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About this Episode

We hope you found value in part one of this podcast. Thank you for joining us for this second segment. 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 episode In this engaging episode we delve into the intricate dynamics of political discourse, focusing on the challenges and opportunities for understanding and civility. Through personal anecdotes and discussions on the role of values, mindfulness, and the biological underpinnings of conflict, the hosts explore how individuals can engage in political conversations in a way that respects differing perspectives without compromising their own values. The podcast highlights an innovative civility summit initiative that aims to bridge divides through decisional balance exercises, emphasizing the potential for growth and understanding in political dialogue. The conversation encourages listeners to approach political engagement as an informed choice, rather than a conflict, fostering a more constructive and less confrontational political landscape. The episode concludes with an invitation for listeners to share their own experiences and insights on navigating the complex world of politics with civility and respect.

In this podcast, we discuss:

• Introduction to the Complex World of Political Discourse: The podcast opens by acknowledging the challenges and tensions inherent in political conversations, emphasizing the goal to understand differing perspectives deeply.
• Personal Anecdote of Political Dialogue: A host shares a personal experience of engaging in a political discussion with a friend, highlighting the importance of seeking to understand opposing views.
• The Role of Values in Political Beliefs: The discussion explores how personal values shape political opinions, emphasizing the need to recognize and respect the value systems of others.
• Civility Summit Initiative: One host shares involvement in a civility summit aimed at fostering civil discourse among individuals with divergent political views, using decisional balance exercises to facilitate understanding.
• Mindfulness in Political Discussions: The conversation turns to the importance of mindfulness and acceptance in political dialogue, promoting a deeper understanding without necessarily agreeing.
• The Biological Basis of Righteous Indignation: A discussion on how the body’s chemical responses to conflict and righteousness can become addictive, influencing behavior in political discussions.
• Aligning Behavior with Values: The hosts reflect on the importance of ensuring personal behaviors are consistent with individual values, even in the heat of political debate.
• The Definition and Nature of Politics: The podcast examines the formal definition of politics as governance and conflict, pondering on how this inherent conflict can be navigated more constructively.
• Choosing Civility Over Conflict: The dialogue suggests reimagining political engagement as a choice informed by values rather than a battleground, promoting a more thoughtful and less confrontational approach.
• Invitation for Audience Engagement: The podcast closes by inviting listeners to share their experiences and thoughts on navigating political discussions and maintaining civility.

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. You don’t want to miss this one! Make sure to rate us or share this podcast. It would mean so much to us! Thank you for listening to the communication solution. 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.

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Transcribe

 Hello and welcome to the communication solution podcast with Casey Jackson and John Gilbert. I’m your host, Danielle Cantin. Here at the Institute for Individual and Organizational Change, otherwise known as IFIOC, 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 everyone. This is Danielle Cantin. I’m your facilitator today with the Communication Solution podcast. And I’m here with your hosts, Casey Jackson and John Gilbert. Hello. Hey guys. Today, I thought we could dive into a compliance situation.

When you look at motivational interviewing, oftentimes we’re working in compliance type models and systems. So it makes you think of law enforcement, probation, child welfare. Where’s the benefit in that intersection with motivational interviewing? When you’re looking at these systems and people trying to help other people.

Deeply rooted in a, you know, compliance type model. This is a really, really common question that we get, Danielle, because John and I get to train a lot of these, uh, professionals in these types of systems. And there are two ways of thinking about, like, one of the first things we launch into in, in the intro training is differentiating.

Between compliance based methods of communication and behavior change based methods of communication. And what’s really fascinating about it is the more data comes out, the data is pretty clear that compliance based. Interventions don’t coincide with long term sustained behavior change. And the example that I always use with people in training is for anyone that’s ever worked with any person that’s been on probation before, especially, you know, years I worked in juvenile probation.

What’s one of the first things we know is going to happen as soon as they get off probation? They even say it. One of the first things they’re going to do is go party or use again. Um, and so that could be, they could be on probation for 2 years. And the 1st thing they’re planning on doing is getting messed up or as soon as they’re released from prison or from jail, the 1st thing they plan to do is get messed up.

So compliance models do not generate behavior change. Compliance models aren’t bad for what they’re designed for. For a swift punishment, but they are not, they don’t coincide with long term behavior change. So what you start to think about is, if I’m in a compliance based system, how do I use a behavior change based method?

And for me, the beauty in this is what we always have control over is we have control over what comes out of our mouth as a professional. We don’t have control over law. We don’t have control over policy. We don’t have control over a court order. We don’t have control over what, you know, has to happen if we need to protect the child, but we have control over what comes out of our mouth and the way things come out of our mouth can actually generate change the whole function.

Everybody listening. We know in motivational learning, the whole function in communication. Is to help move from tension or discord or resistance to ambivalence efficiently. And when you’re moving to the ambivalence and helping people resolve ambivalence, you’re helping their brain generate giving this situation in front of you.

