Dale Carnegie vs Motivational Interviewing: The Difference Between Influence and True Change

In this episode of MI For Change, Dr. Monica Gilbert explores a powerful and often misunderstood comparison: Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” vs. Motivational Interviewing (MI).

While both approaches emphasize communication, connection, and influence, they differ in one critical way—the intention behind the conversation.

You’ll learn:

•  Why the concept of “influence” can feel manipulative in clinical and leadership settings 
•  The key similarities between Dale Carnegie’s principles and Motivational Interviewing 
•  The missing piece in Carnegie’s work: the Spirit of MI (partnership, autonomy, compassion, evocation)
•  How the righting reflex can damage rapport and create resistance 
•  The difference between persuading someone vs helping them find their own motivation
•  Real-life examples of how MI transforms conversations with parents, clients, and teams 

This episode will challenge the way you think about communication and help you shift from trying to convince people… to helping them convince themselves.

If you’re a therapist, BCBA, psychologist, leader, or helping professional, this is a must-listen episode to elevate your conversations and create lasting change.

Learn more about Motivational Interviewing and explore on-demand courses at www.drmonicagilbert.com

Join the MI Academy for practical training and resources — and enjoy an exclusive 15% off with code MIFORCHANGE at checkout.

📲 Connect with me on Instagram: @drmonicagilbert

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Welcome to MI for Change. If you are here today, you are probably curious on how motivational interviewing can help your conversations actually move people forward in real life and real sessions and in your leadership roles. So if you are curious, you're definitely in the right place. My name is Dr. Monica Gilbert, and I will be your host for today. And today we're going to speak about Dale Carnegie. Well, sort of. Now, Dale Carnegie wrote a book a couple years ago, and it was a book that really revolutionized a lot of the ways that leaders spoke to people and just people spoke to people in general. And I read his book because it had a very interesting title. The title of the book was How to Win Friends and Influence People. And a young psychology student, of course, was very curious on how I could influence people because that's how why I wanted to get into psychology. I wanted to learn about people and then what works in communication with them and just what works in general. So reading his book was very interesting. It always gave me this salesy vibe. And I don't know about you guys if you have ever read his book, but it also gave me this vibe of like, I don't know, it's kind of like this dark psychology where we're not really here to manipulate people to get them to do what we want them to do. And that's what the book sounded like. Either way, a lot of people read it. It was, it's been referenced by a lot of other people. And a lot of the times it has been compared to motivational interviewing. So that is why I wanted to dedicate this podcast episode to that, because there are some really cool things that he speaks about in his book. And a lot of them are based on motivational interviewing. Now, do I know if Dale Carnegie used uh some of the motivational interviewing techniques and embedded them in the book? I guess I'll never know unless I interview him. Um, which, if you're listening to this, Dale Carnegie, send me an email. Let's do this. So let's talk a little bit about his book on how to win friends and influence people. So the strategies here had to do with listening more than talking, showing genuine interest. I remember in one of the pages it said something like, when you meet a person, it's important that you look at them and that you remember their name and you call them by their name. This shows the person that you are interested in knowing about them, which that always backfires on me because I can never remember people's names. I can remember faces, but names, it is just something that I couldn't do. So I struggle a lot with that. But either way, going back to this, avoid criticism in conversations, ask questions. People like to talk about themselves. So these were some of the tenets in his book. And when you're listening to this, for those of you who know about motivational interviewing, you're probably like, this sounds very similar to MI. And indeed it does. But there's a critical difference. And the critical difference here is that when Dale Carnegie used a lot of these techniques, he didn't mention the spirit of motivational interviewing. And when you think about the spirit of motivational interviewing, the spirit has to do with following your pace. So building a partnership with that person. Now, if we are manipulating them, if we're trying to get them to do what we want them to do, we have a hierarchy model. So we're not really meeting together to work with them towards a shared goal. Also, autonomy, realizing that people will do what they want to do at the end of the day and really honoring people's autonomy is important. Compassion, having compassion for people, and lastly, evoking those ideas from them. So not just throwing the ideas or like, you know, getting buy-in, a very cold cut from them, but actually evoking these ideas from them. Some of the similarities, going back to those similarities with Dale Carnegie and MI, is avoiding arguing and also showing appreciation. So let others talk for themselves and ask questions instead of giving orders. So those things are are very, very much like what we see in the spirit of motivational interviewing. The issue with Dale Carnegie's book is that it wasn't emphasized. The rest of the skills were emphasized and we forgot the spirit of MI. When we are using motivational interviewing with our staff, when we are using it with our supervisees, with the parents that we're working with, with the clients, we have to always remember to bring the spirit of MI with us through every conversation. So these ideas encourage respectful communication instead of confrontation, which was really groundbreaking. And the open-ended questions, affirmations, and reflections, again, are very useful, but we always have to bring the spirit of motivational interviewing with us. And for those of you who are completely, absolutely new to this podcast, motivational interviewing was developed by Miller and later on redacted by Miller and Rodnick. And this is when they started to include this spirit of motivational interviewing. So we definitely want to influence people in some way, in some positive way, but in a way where they're able to make the decisions by themselves. Now, when we look at influence versus evocation, Carnegie asks, how can I persuade someone effectively? Motivational interviewing, on the other hand, asks, what does this person already care about? And how can I help them articulate