The reflex that runs the show
Rollnick et al. (2020) call it the righting reflex. It is the deeply human urge to jump in and correct something the moment it looks wrong. You see the problem. You feel the itch. You fix it. In the newest edition of the motivational interviewing textbook, Miller and Rollnick (2023) have taken to calling it the fixing reflex instead, which is somehow even more on the nose.
In sport, we do not just have this reflex. We train it. Coaching culture teaches us to instruct, advise, and correct, and the pressure to fix comes from everywhere: parents, committees, other coaches, and often the athletes themselves (Rollnick et al., 2020). Fixing feels like coaching. It looks like coaching. On a Tuesday night with forty kids and one of you, it often is coaching.
To be clear, fixing is not the villain here. Athletes need instruction. Technical knowledge matters. The problem is when fixing becomes the only tool we reach for, when we spend whole sessions operating as what Rollnick et al. (2020) describe as deficit detectives, scanning for what is wrong so we can put it right. Push a solution at someone who has not asked for one and you will often get resistance, silence, or a nod that means absolutely nothing.
The opportunity we quietly take away
Here is what took me embarrassingly long to notice. Every time I solved a problem for an athlete, I took something from them. Not maliciously. Enthusiastically, in fact. But when I did the thinking, the athlete just watched me think. Every problem I fixed was a rep they never got to take.
We say we want to develop decision makers, then we remove every meaningful decision from the conversation. We want resilient, self aware people, then we hand them answers before they have even finished describing the question.
The moment an athlete brings you a problem is a performance opportunity. Not for you. For them.
When we grab it, the words we use shape that moment into a lesson about dependence: your job is to listen, mine is to know. That meaning, repeated across a season, becomes a mindset.
A bias, declared
I am a bit biased here. Motivational interviewing was a tool that gripped me pretty quickly as a coach. Theories like self determination theory gave me the what: people move when they feel autonomous, competent, and connected to others (Ryan & Deci, 2017). What they rarely gave me was the how. How to actually be in the conversation on a cold sideline with a frustrated seventeen year old. MI felt like the bridge between the two (Miller & Rollnick, 2023).
And yes, if I am honest, I partly chose it because it was the only topic I could imagine still enjoying after writing an entire thesis about it. I was mostly right.
So what does MI actually cover?
Before the toolbox, the feel of the thing. Bill Miller, who first developed MI, has long described it as feeling more like dancing than wrestling (Miller & Rollnick, 2023). In a wrestle there is a winner: I pin your reasons under mine, and the strongest argument takes the round. In a dance, we move together. One partner leads. Gently, with a clear direction in mind. But nobody gets dragged across the floor, and it only works if you are both responding to each other. That is what a good coaching conversation feels like from the inside. Not you steering an athlete to a conclusion you reached ten minutes ago, but the two of you moving through a problem together, in step.
At its most practical level, MI offers coaches a small set of conversational microskills, often taught under the acronym OARS: open questions, affirmations, reflections, and summaries (Miller & Rollnick, 2023; Rollnick et al., 2020). Open questions invite the athlete to think out loud rather than confirm what you already believe. Affirmations notice genuine strengths and efforts, which is not the same thing as praise, but that is a post for another day. Reflections offer back what you think you heard. Summaries gather the threads of a conversation and hand them back to the athlete, so they can hear their own story told well.
There is one more layer worth naming, because it is the engine of the whole approach. MI is also the discipline of listening for change talk: the athlete’s own words in the direction of change (Miller & Rollnick, 2023). “I want to be sharper off the line.” “I know my recovery has been rubbish lately.” “I reckon I could get on top of the nerves.” Untrained, we barrel straight past these lines on the way to our advice. In MI they are the whole game. You notice the ember, and you fan it: reflect it back, get curious about it, ask what it would take. The thinking behind this is one of psychology’s more useful findings: people are moved far more by hearing themselves make the argument for change than by hearing us make it (Miller & Rose, 2009). The athlete talks themselves into it, honestly, in their own words. And motivation built that way belongs to them, which is exactly why it lasts.
I will unpack all of this properly in future posts, because each skill deserves its own space. Today I only want to hand you one.
But first, a caveat that matters. MI is not just a bag of microskills. Underneath the techniques sits what Miller and Rollnick (2023) call the spirit of MI: partnership, acceptance, compassion, and empowerment. It is a way of being with people, not just a way of talking at them. Use the skills without the spirit and athletes will smell it a mile off. The techniques are the how. The spirit is the why. You need both.