How do you want to navigate this to get to your best outcome? So even though that rock has dropped in their path, that boulder has dropped in their path. If you’re going to stand on the boulder and say, you can’t go around this boulder. You are going to generate discord if you acknowledge the boulder and drop shoulder to shoulder with the person and look at the boulder and go, how do you want to navigate this reality?

This boulder is not going anywhere. Knowing you still want to make it further on your path. So that boulder can be law. It can be policy. It can be a quarter. It can be all sorts of things. But you, you think more from a collaborative place, knowing that the reality is, is those laws and policies are not going to change.

So you just, it’s, it’s a shift in mindset is as much as a shift in skill set, John, what are your, I know you’ve got lots of thoughts. Yeah, well, we’ve, we’ve worked with so many different groups and this can get really, you could say, unsupportive and gaslighting and manipulative. If you look at the technique and listen to the technique that you were just giving, and there’s a deeper way of being with and treating someone and trying to support their power that they may or may not want to take on.

That you’re getting at there where, you know, you had moved into getting shoulder to shoulder and asking a question for the 1st basic step, which is. To not tell to not should on them, but instead to ask how they see getting around. Right. But in the trainings, we really talk about shoulder to shoulder giving voice to what it must be like the unfairness, the sense of B.

S. This is the sense of whatever they’re going through. But I’m, I’m highlighting that because that’s another skill and there’s other skills we could get into here with him. I, but all of the skills are on a certain way of how I treat you. I think it’s important to talk about that with what we’re, you know, talking about with the different eight factors of.

Helpful helpers of like, how am I treating you? Am I treating you from a place of you are a complex human with choices that you could make? Or am I treating you in a way that’s trying to take your choice from you? Am I treating you from a place that you have to do this? Or am I treating you from a place that there’s lots of ways if you want to approach this rock as you were saying Casey However, it doesn’t mean that in that moment that rock is going to move But you can help them make some sort of sense if you address them in a different way.

And I think that’s the key and working with your group that you were working with today. We went over a key piece of this. How do you, when there is a rule or there is a poly, recognize maybe eventually you might be able to influence that. Maybe the person you’re talking with, you could help them with the power to eventually.

Influence that in society with laws and unjust equity all that. Yeah. But in the moment, I think what you’re getting that that’s critical is how am I with you? Am I trying to take your autonomy from you? Or am I trying to support your choice and your agency and your power in a way that doesn’t get really Unsupported to say, well, given this court order is not going to go anywhere.

How are you going to do it? It’s ultimately your choice to be happy. You should learn how to narrate your life, right? Like those, those are the techniques that people get caught up in, but it’s not very supportive and it’s not very empowering. So I just, I thought that’s important. I think there’s lots of riff.

Directions you could go with that, but I think it’s the way you see and treat people is, is a core piece of this and how we’re trained with traditional training we get, and then the systems we’re in perpetuates, just do the things so we can get our job complete. So then you’ll do the thing and you’ll be better off.

Come on. You know, it’s interesting as you were talking, because I’d like. The global application of motivational interviewing, because when I think of even with parenting, what happens is we tend to lean into a compliance based method as parents. Do it because I tell you to do it. You need to do it for these reasons, but what we know is a fairly supported stereotype or reality is when you raise children in a compliance based system, what do they do when they get to college?

They’re just, once they’re off the leash, what was that Danielle? When they’re off probation, they do the same thing. It’s the exact same thing when you’re in a compliance based party. Exactly. So as soon as they’re off that short leash. They’re going to do what they want to do. And which is why all the things that people worry about when their kids go off to college.

If you’re helping people make behavior based decisions, if they’re making values based decisions, that translates, which is really difficult because sometimes it’s just easier to go for compliance. What I want to be really, really clear with, and then give you some examples from child welfare, is if I’m, if I’m with my kids.

You know, and they’re, you know, four or five years old and we’re standing on a sidewalk and there’s a parade and they want to run out in front of a float. I’m not going to amplify their ambivalence or use motivational interviewing. I’m going to grab him by the shoulder and pull him back onto the sidewalk.

Like that’s just health and safety. I like how you always say that, Casey. When I hear you train, you’re like, there’s a place for compliance. There is a place for compliance. Security and yeah. That’s exactly it. And so that’s why it’s not, uh, either or good or bad. It’s like, why, why am I opening my mouth and what outcomes am I trying to achieve?

And we have data that shows if we open our mouth and say things a certain way, it will achieve certain things, some negative outcomes and some positive outcomes. And for most of us, we’d prefer having positive outcomes. So we want to learn better ways of effective of being that. I think, you know, just right on the heels, I just popped right out of a training.

