Advertise on podcast: MI for Change: Motivational Interviewing in ABA & Mental Health

Share Your Thoughts With Us Your BCBA comes to you frustrated. The parent is pushing back on the treatment plan. Maybe they’re questioning the BCBA’s judgment, demanding something clinically inappropriate, or just not communicating in a way that feels respectful. And your BCBA says: I can’t keep doing this. You understand completely. You’ve been in those shoes. But you also know that if this relationship breaks down, a family loses services — and your organization loses a case. So you’re stuck in the middle. And nobody taught you how to get out of it. In this episode Dr. Monica Gilbert speaks directly to clinical directors, agency owners, and leaders who live in this exact tension — and introduces a framework she calls “protect the clinician, preserve the relationship.” The insight at the center: you can support your BCBA fully without automatically siding with them. And you can preserve the parent relationship without throwing your BCBA under the bus. Those aren’t opposites. They’re both part of the same leadership skill. Monica also shares how MI applies not just in clinical sessions with parents — but in the conversations leaders have with their own clinical teams. Sometimes the person who needs MI isn’t the parent. It’s the BCBA sitting across from you. And at the end — a direct invitation for clinical directors and agency owners who want to bring this work to their teams. Learn more about Motivational Interviewing and explore on-demand courses at www.drmonicagilbert.com Join the MI Academy for practical training and resources — and enjoy an exclusive 15% off with code MIFORCHANGE at checkout. 📲 Connect with me on Instagram: @drmonicagilbert

Share Your Thoughts With Us I teach motivational interviewing. I speak at conferences about it. I train clinicians on it. And there was a session — early in my MI practice — where I walked out thinking: this stuff doesn't work. The parent had nodded through the whole conversation. Agreed with everything. Said all the right things. And I knew, the moment it ended, that nothing was going to change. In this episode Dr. Monica Gilbert gets honest about what that moment felt like — and more importantly, what she eventually figured out. It wasn't that MI didn't work. She didn't yet know how to recognize why a specific conversation wasn't working. And those are completely different problems. The insight at the center of this episode is one of the most useful in the series: when a session falls flat, the instinct is to diagnose the parent. They're not motivated. They don't follow through. This family just isn't ready. But those statements don't tell you what actually happened in the conversation. What does tell you is learning to diagnose the conversation itself — where did we lose the thread? Were we still in Engage? Did we ever find Focus? Did we give ambivalence room to come out before we moved to the plan? Evidence-based doesn't mean guaranteed. But it does mean you have a structure you can learn from when something doesn't work. And that's what this episode is about. Learn more about Motivational Interviewing and explore on-demand courses at www.drmonicagilbert.com Join the MI Academy for practical training and resources — and enjoy an exclusive 15% off with code MIFORCHANGE at checkout. 📲 Connect with me on Instagram: @drmonicagilbert

Share Your Thoughts With Us You walk in with your clipboard. Your intake paperwork. Your assessment tools. Your predetermined questions and your full plan for the session. And you look at this parent. They're answering you. They're being cooperative. They're signing the consent forms. Saying yes to everything. But they're not really there. In this episode Dr. Monica Gilbert — recording live from the FABA conference in Orlando — talks about what she's learned about the moment a family receives a diagnosis and what BCBAs and intake coordinators are often missing in that first session. Not because they don't care, but because they're trained to move forward with the clinical plan before the parent is anywhere near ready for it. The insight at the center of this episode is one of the most important in the series: we mistake quiet for understanding. We mistake agreement for buy-in. We mistake compliance for readiness. And a parent who says yes to everything may not be bought in at all — she may just not trust herself yet. Monica walks through what engagement actually looks like in that first session, the specific questions that change everything, and why slowing down in session one often makes the entire process faster. Including the question she now asks every newly diagnosed family before opening a single form. Learn more about Motivational Interviewing and explore on-demand courses at www.drmonicagilbert.com Join the MI Academy for practical training and resources — and enjoy an exclusive 15% off with code MIFORCHANGE at checkout. 📲 Connect with me on Instagram: @drmonicagilbert

