Brief Intervention Overview

A brief intervention is a conversation designed to motivate people to change their behavior by helping them realize their own reasons for making healthy choices. The brief intervention has foundations in motivational interviewing - a goal-oriented, client-centered counseling style for eliciting behavior change.

Rather than directing people in why and how to change, which has been shown to be ineffective, you'll elicit their own reasons and their own action plan to make a change.

Not everyone is going to be ready to make a change during your first interaction, and that's okay. Ambivalence is normal, and one of the key skills in a brief intervention is understanding how to respond to it. The brief intervention may help to move teens towards change, and follow-up sessions are an opportunity to check in and build upon your first session.