Greetings one and all,
Thanks once again go to Staffordshire County Council for sending some extremely motivated staff on my Motivational Interviewing course. The staff were from across services that work directly with children, young people, parents and carers. My bespoke course encourages each learner to participate and is wholly hands on and practical. Throughout the two days staff get the chance to practice their skills on each other and they don’t even have to do it via role play – winner – winner in my book.
As always, the feedback has been uniformly excellent, with some particularly lovely comments from the packed crowd that I was educating and hopefully entertaining too. The troops were especially fond of the fact the course was co-produced with people from the length and breadth of Staffordshire.
A massive thank you to all of my interviewees and actors who make my training come alive. I firmly believe they are one of the main reasons that my courses are so popular. Lived experience informing services is what Steven Talbot Consultancy has always been about.
On with the learner feedback comments:
“Steven I really liked the pace and delivery of this course. I found the content really engaging and the voices I heard reminded me of the service users that I work with frequently. I thought you were very respectful of the lived experience and the challenges faced by the people that we support. The training examples that you shared were a reminder that the people we work with are hopeful of change, and you shared tools to enable me to support them on their journey.”
“Really enjoyed this training, wish I had completed at the start of my ASYE year. Really helped give me ideas and words to use when reflecting and using the double sided and simple reflections when working with families. It was very interactive, normally I switch off after a while, but Steve ensured each and every one of us engaged and participated with the answers. Steve explained it well, videos of examples really helped and were very informative.”
“Thank you, Steven, for one of the best training I have been on, I really love how fun you make it and this certainly embeds the learning; I am definitely going to use the 6 steps and simple double and amplified reflections. I honestly can not wait to attend future training with you.”
“I found the training challenged my practice in a really positive way. I was able to recognise that I have a tendency to try and “right a situation”. I also realised that in order to try and help I have fallen into the trap of trying to offer solutions or trying to relate of empathise in ways that do not create space for others to develop their own solutions. I now have tools in my tool box to help me achieve my goal of promoting growth in the people I meet both professionally and personally. If it is not already, this should be part of Staffs basic induction training, knowing this 20 years ago would have been a great foundation.”
“I am a new worker in SCAS and speaking to professionals, parents or the public will be the major focus of my day-to-day work. This training has helped me to reflect on how I communicate with the people with whom I work to be able to provide them the best service that we can and to ensure identify the need and any safeguarding concerns in a quick and concise way.”
“A key part of this training has reminded me to listen with intent and to acknowledge, paraphrase, reflect, probe and summarise what I hear at the same time as identifying the key points to confirm the information I am receiving. It has helped me to have a better understanding of how to phrase the words, using the simple, double and amplified approach of communication that enhance the information that I receive.”
“It will help me to understand the individual better and by doing this I will be able to help them have a better understanding of their own needs and concerns that hinder their abilities and what they would like or want to achieve, how they are going to achieve it and any pitfalls they may face. It will help the customer to feel like they are being listened to and worked with rather than to and develop the independence and confidence to challenge themselves in the future and combat any further difficulties.”
“I have been reminded to avoid some forms of communication such as ‘SMOG, ‘TED’ and ‘But’ or use at more appropriate times in the journey and using more open-ended questions such as how, what, when, where, and who. Finally, I have been reminded to use scoring 1 -10 as a form of confirmation to the customer as to how important or not important the issues are and the six step change plan as a process, tool and technique to achieve positive motivational interviewing. I found the course enjoyable and interactive. Steven has a nice style of training and a good sense of humour. He was organised and very knowledgeable about the subject area. There was a lot of information shared and good examples of how to put things into practice. I found him to be calm and approachable and he kept me focused at all times. Thank-you.”
“Steven was like a breath of fresh air. The course was engaging and very interactive. The timing of the course was just right and the quality of the materials was very good. It was lovely to use real-life case studies – and seeing what the outcomes for those families were. I have taken away a lot of skills which will be invaluable to me in in my new role I really enjoyed the course, and I would certainly attend one of Steven’s courses again in the future. Highly recommend!”
“I thought the training was very informative and delivered superbly. Steven is a very good trainer and kept engagement strong throughout the whole two days (which I find difficult over online learning). It had a good balance of group tasks combined with informing on practice. We learnt a lot of new skills which I will take forward and implement within my practice. Thank you Steven, I will keep my eye out for future training sessions which you are leading.”
“Brilliant training it was really informative and very engaging Steven got everyone involved and the group work was good. I enjoyed that we got to practice the techniques in groups and then shared back to the group to gain knowledge from others and used as a learning curve. Steven is so knowledgeable and is always to answer any questions.”
“Really interactive and interesting training. Will be useful to use in my practice. Can implement the six step change with parents. Videos – people didn’t talk at the same time as the video was playing for both days although this may just have been my internet?” (I’m afraid it was just you!)
“Thank you for the last two days it has been really interesting and informative.”
“Thank you. It was very informative and will use this in practice moving forward.”
“Thank you so much for the fantastic two day course, I learned so much and I will definitely be putting into practice what I have learned. You are an inspiration and the training films with REAL people from Staffordshire brought how the good work we are doing.”