Share Your Thoughts With Us Have you ever sat in your car before a parent session, rehearsing the whole conversation in your head? Deciding what to cover first, what questions to ask, how to respond if the parent brings up that one thing? It's not because you don't know what you're doing. It's because parent sessions feel unpredictable. And unpredictable is a very specific kind of uncomfortable. In this episode Dr. Monica Gilbert names the word she hears from BCBAs over and over — not hard, not exhausting — unpredictable. And she makes the case that the feeling most clinicians call "not being confident" in parent sessions isn't actually a confidence problem. It's a framework problem. And those are completely different. She walks through the story of a BCBA she was consulting with — clinically sharp, strong cases, good relationship with her clients — who would lose her footing the moment a parent said something she didn't expect. What that BCBA needed wasn't more clinical knowledge, more charisma, or more self-belief. She needed a way to navigate a conversation she couldn't predict. The line this clinician said after one particular session is what this whole episode is about: "I didn't know where the conversation was going to go. But I knew what to do when it got there." That's not certainty. That's navigation. And navigation is something you can learn. Learn more about Motivational Interviewing and explore on-demand courses at www.drmonicagilbert.com Join the MI Academy for practical training and resources — and enjoy an exclusive 15% off with code MIFORCHANGE at checkout. 📲 Connect with me on Instagram: @drmonicagilbert

Share Your Thoughts With Us When a patient says "okay" — what does that actually mean? Sometimes it means I agree. Sometimes it means I understand. And sometimes it just means I don't know how to disagree with you. Those are three completely different situations. And if we treat them all the same way — if we accept the okay and move forward — we're building a plan on a foundation that was never there. In this episode Dr. Monica Gilbert uses a psychiatric treatment conversation she encountered in the news to explore something much broader: what genuine collaboration actually looks like when one person in the room has clinical expertise and the other has lived experience. And why those are two different kinds of expertise — both necessary, neither sufficient on its own. This episode is not about any specific case, verdict, or individual. It's about a moment in a clinical conversation that illustrated something Monica has been teaching for years: MI is not about giving clients control over things outside their control. It's about giving them a voice in the conversation about their own lives. It's about the difference between compliance and collaboration. And it's about what happens when we treat resistance as information instead of as the enemy. The MI challenge at the end of this episode is one of the most practically useful in the series. You'll want to write it down. Learn more about Motivational Interviewing and explore on-demand courses at www.drmonicagilbert.com Join the MI Academy for practical training and resources — and enjoy an exclusive 15% off with code MIFORCHANGE at checkout. 📲 Connect with me on Instagram: @drmonicagilbert

Share Your Thoughts With Us You've learned the OARS. You're asking open questions, you're reflecting, you're using affirmations. And you leave the session thinking — why didn't that conversation move? Why does it still feel like I'm pushing? Here's what Dr. Monica Gilbert realized about her own early MI work: it wasn't an OARS problem. It was a timing problem. OARS are the ingredients. The four MI processes are the recipe. And if you don't understand the recipe, you can have the best ingredients in the world and still somehow make a quiche when you wanted a pizza. In this episode Monica gets practical — all the way down to the specific questions, reflections, and affirmations that belong at each stage of a parent session. She walks through a morning routine case start to finish: what to ask in Engage when your brain is already three steps ahead, how to find Focus when a session is wandering across behaviors and school and grandma and bedtime, what to do when you hear change talk in Evoke and every instinct tells you to move, and the two very different endings a Plan session can have — one that looks good on paper and never gets implemented, and one where the parent solves her own implementation barrier before she leaves the room. If you've been using MI techniques and still feeling like something is off — this is the episode that names what it is. Learn more about Motivational Interviewing and explore on-demand courses at www.drmonicagilbert.com Join the MI Academy for practical training and resources — and enjoy an exclusive 15% off with code MIFORCHANGE at checkout. 📲 Connect with me on Instagram: @drmonicagilbert

Share Your Thoughts With Us You have the curriculum. You have the motivation. You've taken a course, learned the techniques, told yourself you're going to use open-ended questions and affirmations and reflections in your next parent session. And it still feels like something is missing. In this episode Dr. Monica Gilbert opens with a story about trying to bake a protein pizza — having almost every ingredient, skipping the one she didn't have, and ending up with a quiche. The metaphor is sharper than it sounds: in parent training sessions, knowing the tools isn't the same as knowing how to combine them. And it's the combination that makes the difference between a session with good rapport and a session where the parent actually moves. This episode covers the most important reframe of the entire arc: are you doing parent training TO the parent — or WITH and FOR the parent? One word changes everything about how you show up in the room. Monica also introduces the relationship between OARS and the four MI processes — how knowing where a parent is in the change process tells you exactly which tool to use, how much of it, and when. Not just what the tools are. When to use them. Next episode: the full breakdown of how to apply OARS across each of the four processes. Learn more about Motivational Interviewing and explore on-demand courses at www.drmonicagilbert.com Join the MI Academy for practical training and resources — and enjoy an exclusive 15% off with code MIFORCHANGE at checkout. 📲 Connect with me on Instagram: @drmonicagilbert