I just wrapped up today, uh, in the world of child welfare for child protective services. Excuse me. And it’s this difficult balance. When people are so, when children especially are so unsafe, so in the world of motivational interviewing, we know that it’s going to be a profound provoking of your writing reflex for any person, whether or not you work in child welfare or not.

If we see children at risk, we’re going to have a huge reaction and want to jump into a compliance model that doesn’t make it bad and it doesn’t make it wrong. But what in working with child welfare, this particular state that we’re working with their own vision statement. Starts with, we are here to keep children safe, so that they can thrive in their families and their communities.

Keeping children safe is compliance, but helping people thrive in communities requires behavior change. So, it means you need to have a mastery of both sets of skills. And in most child welfare organizations, there’s, they’re born out of, of high levels of. Compliance based as they should be to keep children safe.

I mean, and just because you’re keeping children safe, they can be in a foster care system that is not helping them thrive. It can be helping them thrive, but it doesn’t necessarily. And what research shows is given the choice between. Like a foster home or a family of origin that even if there’s some levels of abuse going on, children actually thrive more and with family of origin, even if they’re in a more stable foster home because of all the psychological and emotional trauma.

So it’s as we get more data, we’re trying to make more data informed decisions about how we navigate really complicated situations because at first glance, we want to do, we want to do the thing that just makes common sense. Get the children out of there. And make sure they are safe and don’t put him back in a risky situation ever again.

And at first glance, you would think, well, everybody’s going to agree with that. How could you disagree with that until data starts to roll out and go, Whoa, this is interesting. If they go into foster care, they graduated significantly lower rates. They end up in longer term counseling in the long run for mental health and emotional issues.

They suffer a different level of trauma, not being with their family of origin. So it’s just like, wow, that’s just, if we look at this holistically and from a complex perspective, it’s like, well, this is not as simple as we would think it would be, you know, that’s why Casey by, you know, the more I’m involved with your trainings and talking with these groups that you’re working with.

When you see them understand that that, oh, gosh, we are compliance. It’s not wrong or bad. This is what we should be doing. And when you break down their vision statement like that and help them realize. With what they have to bridge, right? What they have on. I just have a lot of respect for these organizations that are kind of forward thinking and willing to step in.

Um, and you’ve gotten some pretty amazing results, um, in particular with 1, 1 state that you’re, you’re helping with the entire child welfare system. They’re seeing the results, right? As they, they start to learn motivational interviewing. Oh, absolutely. And it’s, and it’s not only just anecdotally, we see it in actually performance outcomes.

This, we’ve talked about it on other podcasts before, you know, the most startling ones for me, it’s, this is just how deeply rewarding it is, but some of those startling ones was in the work that we did with law enforcement, just the significant changes in outcomes of even use of force. That there’s a less, there’s less use of force when officers are more skilled, measurably, measurably skilled at motivational interviewing, when they’re measurably skilled at motivational interviewing, they use less force and we get better outcomes and that’s pretty impressive.

It’s the same thing as we keep looking through these things with, you know, child welfare, same thing. If you’re going to engage, think about this way. This is that trauma informed way of looking at the difference between compliance based models and behavior change based models. All of the energy that a brain needs to do to protect itself prevents it from being able to thrive.

It’s survival mode, which is fine. But if that’s what we’re doing to families, like in child welfare, that they’re always on the defense because they’re always feeling accused and they feel like they can’t do anything right. And they have to jump through all these hoops. And no matter how many hoops they jump through, nothing is going to change.

That is not changing behavior. There was an aha moment for one of the, the. Participants today who works in child welfare. And she said, it just clicked with me because we think that if they go to treatment, then they’re going to be better parents and they’re not going to use when the reality is, is we force all sorts of people to go through treatment and it doesn’t mean they change behavior.

So the compliance is not the thing that’s going to make them change. And we, I think the way that it feels for people that work in compliance based systems, that they feel like they’re beating their head against the wall and that these interventions are like throwing spaghetti at the wall. Like, we’re just going to throw all these service at them and see which one sticks.

And it’s like, and then what we do is we end up labeling and stigmatizing and add more diagnosis to the people we’re working with because our interventions are not working. When, if you just step back and look at the data, the data will tell you they’re not going to work because they’re compliance based and compliance based models don’t generate sustained behavior change.

So I think that’s why it’s such a fascinating application to think about how do we do this? How do we orchestrate really effective communication in a way that you see behavior changing, changing substantially and reducing recidivism in every one of these systems. So, so parents aren’t getting more referrals, or people are not getting rearrested, or they’re not cycling through treatment over and over and over again.

That is not a personal failing of those individuals. That is a system that doesn’t know how to orchestrate, orchestrate behavior change. Well, and related to this, there’s, there’s so many things to wrangle to make that practical for the person that’s showing up at the door and knocking on the door and that professional you were speaking with today, Casey, I’m sure has various kinds of training, but there’s a belief at the core of it that if you do this thing.

