So, hi everyone, my name's Owen Atkinson from Dairy Veterinary Consultancy, and I am pleased to be here today to talk to you about a subject which is very close to my heart. How do we get farmers to do what we want, which is a little bit of a tongue in cheek title. I'm going to explain why, but another title is Essential communication Skills for the Farm vet.
Why do I say that's a little bit of a tongue in cheek title? Well, because who are we to get farmers to do what we want? Really, we're just to help farmers to get them to do what they want.
So that's why it's a tongue in cheek title, . I'll ask this question. In your work with farmers, your farm clients, have you ever felt like you're banging your head against a brick wall?
Well, if you have, you're in good company. I speak to a lot of farm vets, and I know that it's a very common feeling, and it's certainly a feeling that I have from time to time, and I had earlier on in my career, and perhaps after the first couple of years of being in practise, it's very exciting. You're learning new skills, but then after a little while, you do get a little bit perhaps.
Oh, I don't know, a little bit, er, low morale, perhaps, it gets you down when you'll find yourself, er, saying the same thing to the same farms year in, year out, and yet nothing seems to change. And that led me some years ago to apply for a Nuffield travel scholarship because I thought there must be a better way of doing this, you know, we, you know, we must get better as vets in just trying to help farmers move forwards with, with their, with their farms, and I applied for a travel scholarship, and this is my title at the time, the role of the vet in Knowledge Transfer in the dairy Industry. I got to travel around the world.
I went to America. I went to New Zealand. I went to the Netherlands, and that helped me understand how other farm vets were finding this challenge.
And I look at that title now and, and I kind of cringe because actually at the time I felt that it was all about knowledge transfer. I felt that if farmers only knew what I know, then surely they would do the right thing. So in other words, it was about Explaining better to them the things that I knew so that they could make the right decisions and I've got a little picture there of me with my megaphone talking to my farmers and of course I cringe because that actually wasn't the right approach.
It isn't about knowledge transfer. It might feel like it's all about helping farmers understand a problem, but, but it, it isn't the right approach. When I travelled around the world and I met lots of farm vets, dairy vets, and, and was keen to learn how they were approaching this problem.
And I found that I was in good company because it was a problem that was not just felt by me or by vets in the UK, but it's a problem that was felt by farm vets worldwide, and they said, once you've cracked it, Owen, come back and tell us how to do it. Now I've evolved, I guess, I've been on a big learning journey to coin that phrase, hopefully that won't make you cringe, of my own, to understand more about how change happens and how we can be better communicators, and I now do a lot of CPD in this area, and if you're interested in really sort of doing this a bit more justice than perhaps what I might be able to do in this, in this relatively short webinar. Then please do reach out and, and see what I might be able to offer you.
I do training for individual vet practises that's bespoke, but I also run every year a 4 day herd health leadership course, and I put this up not just for blatant, self promotion, it's really just to explain the concept that actually I use now, rather than knowledge transfer, I see it as leadership, it's, it, the, the skills that I, Have developed and still continue to develop and more leadership skills. So what I mean by that is that you're leading farmers to change, and it's quite a mind shift. So In essence, I now understand that I can't put what is inside my head into the head of someone else.
It's not as simple as just doing more, more knowledge transfer, doing more education, explaining to farmers the way that I want them to see the world. It just doesn't work. However much I might like to be able to have farmers understanding what I understand and seeing the world as I, as I see it.
We all have different, we all think differently because we've all led very different lives, and to kind of just jump up and down as the vet and say, no, no, no, no, I've got the answers here and I understand these biologies and the science behind why your cows are becoming ill or whatever it is, and it isn't enough, I'm afraid it isn't enough to change opinion. It can have some influence, but it isn't enough. So we all have these different perspectives.
In NLP NLP stands for neurolinguistic programming, which is an area I've become, again interested in and had a little bit of training on myself to help me understand more about this world of communication and behaviour change. The concept is described by we all have a different map of the world, and that's because we've all had different experiences, er and that goes back to childhood, it goes back to very deep seated. Deep seated things, so, so I mean the, the picture on the screen should be self-explanatory, but our map of the world as the UK residents is perhaps the one on the left, and actually this is the map that you see in books and everything like that, but probably if you lived in New Zealand, the, the map on the right hand side of the screen.
Is probably more relevant to you because that's where you've been brought up and that's your homeland. And Oh Map of the world, our perspectives on anything, any, any herd health issue, is derived from our own education, from, from our parents, from our friends, from our next door farmers, from what we read in, in, in farming press, but actually one of the biggest things that will influence our perspective is our own hard won experience. And if I can illustrate that with an example.
For example, if you did persuade a farmer to use a vaccine that you hadn't otherwise persuaded the farmer to use before, and they use that vaccine in a herd of cows and the following week two abortions happen, you will never, or you will, you will struggle to ever disassociate the two abortions in the farmer's herd from the act of vaccination. So that farmer will forever have that perspective that, oh, I use this vaccination, it causes abortion. Now of course it may well have been just a total coincidence, and that might be your view, but you will struggle to change the farmer's view because that's their own hard-won experience.
