Author ⧫ Consultant ⧫ Dietitian ⧫ Trainer

LESS FIXING; MORE LISTENING

As a registered dietitian, I was trained to believe that knowledge is what changes behavior. That if we tell people what to do, they will do it. And that couldn’t be further from the truth.

When I moved to Portland, Oregon in 1999, my first job was at a research center where Bill Miller & Steve Rollnick had both just spent time during their sabbaticals, and this is where my training in Motivational Interviewing (MI) began.

Over the past 24 years, I’ve been learning and growing with some of the best trainers in the Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers, including Steve Rollnick, Denise Earnst, Theresa Moyers, and Steve Berg-Smith.

In the fourth edition of Motivational Interviewing, Miller and Rollnick define MI as “a particular way of talking with people about change and growth to strengthen their own motivation and commitment.”

I spend about half of my time facilitating trainings to introduce healthcare professionals to the theory, principles and spirit of MI. Participants are always guided through a sequence of learning activities to explore and shape counseling practice behavior, and to begin a process for developing proficiency in MI.

“If we make satisfying conversations and human connection the focus of our health care delivery development, if we make connecting people and having them talk to each other the single most important metric by which we judge all of our efforts, we will get everything else we want our health care system to be. Rich conversation is the pathway to quality, to efficiency, to affordability.”

— Maggie Breslin of Mayo Clinic

Dana Sturtevant, M.S., R.D. (she/her) is the co-founder of the Center for Body Trust and the co-author of the book Reclaiming Body Trust. As a registered dietitian, she helps people divest from diet culture, explore what it means to be embodied, and move toward more compassionate forms of radical care. Her work as a speaker, educator, and trainer focuses on humanizing health care, advancing health equity, and advocating for food and body sovereignty.

As a sought-after speaker and writer, Dana is a champion for weight-inclusive models of care and offers supervision, training, and consultation for helping professionals and health care organizations. Dana’s work has been featured in The New York Times, Scientific American, Health, Self, Real Simple, Huffington Post, and on the TEDx stage.

For more about my work at Center for Body Trust, visit CenterForBodyTrust.com | Download my CV here