, and maybe another 10 didn’t submit anything, for a variety of reasons.
We all experience that or situations very similar right? Not just with students, but with family members, peers, colleagues, acquaintances, pretty much anyone. When we encounter people who are taking actions or holding opinions that are unhelpful or even damaging, it seems no amount of persuasion, cajoling, coaching, instruction, or whatever we try seems to work.
Or as my nephew Ben says, “you can’t fix stupid.”
Except you can, you just can’t do it using the methods we tend to use.
How to Reach Those Who Resist Efforts to Help
A technique called Motivational Interviewing works 74% of the time, 5 times as often as other techniques investigated.
Motivational Interviewing involves
- Asking open questions
- Using reflective listening
- Affirming the person’s desire and ability to change
Why do people resist our efforts to help them?
Cognitive and neuro- scientists have mapped out what happens in the brain, and why our normal methods of influencing others’ behavior are often ineffective.
While our offer of criticism or coaching is generally from a genuine desire to help, what happens in the other person’s brain is that the survival instincts take it as a threat. Threats trigger stress hormones, cortisol and adrenaline, which focus our resources on combatting the threat, shut down our ability to be resourceful or thoughtful, and trigger a flight or fight response.
This happens subconsciously, before their consciousness is even aware of what is happening.
With their ability to think through the issue essentially cut off, they are mentally and emotionally incapable of incorporating our efforts at their changing behavior.
How does motivational interviewing help?
Motivational Interviewing resets the brain from survival mode, establishes connection and trust, and then gives agency to the individual affected. All three components are necessary to enable a person to entre a resourceful state of mind, and be capable of reconsidering decisions or actions.
When a person is in a resourceful rather than anxious frame of mind, they become conscious of their own ambiguities toward their stance and actions, and able to consider alternatives and eventually choose a different path.
A deeper dive into Motivational interviewing and how to implement it in practice and in classrooms, along with 60 other brain hacking techniques that can accelerate your ability to motivate students, is part of the Mindshifting: Growth Mindset and Critical Thinking for Impactful Educators.