So I know that telling does not work. There is a place for telling, and we'll come on to that on different communication styles and, and where the place is for each of those styles, but I can't simply tell. A farmer, someone to create more space for their cows or to use less antibiotics or to feed colostrum better to their calves or to mobility score their herd to detect lame cows sooner.
All of those things I believe strongly will make a farm better, but I, it doesn't work just to simply tell a farmer that, they've got to believe it and see it for themselves in order for them to implement the change. So There is a temptation perhaps to sort of throw your hands up in the air. Well, OK, so I can't tell a farmer anything.
So, so how do I make a difference? Where do I go with this? How can I, how can I influence a farmer to make the changes that I feel would benefit them?
Well, it's really by adopting a coaching approach, and that's, that's where this webinar is going to go. It's where it's going to lead you really into understanding a little bit more about this coaching approach so that you can help people see what is beyond their own hurdles. We all have our own hurdles and barriers into why we don't do something, and if we can help people understand what's beyond their hurdles, then they can effectively remove those hurdles for themselves.
Only they can remove the hurdles, the barriers that prevents change. So in terms of communication style, look at the, well, look at the image on the left because it's quite a nice just illustration, I guess. You've got this kind of push pull effect.
OK, now look at the diagram on the graphic on the right of the screen. The kind of push approach is a very directive approach, so telling would be the most directive way of communicating on, on this scale of communication. And if you go right up to the other end of the scale, the non-directive pull approach, then the most non-directive communication style is listening, and it's listening to understand.
And then coming down towards the directive, we've got, we can reflect, we can paraphrase, we can summarise, we can ask questions that raise awareness. And all those things in blue there, they're all, they're all associated with this, with this coaching approach, this non-directive approach, this pull, this helping people solve their own problems, and then we get to the white text where we can start making suggestions, we can give feedback, we can offer guidance, we can give advice, we can instruct, and of course we can tell. The trick is to be very flexible with our communication styles because there isn't a right or a wrong on any of those, none of those, none of those, types of communication are wrong and none are right.
If we could be flexible and make sure we're using the. Whole range, that's probably the best thing we can do. Just the research would suggest that farm vets tend to use a more directive approach.
In their comfort zone, i.e., that's their kind of, that's their default communication style with farmers rather than this, this less directive listening to understand approach.
So it's about trying to build your skills where you feel you have the need to build those skills, and the research would suggest strongly that the skills that we need to build or we would benefit most from is this non-directive approach. So this non-directive approach is sometimes called a transformational, transformational communication style. I Do a lot of training in, in, in, in leadership, agri- leadership and leadership within the farming in an agricultural setting, and, there's many different, there's many different leadership styles, er but there is a well-known kind of distinction between transformational leadership and transactional leadership, and the transformational leadership is perhaps exemplified by Jurgen Klopp on the left there, whether you're a Liverpool, Fan or not, obviously Liverpool's going through a little bit of a rough time at the moment.
I'm not a Liverpool supporter, so I just, just happen to know that they're not going through a very rough, a very smooth time at the moment, and that may or may not be because they've had a change of football coach. But Jurgen Klopp, one of his kind of, well recognised kind of approaches is that he's a very supportive, listening kind of coach. He exemplifies perhaps that transformational, that.
Informational style, it's sort of standing shoulder to shoulder with the players really building them up, understanding their perspective, helping them to be better people, better versions of themselves, whereas the image on the right perhaps exemplifies that more transactional approach, the sergeant major who's just giving orders and telling people what to do, and there are plenty of football coaches that perhaps fall into that style. So the transformational non-directive. Communication style is again where I'm going to go with this with this webinar.
So I'm going to throw a few bits of science at you. There is a huge amount of science around communication change, behaviour change and communication. Obviously it's it's a huge area, and I can only really just scratch the surface for you.
I'm going to start by looking at two different behaviour change models. There are loads of behaviour change models. These two I really enjoy thinking about when I'm helping farmers make changes.
I find them easy to understand. They're kind of, they're very different models, which is why I'm going to introduce these two for you. And the first one of these two models is called the De Clement and Prochaska's Trans theoretical cycle of chain.
They just love a good title like that. It gives it a bit of kudos perhaps because it makes it sound very, very scientific, but it's been developed by two well known and established psychologists, and it is quite an old fashioned model, this actually. It was developed in the 1970s, I believe.
It's a decades-long model and it was, it's used in many different healthcare settings, but one of the early adoptions of this model was to help people get off heroin. To recover from heroin addiction, and I love to remember that because I like to think, well, crikey, if it is possible to help people give up heroin. Then surely it is possible to help a farmer just make a small change on their farm, and this model helps to understand what's needed.