it? Instead of persuading, MI focuses on evoking change talk. Instead of convincing someone, we help them convince themselves. And when people hear their own motivation out loud, change becomes more likely. So a quick example imagine a parent who isn't following through with behavior strategies that you gave them for their child. A Carnegie style interaction may focus on helping the parent see why the therapist's recommendations make sense. Now, an MI approach might sound different. It may be something like tell me what you've noticed about your child's behavior lately. What concerns you the most about how things are going? What would you like to see change over the next few months? So instead of pushing that advice, we create a space for the parent's motivation to emerge. Now, we're not pushing them towards our agenda. We are just reflecting and asking the questions that are obvious, may not be obvious to them, but these are things that we are seeing in the environment. Perhaps the parent doesn't see this problem behavior as something that will have negative consequences in the future. So what are we doing? We are simply tying it together and we're showing them, well, if things keep going on like this, what do you think is the worst case scenario? How do you think little Jimmy is going to respond to others? Or how is he going to have his needs met if we're not working on these functional communication skills? So again, you're helping the parent brainstorm. And also you're giving them the space to say, well, that's not really important for me. And I don't think anything bad will come from it. And then that's okay. When we're looking more at the Carnegie kind of style, even if the parent says, well, that's not important for me and he'll be okay. And he's gonna have, I don't know, a nanny forever. So he won't have to functionally communicate, let's say, then that style urges you to continue to push. And what happens when we as therapists continue to push? We get frustrated, we usually don't get anywhere. Parents tend it tends to backfire because parents are now like, no, this is exactly what I want. I'm gonna rebel against what you're telling me even more. And it just leads to this discord in the relationship that again doesn't resolve the issue. In motivational interviewing, we are allowing all of those different things to happen. So the parent may say, like, yes, I totally see this. And now I see that if we continue this, behaviors will become worse. So we have to do something about it. On the other hand, they may just say, like, no, this is not going to be a problem in the future. And that's okay. We stop talking about that then, right? But that also um prevents us therapists from feeling burnt out because the parent has to see the value of it before we even move forward. So, again, why does this matter for therapists? So, as therapists, behavior analysts, as clinicians, we often fall into this writing reflex, which is the urge to correct, to teach, or to persuade. So, Carnegie helps us communicate more kindly, but MI helps us collaborate with autonomy. And that is something that I want you to take from this episode. Collaborate with autonomy. Isn't that beautifully said? It reminds us that people are not problems to solve, they are partners in change. We are working with them. We're never doing parent training to parents, we are doing parent training with parents, which makes a difference. So if you ever read Dale Carnegie and think this sounds a lot like motivational interviewing, you're probably correct. But just remember that MI takes those communication skills and anchors them into something deeper. We are respecting autonomy and the belief in the person's capacity for change. And it really comes from that respect. If you are cultivating relationships that are based on respect, then you're never going to go wrong because you're cultivating relationships that are based on respect. And that shifts from influencing to evoking. And it is really what makes MI so powerful. I've told you guys about this encounter that I had with one of the participants in one of my conferences. I was doing a conference in, I think it was, I always forget if it's in Haba, in Hawaii, or one of these conferences that I was invited to go speak to. And this was very early on. I believe it was maybe the second conference that I was invited to speak in. And after my PowerPoint slides, I asked who had questions. And one of the participants, she was also a BCBA, stood up and said, Well, this presentation sounds great, but how do I know that I'm not just influencing people to do what I want them to do instead of encouraging them and instead of doing all these things and really being ethical in the way that I do it? And I started to think and I was like, oh my gosh, I have never really presented on the spirit of motivational interviewing. I have been so focused on explaining the techniques, how to embed MI into the fields of ABA. And I have left our left out a very important piece, which is a spirit of motivational interviewing. And then I went on to explain even further how the spirit of motivational interviewing is very similar to our ethics. So one of the reasons why we don't, or one of the things we have in our field that prevents us from becoming these mad scientists, are our ethical code. It is our ethical code. And if you're a psychologist, you have ethical code as well. So this is what outlines how far we can go because we absolutely know that we can use ABA and manipulate and influence and you know, do these reinforcement strategies and all these things. We can really use it for that dark science. But what prevents us from going there are the ethics that we have to follow. So the spirit of motivational interviewing is very similar. And this is what keeps us grounded and what allows us to come back to am I using my writing reflex and am I imposing my will into onto this person or am I respecting what they're saying? Are we collaborating? Are we working as partners? So I hope that you are able to use some of these things to your value. I hope that you're able to really think about this a little bit more when you're in a session with your client and always carry the spirit of motivational interviewing with you. Definitely, if you want to read Carnegie, I'm sure that if you read it now after listening to this, you will see it with different eyes. It is really an interesting book. I'm not gonna say it's that an interesting book. Um, but definitely just take things with a grain of salt like everything else. And I hope to see you back on my next episode of MI for Change. Thank you for sticking with me throughout this episode. Thank you for joining me on today's episode of MI for Change. If you're ready to keep growing your motivational interviewing skills, I'd love to invite you to explore my MI Academy, where you'll find a full library of on demand courses designed to help you put MI into practice with confidence. You can learn more at www.drmonicagilbert.com. Until next time.