Mastering your Recovery Coaching with Skilled Professionals

Coaching Competencies: The 3-Legged Stool i Discover the core skills that hold effective recovery coaching together: asking good questions, listening deeply, managing your own stuff, and treating the person as resourceful.

Skills Practice: Foundations i Begin practising the foundations of Motivational Interviewing, including open questions, affirmations, reflections and summaries, in ways that feel natural rather than scripted.

Mindful Coaching i Learn how presence changes a coaching conversation. Notice what is happening in yourself, quiet the urge to fix, and become more fully available to the person in front of you.

Skills Practice: Reflections i Deepen your use of reflective listening. Practise simple and complex reflections that help someone hear themselves more clearly and feel genuinely understood.

Managing Your Stuff + Treating People as Resourceful i Notice what happens when your own opinions, experience and solutions enter the conversation. Learn to recognize them while trusting the person you are coaching to find their own way forward.

Skills Practice: Change Talk i Learn to recognize change talk using Motivational Interviewing skills and respond in ways that strengthen a person's own motivation rather than adding yours.

Reflective Statements Through Active Listening i Go beyond simply hearing the words. Learn to reflect meaning, emotion and possibility in ways that help someone feel genuinely understood.

Skills Practice: Sustain Talk & Resistance i Explore what happens when someone argues for staying the same. Practise responding without correcting, confronting or getting pulled into a struggle.

Establishing Empathy i Empathy is more than being kind. Explore how coaches create the experience of being understood without assuming they know exactly what someone else feels.

Skills Practice: Ambivalence i Work with the tension of wanting change and not wanting change at the same time. Practise staying curious when someone feels genuinely stuck.

Cognitive Dissonance i “I want to change, but…” Explore what happens when someone's actions and values collide, and how a coach can work with that tension without pushing for an answer.

Skills Practice: Evoking i Move beyond information-giving and advice. Practise questions and reflections that help people uncover their own reasons, values and hopes for change.

Generative Moments i Some questions change the direction of a conversation. Learn to recognize and create moments that invite new thinking, insight and possibility.

Skills Practice: Confidence & Readiness i Explore conversations where someone wants change but doubts they can do it. Practise strengthening confidence without offering false reassurance or taking over.

Reoccurrence Prevention & Management: Part 1 i Look beyond simply avoiding relapse. Explore vulnerability, triggers, warning signs and the conditions that help someone protect and strengthen recovery.

Skills Practice: Difficult Conversations i Apply Motivational Interviewing when emotions are high, motivation is low or the conversation begins to feel challenging. Practise staying grounded, curious and collaborative.

Reoccurrence Prevention & Management: Part 2 i What happens when recovery gets shaky or substance use returns? Explore how coaches respond without judgment, panic or taking control.

Skills Practice: Integration i Bring the pieces together. Practise moving naturally between questions, reflections, affirmations and summaries without sounding like you are “doing MI.”

Designing a Life in Recovery i Recovery is not simply about stopping something. Explore how coaches help people begin imagining and building a life with meaning, connection, purpose and possibility.

Skills Practice: Coaching Fluency i Bring Motivational Interviewing together with the broader skills developed throughout the program, using it as a way of being in conversation rather than a collection of techniques.