So let's look at an example. Let's work through an example of of a change that you, you might want to encourage a farmer to make using this cycle of change model. And let's just consider helping a farmer to ensure that their calves are always reared in pairs or groups.
And this is now a, if you're listening from the UK, you'll be familiar with the red tractor, which is a farm assurance scheme, and it's now a red tractor, or it has been for quite a few years, a red tractor requirement. If you're farm assured by a red tractor, and most dairy farms are, then it's a requirement that you must rear your calves in, in pairs or groups, not really quite specific on the age for which you begin to do that, but ideally you, you, you rear them in pairs. For at least or or or groups from a very early age, and there are some known benefits for that, and yet, it was perhaps the norm, and it was something certainly the vets encouraged, myself included, when I was a, er a more recent graduate vet.
To rear calves individually because the thought was rearing them in single pens reduces the spread of disease, pneumonia, and scour, and therefore has health benefits, but the more recent science demonstrates them different. So that's quite a change because farmers have been told for many, many years, oh, you've got to rear your your calves singly, and now all of a sudden those vets are going going around telling people, Oh no, no, you mustn't rear them singly, you've got to rear them in pairs. Then there's quite a change that needs to occur there.
So for any change, and that's the change we're going to look at for this example, we start with the status quo, the doing, the doing phase. It's the here and now. So we're going to say in this example, the doing phase for this particular farm in our mind's eye is rearing calves in individual pens.
Well, for any change to happen, the first thing that's got to happen, the first thing that's got to be in place is it's got to be a concept that there is a different way of doing it, an idea. So in this case, it's the idea that, oh, you know, rearing calves in, in, in pairs is something we could do. And you need to develop that idea.
You need to work out how you're going to do it. So, well, OK, so. I've got individual pens.
Can I, can I, can I put two pens together and create an outside space to join two pens? I'm thinking calf Hodges, you'd perhaps be able to picture that situation where calf Hodges, you can buy actual kind of equipment to. That's purposes purpose made, purpose built to link two hutches together to make a, to make a pair rearing situation, for example, but that might be, that might be part of your planning.
But you've got other, other aspects of planning that you might need to buy new feeders instead of individual teat feeders. You might need to buy pair pair feeders and then pair, pair teat feeders. And then you think, oh gosh, well I used to just put the bucket in front of the calf and just let them get on and drink, drink, and I'd leave them to it.
But now there's 2 calves or 3 calves in the pen. What happens if one calf drinks faster than the other one and knocks the other ones out of the way? So there's a lot of planning on how you might want to develop this idea of pair rearing.
And then at some point you're going to have to give it a go, and that's the experimenting phase. And there's fine tuning that often happens in experimenting. I would say change the word often to always.
There's very few changes that occur that someone embarks upon. Think of a change that you might have to embarked upon yourself where you decide to do something, you give it a go, and it works full time. It just, that's not life.
You need to fine tune and work out a way to make it work. But if you do make it work, then you complete the cycle because our new status quo, our new doing phase, is this new, this new way of doing something, this new behaviour, and in this case it would be a farmer successfully pair rearing calves. Now the problem is with any change is the current status quo, so in this case, Rearing calves in single patterns.
It kind of acts like a big magnet. There's always this, this, this, there's always a resistance to change. There's always a, there's always a thing that drags us back to our comfort zone, the here and now of what we do.
So this drag back from the magnet, magnetic drag back to what we're currently doing occurs all the way around the cycle. In the first instance, . There are the dreamers are losers people, and you'll be able to think of farmers in this, in this, in this category.
These are farmers who don't have the ideas. They don't even allow those fresh, fresh ideas into their mind. Almost they're very resistant to any innovation.
These farmers will be the ones that farm as they have always farmed. They probably farm as their father or mother farmed before them and maybe even their grandfather and grandmother before that. We all know farmers in this category.
These are the dreamers are losers. They don't even get started. Then we have The other drag back is a little bit dragged back to the status quo is a bit further along the cycle.
This is when a fresh idea is suggested and you get a get real response, and it's a reflex response. I often see this as a fear response. Actually, there probably is a rise in adrenaline with the get real response, and you'll hear this, or you'll come across it when you hear farmers saying this, get real.
Do you think I'm made of money or get real, do you think I've got time to do that? Get real, do you think I'm going to put calves in together, they'll they'll . That won't work, OK, it's just a, almost an illogical reflex, rejection of the idea.
Then let's assume we get a little bit further around the cycle and actually no, the idea has landed and there's a bit of planning that goes in and a bit of thought and a bit of logic. But this happens Catastrophic fantasies. We all have catastrophic fantasies which are also known as performance limiting thoughts, depending on what kind of field of psychology you're looking at, people call them different things.
I don't know if any of you may have come across Brene Brown, who is a, oh, she's, she is an American psychologist and she talks a lot about changed behaviour and communication. Brene Brown, if you want to read her books or listen to a podcasts, it's quite interesting. She works in this field.
