Flip Trump Voters the Easy Way
Leverage existing ambivalence with a few simple questions.
Today I’m going to teach you one of my favorite tools for helping people transform their political attitudes, beliefs, and behavior.
It’s a two-part intervention commonly used in Motivational Interviewing (MI), a type of psychotherapy originally developed to help people overcome addiction, but useful in any setting where people want to change or are thinking about changing.
Intro to Motivational Interviewing
As we all know, change is hard. Whether you want to eat healthier, exercise more, or stop using substances, there is a huge gap between the desire to transform yourself and actually doing it.
For a long time, psychotherapists thought the key to getting patients to change was to help them identify the barriers holding them back. We’d ask, what’s stopping you from quitting smoking? What are you afraid will happen if you stop drinking alcohol? What roadblocks are preventing you from entering rehab?
The theory behind these questions was simple. If we could help our patients identify the things stopping them from changing, we could then help them find a way to eliminate, surmount, or avoid those obstacles.
