Motivational Interviewing Techniques: Using OARS and Change Talk in Session

There's a familiar moment in session: a client says, "I know I should change, but…" — and then the conversation stalls. Motivational interviewing (MI) is built precisely for that stalling point. Instead of pushing past a client's ambivalence with persuasion, MI works through it, in conversation. This piece lays out the spirit behind MI, the core OARS skills, how to grow change talk, and how to respond to sustain talk — all in a form you can apply in your very next session.

What Motivational Interviewing Actually Is

Motivational interviewing is a collaborative way of talking that helps clients articulate their own reasons for change. Miller and Rollnick define it as "a collaborative, goal-oriented style of communication … designed to strengthen personal motivation for and commitment to a specific goal by eliciting and exploring the person's own reasons for change" (Miller & Rollnick, 2013). The defining move is that the counselor does not supply the answer; they draw out the motivation already present inside the client.

MI began in the addiction field — alcohol, tobacco, substance use — but has since spread to nearly any clinical territory where ambivalence lives: chronic-illness management, diet and lifestyle change, treatment adherence, and more. Its clinical value is that it lets you work with the "I understand it intellectually but I'm not moving" state without applying pressure that tends to backfire.

Before the Techniques: The Spirit of MI

Learn MI as a set of moves and it quickly degrades into surface-level question-lobbing. For MI to actually work, four qualities — what Miller and Rollnick call the spirit — have to underlie everything you do.

• Partnership: Not an expert prescribing from above, but two people sitting side by side, exploring together.
• Acceptance: Honoring the client's autonomy and worth, and recognizing that the choice to change (or not) belongs to them.
• Compassion: Keeping the client's welfare — not the counselor's agenda — at the center.
• Evocation: Drawing out the resources and motivation already within the client, rather than installing what you assume is missing.

Strip out the spirit and use only the techniques, and clients quickly sense they're "being worked on." Their defenses rise. In practice, the consistency of this stance often shapes the feel of a session more than technical precision does.

OARS: Four Skills You Can Use This Session

At the practical core of MI sit four skills, known by the acronym OARS. Simply placing these four deliberately within a conversation changes its texture.

1. Open questions. Instead of "Why didn't you do it?", ask "What did that mean to you?" — questions that leave room for the client to unfold a fuller answer.
2. Affirmations. Name the client's strengths and efforts specifically. Behavior-anchored affirmations land best: "It was a rough week, and you still came in to keep our appointment."
3. Reflections. Offer back what you heard — but mix in complex reflections that go one step beyond simple repetition to name the underlying meaning.
4. Summaries. Gather the thread at the middle and end of a session so the client hears their own words played back and organized.

Reflections and summaries are especially directional: what you choose to emphasize steers the conversation. Selectively reflect the change-oriented statements, and the client hears their own case for change, again, in their own voice.

Recognizing and Growing Change Talk

The single most important clinical signal in MI is change talk — the client's own language pointing toward change. It usually shows up in forms like these:

• Desire: "I really want things to be different now."
• Ability: "If I put my mind to it, I think I actually could."
• Reasons: "I felt ashamed in front of my kids."
• Need: "I can't keep going like this."

When these appear, don't let them slip by. Open questions and reflections help the client expand them: "Could you say a little more about that?" or "When was a moment you felt that?" turn change talk from a single sentence into a full paragraph. Respond instead with advice or warnings, and change talk tends to close back up fast.

Working With Ambivalence and Sustain Talk

When a client says, "But I'm comfortable where I am," or "Do I really need to change?", that's sustain talk — and it's not resistance. It's one side of ambivalence. Try to override it, and the client will only argue the case for staying put more forcefully, again in their own voice.

What helps here is a simple reflective response that neither agrees nor disagrees. You mirror the ambivalence back whole: "So part of you wants to change, and part of you finds where you are right now comfortable — both are here at once." A double-sided reflection lets the client hold both feelings in view simultaneously, which creates room for them to shift the balance themselves. Rolling with resistance instead of fighting it, and honoring autonomy, is the heart of the move.

Structuring a Session With the Four Processes

MI isn't a loose bundle of one-off techniques; it flows through four processes that are sequential yet overlapping. Viewing a session through this frame makes it easier to judge where you should be right now.

1. Engaging. Building the working alliance — use OARS to establish safety first.
2. Focusing. Agreeing, together, on which change goal this session will pursue among the many possible threads.
3. Evoking. Drawing out and strengthening change talk — the distinctive, central process of MI.
4. Planning. Moving to concrete action once motivation has genuinely ripened.

The common trap is jumping to planning before engagement is even established. Push an action plan while motivation is still unripe, and sustain talk tends to multiply. It takes patience to wait for the signal that a shift to planning is warranted — a rise in the frequency and intensity of change talk.

A Post-Session Checklist

When you review a session through an MI lens, these questions help:

• What was the ratio of my talk time to the client's this session?
• When change talk surfaced, did I expand it fully — or let it slip by?
• Did I meet sustain talk with argument anywhere?
• Did I use affirmations and complex reflections, distinct from simple repetition?

This kind of self-review helps even when you're just recalling the session from memory and jotting notes. But a verbatim session transcript lets you check the counselor-to-client talk ratio and the exact placement of change talk objectively. Modalia AI is a security-first AI partner for counselors that can transcribe and organize a session right after it ends, so you can quickly retrace the flow of dialogue and plan your OARS placement for next time with room to think.

Motivational interviewing isn't a skill you master in one pass. It's an ongoing practice of tuning your ear, session after session, to catch change talk. May you be able to set down the burden of supplying the right answer — and instead stand alongside the client, helping translate their own reasons for change back to them.