I'm She talks about catastrophic fantasies as being a shitty first draughts, that's a, that's a term for it. In other words, we let our mind just run away with these different ideas that aren't really going to happen. So a catastrophic fancy that I would come across quite often with this specific example of a farmer wanting to think about pair rearing is.
All my calves will get navel ill because they'll start sucking each other's navels. Now that hasn't happened. It's a catastrophic fantasy, so people don't progress with their plan, and they never even get into experimenting phase.
And then finally we've got. Here at this point where we're sort of giving it a go. But I give up.
It doesn't work. You give up at the first hurdle. Like I said, it's not real life for things to happen the first time when you, when you try a new change, it's very easy to give up.
And so you go back to the original status quo, rearing calves individually. Maybe be that, you know, I know the first couple of calves that you try and rear together, it is true that one calf stole all the milk from the other calf and that, and it didn't work particularly well. It's easy to give up.
So where do we fit in? What can we do as the vets? Well, the answer to that is really understanding where a farmer is at, understanding some of the challenges that they are facing, and rather than give solutions, it's to ask the right questions.
And in this first stage, trying to get an idea into farmers' minds, this is the kind of question that you might think about. It's this very open question. They're all open questions, but the question is, what do you know about?
What do you know about pair rearing? And that's. Allows the farmer to say, well, I know this or that or the other.
You understand where they're coming from. You get to understand their perspective, but it also allows them to give you an invitation to give them some information, and that's quite different if you're invited to give some information, that's quite different to giving unsolicited advice. So it may well be the farmer says, Well, I've heard about it, but actually I don't really see how it works.
I don't understand much about it or whatever, and that's your invitation to then give some advice. So what do you know about gets people started off. Now this one here.
There is something that is important to avoid, and the thing that we have to avoid is the advice giving trap. So when a farmer is in this get real phase, they're rejecting an idea because they're just in panic mode. The worst thing we can do is give them logical reasons why that's not what we want them to do, rather than give them logical reasons why they should progress the idea.
So we need to avoid the advice, advice giving trap. I will reference motivational interviewing later on in this presentation, and I'll come back to that because it's an important aspect of motivational interviewing too. So instead of trying to give advice and be logical, because the farmers are not in a logical space yet, this is the logical space when they get to planning phase.
They're not at planning phase. Then the question that we might offer is this one. It's called a forward thinking open question.
Forwards thinking because it gets a farmer to think beyond the hurdles that they're putting in their mind, and it's, how would you feel if you had calves that were even better than they are now? How would you feel if your growth rate of your calves was even stronger than your current performance? How would you feel if your calves A more concentrate.
How would you feel if your calves actually had a personality change because they're reared in pairs, so they were easier to milk when they come into the milking herd? You're throwing a question. That allows the farmer to think beyond and get over this or it always distracts them from this adrenaline filled.
Fear response. And you often, if you ask this question, if you remember to ask it and you, you ask it in the right context, you'll often see a farmer smile, because actually you're putting their imagination into a place where you want it to be. You're, you're wanting them to imagine these sunny uplands of, of, er, their scenario, their situation, when, when they've solved the problem or when they're in a better position.
So it's a forward thinking open question. What question can we ask to get beyond this bit, the catastrophic fantasies. Just get a farmer just to give it a go.
Well, here's a question. What's a good first step to take, because we want this barrier to be as low as possible to give it a go. Allow the farmer to suggest what a first good step to take is.
I can, I can guess that in this case it might be, well, let's try it with the next few calves that are born. Let's just, let's just not go all in and go out and buy a whole new calf rearing system. Let's just see how we go.
We adopt it, we'll, we'll adapt a couple of individual cultures that we've got already and, and, and just the next few calves that are born will pair up. And put together How about this one here? What's a good question to ask?
Well This is one of the hardest questions. For me to ask in real life, and it's, how did you get on. And it's a hard question.
Because I don't want to hear. The reality which is a farmers' Possibly not got on very well. I need to ask it though, because it shows that I care, and if I care, the farmers like to have cared.
Usually when I ask this question, they've not done anything. It's like, how do you, how do you get on? It's like, not actually, well, I tried, I tried putting cards together and, you know, the, the first pair got navel ill and I, I don't like the idea.
It, it's not that. It's more like, oh, I've not actually done it yet. So it holds the farmer accountable too, because I'm interested.
And by showing that interest, It helps the farmer think, oh well, if Owen cares whether I'm doing this, then I'd better care. I don't want Owen to have to ask that question again next week, and I've still not done it. So it's a very, very important question.
It also allows you to help the farmer return to the planning stage if there's some fine tuning that needs to be done. You know, OK, I've tried it, Owen, didn't work, and OK, that's fine. Let's see how you did it.
What can we change? What can make it better next time? So it's a real good check in question.
