🧭 Bonus Module — The Stages of Change and How MI Fits | MI Course
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Free Course by Everything IFS Academy | Therapeutic Modalities Series
Bonus Module — The Stages of Change and How MI Fits
Motivational Interviewing is routinely mistaken for the stages of change, and the confusion is understandable: the two grew up in the same era, in the same fields, working the same problem, and they are quoted in the same breath so often that many people believe the stages are part of MI. They are not. They are two different things, made by different people, and they happen to fit together so beautifully that helpers have been pairing them for forty years. This bonus lesson teaches the famous model properly, credits its actual creators, and then does the thing that makes the whole lesson worth its place in an MI course: it shows exactly where one ends, the other begins, and why the seam between them is so useful.
The Transtheoretical Model
The stages of change belong to the Transtheoretical Model, developed by psychologists James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente beginning in the late 1970s. Their starting question was refreshingly humble: instead of asking which therapy was right, they studied how people actually change, including the enormous number who change with no therapy at all. Smokers who quit on their own were an early focus, and what the research kept showing was that change is not an event. It is a progression through recognizable stages, and people in different stages need entirely different things.
That is what the model is: a map of readiness. It does not tell anyone how to talk to a person about change; it tells them where the person currently is on the road. The name, for the curious, means "across theories": Prochaska and DiClemente built it to describe change itself, regardless of which school of therapy, or none, was involved.
The Five Stages
Precontemplation. Change is not on the radar. The person is not considering it, not weighing it, and often does not experience the behavior as a problem at all, whatever the people around them experience. Devon's brother-in-law Ray, whose family winces every time he gets behind the wheel after two beers at the cookout, is in precontemplation: ask him about his drinking and he will answer, sincerely, that he doesn't have one. The essential teaching about this stage is that it is not lying and it is not stupidity; it is a genuine position, and pressure applied here produces defense, not movement.
Contemplation. The two-minds stage: the person now sees the issue and genuinely feels both sides of it, wanting change and wanting things as they are, often for a long time. Jordan through most of this course, hating the smoking and leaning on it in the same paragraph, has been a contemplator. This stage is where an enormous share of humanity lives on any given subject, and people can remain here for months or years, which the model treats as ordinary rather than shameful.
Preparation. Getting ready: the person has tipped toward change and is making small moves in its direction. Intending to act soon, telling someone, gathering information, taking the first quiet steps. Priya pricing the online program and rehearsing the admissions call was preparation in motion. The stage often looks unimpressive from outside, which is exactly why its small signals are so routinely missed.
Action. The visible work: the person is actively doing the new thing. The membership used, the cigarettes gone, the budget running. This is the only stage the outside world reliably applauds, and one of the model's quiet gifts is the reminder that action is a middle chapter, not the whole book: everything before it was also change, and everything after it decides whether the change survives.
Maintenance. Keeping the change alive after the novelty and the applause fade: month four of the routine, the second holiday season without the habit, the point where the new way of living has to hold up on ordinary, unmotivated Tuesdays. Maintenance gets no parades and does most of the deciding about how the story ends.
Recycling, Not Failing
Prochaska and DiClemente's most humane finding is that almost nobody walks the stages once, in order, and stays done. The real shape of change is a spiral: people move through the stages, slip back, and come around again, often several times, and each lap tends to start further along than the last, because the person returns carrying everything the previous attempt taught them.
The model's word for this is recycling, and the framing is the teaching: a return trip is a lap, not a collapse. The smoker back at contemplation after six clean months is not at zero; she is a contemplator who now knows precisely which situations took her down, which is a different and better-equipped contemplator than she was a year ago. People who understand the spiral in advance treat the slip as a bend in a long road. People expecting a straight line treat the same slip as proof the road goes nowhere, and quit the journey instead of the lap.
Two Different Things That Fit Together
Now the seam, and the payoff of the whole lesson. The Transtheoretical Model is a map of readiness: it tells you where the person is. Motivational Interviewing is a way of talking: it tells you how to be with them there. One is a diagnosis of position; the other is a method of conversation. Neither contains the other, neither requires the other, and each is exactly what the other lacks, which is why the pairing became legendary: the map without the method knows where everyone stands and has nothing to say to them, and the method without the map talks beautifully while occasionally aiming at the wrong stage entirely.
Paired, they read like this:
Precontemplation calls for engagement and acceptance above all. There is no motivation to draw out yet and no plan to build, and pushing creates the exact defense the stage is famous for. What reaches a precontemplator is the stance of Module 3 and the listening of Module 8: being the one person on the subject who is safe to talk to, so that when the radar blip finally appears, it appears in your conversation.
Contemplation is evoking's home turf. The two-minds stage is precisely the terrain the whole middle of this course was built for, and the drawing-out craft of Module 13 does its finest work here, where both sides are alive and the person's own case for change is waiting to be spoken.
Preparation and action lean on planning. A person making small moves and a person mid-effort both need the readiness reading and the structure of Module 18, and the recycling spiral is why that lesson's replanning teaching matters so much: the lap around is normal, and the plan is a living document.
Maintenance runs on affirmation and the long game. The unglamorous months are carried by accurately named strength, Module 7's craft, and by the standing stance of Module 19: the change stays alive best around people who see the person, not the project.
One map, one method, one seam. Keep them distinct in your mind, credit each to its makers, and use them together for what each does best: the stages tell you where someone is standing, and MI is how you stand there with them.
Below this lesson, you'll find a Motivational Interviewing practice built around one of the skills you just learned, along with a few ways to begin noticing and practicing it in everyday life this week.
Motivational Interviewing Practice: Reading the Map
The model becomes useful the moment you can place real people on it accurately, including yourself, so this practice is a staging exercise.
It takes about ten minutes with paper and a pen.
Write the five stages down the side of a page: Precontemplation, Contemplation, Preparation, Action, Maintenance.
Take the change you have worked with through this course's practices and place yourself honestly on the map. Write one line of evidence for your placement: what you are actually doing or saying that marks the stage, not what you intend.
Now think of two people in your life who are somewhere on a change of their own, and place each of them, with one line of evidence each. Be careful with the first stage: precontemplation is a position, not a flaw, and placing someone there is information, not a verdict.
For each of the three placements, write what that stage calls for, in your own words, one line each: safety and listening, drawing out, structure, or steady acknowledgment. Notice where your instinct has been offering the wrong stage's medicine, like handing a plan to a contemplator.
Finish with the spiral: recall one change of your own that took more than one lap, and write a single sentence about what the second lap knew that the first one didn't. Keep that sentence somewhere; it is the model's whole heart in your own handwriting.
This Week
When someone frustrates you by "not changing" this week, privately stage them first, and notice how the frustration changes shape once the stage has a name.
Listen for one piece of preparation in the wild, the small unglamorous move someone mentions in passing, and mark it as the stage it is.
If a plan of yours or anyone's slips, practice saying "lap, not collapse" before saying anything else.
Disclaimer:
Everything IFS Academy is an independent educational platform and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the IFS Institute. While we strive for accuracy, errors can occur, and users are encouraged to cross-reference critical information. These courses, lessons, skills, and practices are offered for educational and self-reflection purposes only. They do not constitute therapy, mental health treatment, clinical training, or crisis support, and they should not be used as a substitute for professional mental health care.
Crisis Support: 🚨
If you are experiencing a mental health crisis, feel unsafe, feel at risk of harming yourself or someone else, or feel too overwhelmed to safely use self-directed practices, please pause this material and reach out for immediate support. Contact a licensed mental health professional, call or text 988 in the U.S. or Canada, or use your local emergency or crisis resources.
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