Share Your Thoughts With Us You're in a case review. The graphs are flattening. The child is making progress in session — treatment integrity is high, IOA is high, the programs look solid. But every goal that depends on what happens outside of therapy hasn't moved in months. Your first instinct is to modify the intervention. Change the prompting hierarchy. Adjust the reinforcement. Look at the function. Sometimes that's right. But sometimes the data is pointing somewhere else entirely — and most agencies aren't structured to see it. In this episode, Dr. Monica Gilbert speaks directly to agency owners and clinical directors about a pattern she has seen across clinics, across clinicians, and across diagnoses: excellent progress during sessions, minimal progress outside of them. The same outcome, over and over, in cases with completely different treatment plans. And the reason, when she finally looked at it honestly, wasn't clinical. It wasn't a family problem either. It was a system problem. This episode covers what most agencies audit for versus what actually predicts long-term outcomes, why parent coaching consistently becomes an afterthought at the end of supervision visits, and the one question Monica gave a BCBA last week that immediately changed how she was approaching a case she'd been stuck on for months. Free AOA guide for you. Learn more about Motivational Interviewing and explore on-demand courses at www.drmonicagilbert.com Join the MI Academy for practical training and resources — and enjoy an exclusive 15% off with code MIFORCHANGE at checkout. 📲 Connect with me on Instagram: @drmonicagilbert

Share Your Thoughts With Us Have you ever finished a CEU training thinking it was genuinely good — took notes, highlighted the slides, told yourself you'd use it with your families — and then three months later couldn't remember what the presenter actually taught? Most continuing education doesn't fail because the information is bad. It fails because information alone rarely changes behavior. And as behavior analysts, we already know this. We know our clients need practice, feedback, repetition, and reinforcement before new skills generalize. We just somehow expect ourselves to learn differently. In this episode Dr. Monica Gilbert gets honest about the gap between attending a training and actually changing how you practice — including a two-day workshop she was genuinely excited about, bought the book for, and then quietly stopped using when life became life. She also shares why Motivational Interviewing has stayed with her in a way that most other trainings haven't — not because it's inspiring, but because it's structured. It gives you a roadmap, decision points, specific questions, and techniques you can use in your very next session. One of those techniques — the AOA approach — is demonstrated live in this episode through a real session with a skeptical ABA parent who came in having heard everything negative about the field on social media. Free AOA guide . Grab it and use it this week. Learn more about Motivational Interviewing and explore on-demand courses at www.drmonicagilbert.com Join the MI Academy for practical training and resources — and enjoy an exclusive 15% off with code MIFORCHANGE at checkout. 📲 Connect with me on Instagram: @drmonicagilbert

Share Your Thoughts With Us Why do parents keep agreeing with you in session — and doing nothing at home? If you've ever asked yourself that, this episode is for you. Dr. Monica Gilbert sits down with Jany Bello, M.Ed, BCBA, LBA — founder of Exceptional Minds ABA — to talk about the real reasons behind parent follow-through, why the fix-it reflex BCBAs are trained to use is often the thing killing rapport, and what motivational interviewing actually looks like in a parent coaching session versus what most of us were taught. They also get into the BCBA-RBT relationship — the breakdown, the burnout, and the three questions every supervisor should be asking before giving any feedback at all. Whether you're a BCBA struggling with parent buy-in, an RBT trying to find your voice, or a supervisor who wants a team that actually trusts you — this conversation is going to hit. Don't try to impress. Try to connect. That's the episode in one line. Find Jany at Exceptional Minds ABA for RBT and BCBA exam prep, ABA education content, and straight-talk advocacy for the field. Learn more about Motivational Interviewing and explore on-demand courses at www.drmonicagilbert.com Join the MI Academy for practical training and resources — and enjoy an exclusive 15% off with code MIFORCHANGE at checkout. 📲 Connect with me on Instagram: @drmonicagilbert

Share Your Thoughts With Us If someone walked up to you and said your hair is green -- and it isn't -- you'd laugh it off. You wouldn't lose sleep. You wouldn't question your worth. You'd just know it wasn't true. So why is it that certain things people say can stick for days? In this episode, Dr. Monica Gilbert unpacks the difference between information and interpretation -- and why the comments that sting us most often say more about us than they do about the person who said them. She shares the story of a business owner who lost three nights of sleep over something that was actually half true, introduces the three questions that redirect your brain from defensiveness to curiosity, and explains why 1 in 10 people won't like you no matter what -- and why chasing that approval is the thing that actually costs you. Learn more about Motivational Interviewing and explore on-demand courses at www.drmonicagilbert.com Join the MI Academy for practical training and resources — and enjoy an exclusive 15% off with code MIFORCHANGE at checkout. 📲 Connect with me on Instagram: @drmonicagilbert