So You'll notice there that the approach is not ever really along that cycle of change. It's never kind of to offer solutions. It's never to give advice.
It's never to give your opinion. It's really just asking the right questions at the right time, and they're all open questions. I'm guessing because it's kind of communication 1.01 really.
I'm guessing you kind of most people who listen to this, if not everyone will understand the difference between open and closed questions, and open questions are more powerful questions to ask. They begin with what, why, how, who, when, where. They cannot be answered yes or no.
They're more probing questions. They're more thought provoking questions, and that's why they're higher value questions. It's not to say that closed questions and never have a place, of course they do, but it's habit forming to ask open questions and it's a good habit to get into.
You're coming from a place of curiosity. Genuinely, you want to understand. You want us to understand your farmer's perspective and you want to understand why they do something like they do, and you want to understand why or what fears they have about the changes, and you want to understand, well, they've tried something and what were the challenges.
You're just coming from a place of curiosity. Now asking the question is only not even one half, it's probably 1 quarter of it. The other 3 quarters is remembering to listen closely to the answers.
And by doing that you position yourself to be a thinking partner. The point about asking questions and the point about being a coach is you unlock thought pathways that the farmer would not have had. By themselves, farmers are no different to you or I.
They'll be thinking about their problems. All the way through the day in different aspects, they'll be driving their tractor thinking it'll be churning around in their mind, they'll be waking up in the night like we do sometimes and have these, these worries and thoughts and, and, and, and, and, and, and thinking going on. It's not like people don't think without a coach, but what a coach does is you unlock new pathways.
Of thought by asking the questions and listening to the answer because that allows people to speak out loud. When people speak out loud, they kind of process their thoughts more clearly than just when it's all internal. So the listening is critical to that, and I love this term becoming a thinking partner.
I referenced before Brene Brown, who I would recommend you to read some of her books, listen to her podcasts, and just and just find out about. I'm going to now recommend someone else, another American author, authoress called Nancy Cline, and Nancy Kline has kind of coined this expression of being a thinking partner, and she's written some great stuff in this, and she's got a book called Time to Think. It doesn't take, it wouldn't take you that long to read it.
It's a great book. It really opens your mind. It opened my mind onto this concept of becoming a thinking partner, how it works, understanding how it works, and understanding the process.
But it begins with asking open questions and listening closer to the answers. So coaching is less about questioning. It is more about, it is more listening.
Questioning is important because it opens it up, but listening is where the magic happens. And We listen on 4 levels. This is like a Russian doll.
We spend most of our listening. In a distracted mode. And never is this more true than when you're a farm vet, and we kid ourselves as farm vets all the time that we're being effective advisers as we're having conversations at the same time as Doing a caesarean.
4 o'clock in the morning PDing a row of heifers. Doing the routine fertility visit, we're there every fortnight and we're scanning a line of 20 cows, right? If you're having a conversation.
Whilst doing these things, you're in distracted listening mode by definition. You're in distracted listening mode, so you're kind of listening, you know, the words are going in. You could possibly remember some of the words if someone asked you to remember those words and write them down straight away, but actually your focus is not 100% on what the person is saying.
So Russian doll, we go the next layer in. We use filtered listening. And filtered listening is when someone is talking to us.
And we hear the words. And we're thinking, Well, that, that's very interesting, but if it was me, I would do this. That's filtered listening.
Filtered listening is applying judgement to the words that we hear. Again, we do it all the time. It's kind of normal behaviour, by the way.
You're not wrong to be a distracted listener or a filtered listener. It's kind of normal. It just isn't the most helpful type of listening.
So fed listening is when we're applying judgement or, yeah, just leave it at that, applying judgement to the words that we hear, and often it is, oh, what would we do in this situation. So if you find yourself, you know, almost, almost commiserating with someone, they're telling you a story and they say, oh yeah, yeah, that happened to me once, and da da da da da da da da, that's filtered listening. So the next level is attentive listening.
Attentive listening is, is being 100% focused, so not PDing the cows, not trying to give advice while you're doing the LDA op or doing the TB testing. Attentive listening is like. Right, you're connecting.
You're listening and you're not doing anything else. And you're not Applying judgement You just You're there. And you're listening and you'd be nodding.
And you'd be giving some feedback. And that encourages the farmer to say more, and that opens up new thought pathways. And that's where we need to be at.
And let's look at the last Russian doll core. And this is The best type of listening, and that's attuned listening, and attuned listening is attentive. And more.
It's, it's hearing the words that haven't been said, and that helps us with our questions because the questions that we're likely to come up with, if we're hearing the words that haven't been said, and that's through body language, by the way, it's not kind of some magic sixth sense, but well, let's call it sixth sense because it's kind of the same, same, but really it's being attuned to the farmers's feelings and what their body language is telling us. As well as the words that we're hearing, we can understand their perspective better and perhaps ask the most pertinent questions. So those last two attuned and attentive listening is kind of where we need to be at.