You will get better. So what can I do to get you to see or get you to say or get you to buy in all these traditional ways of persuasion to do the thing that I think is best for you and that can come from a heart of gold. And I just want to honor the people that do this work. The amount of berating if you don’t work in this work, the amount of get the F out of here.

You, you know, all the things they hear that might be personal attacks, and it’s just extremely emotionally draining to be in this kind of work. And I just want to honor that for the type of respect at the systems level, Danielle, but also at the individual level, and that if we just boil this down, as we’re coming to a bit of a close here, it might be that they have a positive UA with, uh, a child.

Um, present, or it might be that their child, uh, tested positive for a drug. Um, recently, there are very difficult things to navigate, and there might be a need for saying this isn’t okay, and this isn’t. But short of doing that, interview them about their motivations. What matters to them? What does it matter?

And what do they believe? And maybe information in there would be helpful, but maybe I don’t do it in a way that tries to show you I’m right and you’re wrong. And maybe I could open up my mind that there’s more than one way for you to go about making change happen in your life. It doesn’t take away that the court order is here and we can talk about that if that’s worth it to you to do or not.

And then how to maybe change the system so other families don’t have to go through this. But right now, Casey, to wrap this full circle, that rock, unfortunately, for your situation isn’t going anywhere. So what does it matter about this UA, the drugs in your child’s system and what matters to you and how much do you want to work together to figure this out, right?

For you to get your behaviors aligned with your values. And hopefully that’s just a clear takeaway, practically and tangibly that this can be done at a macro level or a micro level with how to think about MI with compliance. You know, and you, you know, having your expertise in the health world to John, what I think of is there’s so many protective factors, the more skilled you get at motivation wing, not because it’s motivation wing, because there’s so much data that shows when we’re more mindful.

It’s going to help our blood pressure. So even if people are attacking us or berating us to be mindful that it’s not as personal as it feels if you really understand the nature of what’s happening here and then to know that you have a skill set to de escalate the negative energy within minutes and to see that happen actually becomes very self reinforcing to want to do it more often because then these, these things that can be so draining.

Um, and could be mentally and emotionally physically destructive to us. We learn how to have it almost a restorative practice in the way we’re interacting with people. And that in and of itself, not only is a better outcome for us as professionals or helpers, it’s better outcomes for the people that we’re serving as well, too.

So there’s so many things that are a restorative process, um, that can get us to the best possible outcomes. And again, this is why for me, it’s not even just motivational interviewing. It’s just, how do we master communication? In a way that we walk away, always feeling like this situation is better because I was because I was involved in this conversation.

This is a better outcome than if I wasn’t involved in this conversation that becomes. So it may not be the X or the Y that needed to get to, but it’s the fact that this situation is just. Overall, a better situation because I had a chance to interact with this person and communicate with them. That becomes a restorative process for us.

So that’s why I love, you know, when we get into these topics about communication and how can we be more effective and how does it work in these different, you know, these different arenas that we all work within? How do we bring it home and know that we’re doing the right thing for the right reasons to get to the best outcomes?

Yeah, and I’ll just lastly say, because I know we’re wrapping that we didn’t talk about all these labels we could have talked about, like intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation, uh, all these aspects of what’s our people around us in our work environment doing, perpetuating us to want to use compliance or our supervisors using compliance with us.

So we want to pass that compliance down and there’s lots of other factors going on in the system and the individual that we didn’t get into. But if you’re interested in that, you can always go to Casey at IFIOC. com. Send us more inquiries, challenges, questions, as well as if you want to be on here and maybe get into any of this, of what that lived experience is like for you, be it in CPS, child welfare, or other situations.

Maybe we could talk about this same sort of thing with research and healthcare in the future and how, uh, how to talk about that. So anyhow, I wanted to just invite Danielle Casey, is there anything else you wanted to wrap up with him? I think, um, what I, I would say is I just love the range that we cover on these podcasts, stepping in and knowing all the way from, you know, somebody who is, you know, working in motivational interviewing to fidelity on, you know, in a police department.

The kind of data and results, tangible results you can get in terms of reducing, um, uh, aggressive behavior or any kind of violence is huge. And then all the way down to these practical tips of like, all the way to, gosh, is this. Outcome better, did something better happen because I was part of this communication, part of this conversation.

I think that is really empowering, um, to kind of give that range, which is why obviously this is motivational interview interviewing infused, but it really always comes down to communication, how the brain works and how we can keep making everybody’s lives. A little better, including ourselves, like high blood pressure, you know, like, wow, with these tools, we can start to ourselves, live better lives.

All about health and healing that way. Excellent. Great topic, Danielle. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks guys. We’ll catch you on the next episode. Everybody thanks for joining us. Have a beautiful day. And we will catch you on the next episode.  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 ideas, send them our way at Casey at 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.