Share Your Thoughts With Us A parent said something to Dr. Monica Gilbert after a session that she's never forgotten. She wasn't criticizing. She wasn't feeling sorry. She simply looked at Monica and said: "When you're a BCBA, you're all alone." In this episode, Monica talks about the part of clinical work no graduate program prepares you for -- the emotional weight of being the person everyone runs to, the isolation that hides behind productivity, and the cost of carrying uncertainty without anyone to process it with. She shares what finally changed her thinking, the story of a BCBA-D colleague who burned out and left the field entirely, and four concrete things you can do to build the support structure the profession doesn't build for you. Plus: a free resource in the show notes that makes some of your hardest conversations with parents and staff feel lighter immediately. Remember how lonely your first year felt. Sometimes the most valuable supervision isn't an answer -- it's helping someone realize they're asking completely normal questions. "Great clinicians aren't the ones who never need support. They're the ones wise enough to build it." That parent was only half right. The role can feel lonely. But it doesn't have to stay that way. The moment we start talking about it, the isolation loses some of its power. Free resource: grab the AOA guide -- a small, practical communication tool that can immediately make some of your conversations with parents and staff feel lighter and more collaborative. Download it and use it this week. Learn more about Motivational Interviewing and explore on-demand courses at www.drmonicagilbert.com Join the MI Academy for practical training and resources — and enjoy an exclusive 15% off with code MIFORCHANGE at checkout. 📲 Connect with me on Instagram: @drmonicagilbert

Share Your Thoughts With Us "I've explained it five different times. They keep agreeing with me but nothing changes. I don't know how to get them to buy in." If you've sent that message to a colleague, said it out loud in supervision, or thought it at 10pm on a Tuesday -- this episode is for you. Dr. Monica Gilbert makes a case that might be uncomfortable: buy-in isn't the problem. The phrase itself is. In this episode, she walks through what actually keeps parents stuck (hint: it's rarely lack of understanding), shares the story of a mom of twins whose silence was fear, not resistance, and offers three concrete shifts that change the entire dynamic of a parent coaching session -- starting with stopping what most clinicians do instinctively: explaining more. Learn more about Motivational Interviewing and explore on-demand courses at www.drmonicagilbert.com Join the MI Academy for practical training and resources — and enjoy an exclusive 15% off with code MIFORCHANGE at checkout. 📲 Connect with me on Instagram: @drmonicagilbert

Share Your Thoughts With Us Dr. Monica Gilbert posted a 60-second reel meant to teach the difference between passive, aggressive, and assertive communication. The response told her something else entirely. In this episode, she unpacks why so many RBTs immediately recognized themselves in an intentionally exaggerated, role-played scenario — and what that reaction reveals about psychological safety, the “compliance illusion,” and what it actually takes to get a team member to tell you the truth. Pulling from motivational interviewing, Monica breaks down why agreement isn’t buy-in, why trust functions like a thermometer, and why the strongest teams aren’t the ones where everyone agrees. Learn more about Motivational Interviewing and explore on-demand courses at www.drmonicagilbert.com Join the MI Academy for practical training and resources — and enjoy an exclusive 15% off with code MIFORCHANGE at checkout. 📲 Connect with me on Instagram: @drmonicagilbert

Share Your Thoughts With Us Dr. Monica Gilbert almost didn't record this episode. Here's the question underneath it: what happens if you get so good at parent coaching that your clients need you less? What happens if families become independent faster — and services fade sooner than they used to? As clinicians, that's supposed to be the win. But if you're honest with yourself, another thought sneaks in right behind it: if families leave sooner, what happens to my caseload? My hours? My income? My business? Nobody says this out loud. Monica says it out loud in this episode — not as a teacher, but as someone who has run a practice for 16 years and felt this exact tension herself. Then she dismantles it. With 16 years of data behind her. The therapists who create the most independence don't end up with empty schedules — they end up with the busiest ones, because empowered families become the loudest referral sources in the room. This is the final episode in the 6-part arc — and it closes with Monica's complete invitation into the work she's built around everything you've heard so far. Learn more about Motivational Interviewing and explore on-demand courses at www.drmonicagilbert.com Join the MI Academy for practical training and resources — and enjoy an exclusive 15% off with code MIFORCHANGE at checkout. 📲 Connect with me on Instagram: @drmonicagilbert