And remember we're probably more filtered and very often distracted. The more attention we give, the higher the quality of the thinking. So if we get closer to that inside the Russian doll, attentive listening and attuned listening, the quality of the farmer's thinking will be higher, the more effective we are going to be at leading change.
OK, that was the cycle of change, the Clement and Prochatica's trans theoretical cycle of change, and a little bit about open questions and a little bit about listening. Now I'm going to look at our second behaviour change model. This is called the theory of planned behaviour, sometimes it was known as ASjan's theory of planned behaviour.
It's been adapted and moderated by different people since. But Aston's theory of planned behaviour is a very simple model again very applicable to lots of farmer situations, and you may have come across it because if you've done a speed awareness course, Aston's theory of planned behaviour is used in that speed awareness course in the model, in the way the speed awareness course has been designed, as it is used in many other human settings and healthcare settings. So Aston's theory of planned behaviour, even if you've never heard of that before, you may have kind of come across the concepts.
And I'll talk through two examples. We'll talk through the speed awareness course and we'll talk through another calf example. And consider helping a farmer to ensure their calves always have some starter pellets or coarse mix from the first few days of life.
A lot of farmers might not give starter pallets until they're 23 weeks old, or even older. Whilst they are on a milk-fed diet and they think it's the reason for doing it, so we'll look at Azin's theory and how that works. So we're going to kind of, we've got a farmer who's not giving starter pellets.
In the first week. Which we believe is the best thing for them. And we want to help them to do that.
So as your theory would be, well, if you get any behaviour change, so we're looking at two examples, remember, we're looking at a behaviour change of not speeding, and we're looking at the behaviour change of giving. Course feed or starter pellets to baby calves in the first week of life, then people have got to intend to do that. It doesn't just happen by accident.
You've got to get a true intention there. So I've been on a couple of speech awareness courses, and that maybe illustrates that A in's theory doesn't always work 100%, and that's just life, you know. We're not all perfect beings, and we, I'm certainly not, and Sometimes it's nice to have our intentions reinforced by going through the process again, like I have done with my speed awareness course.
However, if I intend not to speed, then I've got to have 3 things in place, and these are the 3 things. So the first thing is something is a behavioural belief, attitude towards behaviour. So let's stick with the speed awareness course for a minute.
One of the things that I remember strongly from the speed awareness courses that I've attended is that I understand better about why a 30 mile an hour limit is used in a built up area. It's not just 30 miles an hour isn't that 30 number isn't just an area plucked out of the sky. It's a figure which is based on science.
In essence, if I hit a pedestrian at 32 miles an hour, the outlook is likely to be far more severe. Much higher rate of mortality than if I hit a pedestrian at 28 miles an hour. Now I don't want to hit a pedestrian in either situation, but if someone just walks out from behind a parked car, for example, And that difference in 32 miles an hour to 28 miles an hour is a big difference, and I understand that now.
And so I have an attitude towards my speeding behaviour which makes me more motivated to not drive above 30 miles an hour in a built-up area. For the calf situation. A lot of farmers don't see the point of giving pellets to the first calves' first week of life.
They say, Well, why? Because they don't, they don't eat pellets. They just slobber on them and they just go bad.
I can't see the point. I know it's in my red tractor guns. And I know lots of vets have told me that it's a good thing to do, but honestly, why?
A farmer has got to understand the why. They've got to understand what's in it for them. And what is in it for them is, and the science should say that if you give pellets in the first week of life, it speeds up rumen development, and we're kind of doing something a little bit unnatural with these milk reared calves because we expect them to be ruminants when we wean them at let's say 8 weeks old.
That's very early to suddenly become a ruminant. In nature, a calf is not weaned until about 6 months, so we're kind of expecting this rumoured development to happen in 8 weeks. And one of the key drivers of brooming development is very early exposure to starch, concentrate, in other words, and so that's the why.
Why would a farmer feed pellets in the first week of life if they don't understand that? OK, the second thing that needs to be there for the intention is something called a normative belief or subjective norm, and this, in essence, means that we're all, we are all herd animals, human beings. We follow the crowd.
We like to do what other people do. In the speed awareness course we were taught or we've discussed just how antisocial it is to be a speeder. Not everyone speeds.
I know that in a room of a speed awareness course you're there all together, a little club of fellow speeders, but actually most people don't speed. Or it's not embedded in their behaviour, so we understand that it's a bit antisocial, and actually I remember the speed awareness course talking a lot about the antisocialness of if you cause an accident and someone is off work sick and they have a family that's dependent on them, just, just the antisocial effects, if you like, of, of, of that, of your behaviour. With a farmer feeding calf pellets, it's a lot easier to persuade farmers to do things if they know that everyone else is doing it.
If they're an outlier, they're the only farmer in the, in the district that doesn't feed calf pellets in the, in the first week of life, they're going to change. So that's that one, the normative belief, and then the final one is control belief. So speed awareness first.
I might understand now that it's important not to speed. I might understand that I'm a little bit of a pariah in my society by being a persistent speeder. But hey, I'm a farm vet.
I'm always in a rush. I've always got to get there in a hurry. I don't know how to do it.
I don't know how to, how to not speed. And of course that's what the speed awareness course also is good at is giving us tools to avoid speeding, such as using the speed limiter. Dropping down a gear if you've got a manual car when you're going to build a barrier, drop down to 4th or 3rd.
The big one for me was planning a journey, so I put it in Google Maps, and if it says it's going to take me 35 minutes, I know it's going to take me 35 minutes. Don't just assume that I can do it in 20 minutes just because I'm better than Google. So that was a big one for me.
It helps me understand that if I don't want to speed, I need to set off on time. Sounds simple. It is simple, but that's a controlled belief.
It's like, how do I do it? For the farmer, OK, I understand now. Yeah, it's important to give calf pellets in the first week of life because that helps the rumour develop, and I want them to be ruminants when I we wean my calves at 8 weeks.
Yeah, I understand. Yeah, this is what everyone does now. It's normal, you know, I'm, I'm a bit of an outlier by not giving calf pellets to the my calves in the first week of life.
But yeah, I've tried it and they still slobber on the calf nuts and they don't eat it and they go and it goes bad and I just don't think they're eating it and I don't think it's doing any good. So that's, I need to understand how I'm going to do it. Oh, OK, I understand now.
So I need to give just a handful of pellets every day, and everything that's not being eaten at the end of the day and the first week there won't be much eaten. I remove them and I give that to the older calves and I replenish it with just one more handful every day. Ah, that's how I do it.
And that's a controlled belief. In essence, as the theory of plant behaviour is that we help a farmer answer three questions for themselves, and those questions are. What's in it for me?
What's everyone else doing? And how can I do it? And that's my, if you like, adaptation of Ashton's theory of planned behaviour because those three questions are not genuinely part of the original theory, but that simplifies it in my mind.
I can help a farmer. By asking the right questions and imparting the right information so they can answer those three questions for themselves, and if any one of those three questions goes unanswered. The farmer won't do the behaviour change.
So now let us look at something a little bit different, locus of control and building self-efficacy. Another bit of theory. Here's the question Do you believe that your fate, in other words, what happens to you in life, is controlled by internal person variables or by external environmental variables?
In other words, what happens to you today? Is that down to you? Or is it down to just The environment stuff.
This is a question that's been posed over the centuries by many philosophers, but Julian Rotter has kind of coined this locus of control. Theory Julian Rotter is no longer on this world, but he was. Alive between 1916 and 2014.
So he led a very long life. Whether that was down to his strong locus of control, internal locus of control, who knows. But his theory.
Is that people that have strong internal locus of control orientations will work harder to obtain a goal, believing that they can control the outcome in a specific situation, meaning, If you can believe that what happens to you is very much down to you, then you're more likely to, I guess modify what happens to you so that you get a positive outcome. It's a little bit like this growth mindset, fixed mindset stuff which you may have come across. So a growth mindset, if you have a growth mindset, then that's a positive thing because you're more likely to get a successful life, really, you know, a growth mindset is I can learn to do anything I want.
Challenges help me to grow. My effort and attitude determine my abilities. Feedback is constructive.
I like to try new things. Those are all growth mindset kind of. Phrases and a fixed mindset would be, well, I'm either good at it or I'm not.
My abilities are unchanging. I either can do it or I can't. I don't know how to be challenged.
It's my potential is predetermined, which is very much what happens to me. What happens to me, it's all external locus of control stuff. I've seen this a lot on farms with farmers, and one of the areas that I've spent a lot of time working with is lameness, dairy cow lameness.
And I did some research work. I formed a research project in 2015, so 10 years ago now, and it was looking at farms that had low levels of lameness and farms that had higher levels of lameness and average levels of lameness. Was there anything that those low level lameness farms were doing?
We were interested in looking at, you know, were they thought bathing more regulated? Did they have better cubicles? Did they, did they, have a certain system of farm, you know, grazing versus, versus house.
And yeah, we found some, we, we found some minor, . It wasn't a big enough study to find strong or statistically significant. Not collaborations, I'm struggling to remember the word, er.
Someone will remember the word, you know, to help me, . Links between, you know what a farmer did and what their outcome was. However, there was one thing that was statistically significant in our data set, and that was the farmers' attitude towards their lameness.
And essentially we asked farmers to what extent is lameness on your herd down to you and to what extent is it down to the environment or the weather or other things. And the farmers that said that lameness is down to them, they had the least lameness. And so I didn't know at the time in 2015 when we did this work.
I didn't know about this locust control, but it was a piece of work which absolutely kind of supported the theory that farmers that believe that they can control something are more likely to control it. This is also used another kind of expression to explain this is this expression of self-efficacy, and it's a little bit like having a strong internal locus of control, self-efficacy. If you have a high self-efficacy, you're gonna have better performance.
It's used a lot in the area of sports performance coaching, and, Albert Bandura is, is, is someone who's written a lot in this area. So if you wanna, if you want to research that further, then, then, then please do so. It's about the fact that if you want a football team to do well, you don't, before you send them out onto the pitch, give them a hard time about how bad they are and how rubbish they are, you build them up and you say you've got this, you know, we've done the training, we know that you can.
Beat this team because you're a strong team and you've got the skills, you've got the capability, and you're working well, OK, that team is more likely to go out and perform well than a team that's just been given a good telling off about how poor they are, how out of shape they are, how, how, how weak they are. That's self-efficacy. We can help farmers with their self-efficacy.
We can help farmers feel that they are in control and they can do something about their issues, and we can do it. By telling them that's verbal persuasion, but we can do it more effectively if we can show them how other people have done it, accomplished for other people, and we can do it most effectively if we can celebrate their own previous accomplishments. That is the biggest thing that builds people's self-efficacy.
And if you think about that in the sports coaching field, you kind of, you wouldn't set your football team up for a failure by trying to put them in a league that is well above them because they're just going to feel. They're just going to feel bad about themselves. You're more likely to put them into a league that they've got a fighting chance, so that you can celebrate when they win.
And that's kind of how sports coaching works. It's how people get to be elite. It's they work their ways up to elite, .
A boxer doesn't just go into the ring with the top boxer. They kind of get, they work themselves up a ladder until, until they reach that point when they, they're ready to go in with the, with the top boxer. Farmers are the same.
You don't set a farmer up with a hugely ambitious goal. So lameness, let's look at lameness because I talked about that just a little bit before. You wouldn't try and get a farmer to have 10% lameness prevalence when they're at 30%, because that's just setting a farm up to failure.
But what you might do is you might go, well, let's just see if we can get to 25%. Let's see if we can just concentrate on digital dermatitis to start off with. We'll get a handle on that first before we look at the maybe harder ones to tackle, such as sole bruising and sole ulcer.
And by Setting sensible goals. Rewarding, acknowledging those achievements, we build self-efficacy. OK, my final piece, bringing this together a little bit, but just because I think I promised, or it has been promised in the blurb for this webinar that I would be touching on motivational interviewing, it's only fair that I do touch on motivational interviewing.
Motivational interviewing is something that a lot of farm vets in the UK will have heard of, and you may be thinking, well, where does this fit in? And I will just explain where this fits in. Motivated interviewing is a coaching model.
It was developed by, I think it's, yeah, William Miller and Stephen Rolnick, and it says it on the book because I'd forgotten their their Christian names. This is the book Motivated Interviewing. These two guys are doctors.
It's used a lot in the human healthcare setting. Again, doctors helping patients make changes to their lives like giving up smoking, and it has been used also in a veterinary farm animal healthcare setting. I'm not sure whether it's been used in a small animal veterinary setting, but certainly in the farm animal setting.
It's one example of a coaching style, and it sits under the umbrella of cognitive behavioural coaching, and everything I've talked about has been coaching and in particular a cognitive behavioural coaching, which is a, which is a, which is kind of an umbrella of coaching, sorry, it's a style of coaching and it's a broad church. It has some very neat features, but I would suggest it's not necessarily the easiest starting point for a farm vet. My analogy here is.
I do a lot of training, like I say, in this area for farm vets, and I think if I start with trying to help a farmer, a farm vet become Familiar or adept at motor race interviewing, it's a little bit like giving a learner driver the keys to a Ferrari before they've learned to. Change gear on a I was going to say Mini Metro, but that's showing my age. No one knows what a mini metro is nowadays.
A, a Skoda, a, a, a, a small, Fiat, or Skoda or, or Volkswagen up, that's sort of the car I was looking for, the little cars that you know, we all learned to drive on. It's kind of not the greatest starting point because you kind of need to start a little, understand a little bit about, get used to asking open questions and listening skills before you just sort of, dive in with using motor engine. It's quite complex.
It's a lot to remember. And and and and there we are. It's not necessarily an easy starting point, but I think it's useful just to explain what it is, where it fits in, and some of the neat features of it.
It includes exploring something called ambivalence. And an individual's ambivalence is something you want to change, and straight away you're into something where you can get confused because ambivalence to most people means I don't give a damn. You know, if, if you asked me to define ambivalence, I would say, well, ambivalence just means that you don't care one way or the other.
Ambivalence in motivated interviewing does not mean that. Let me explain. You could say I'm ambivalent to beer.
Now let me tell you, you won't know who I am. You won't know me. But I care a lot about beer, so ambivalence doesn't mean I don't care about beer.
What ambivalence means in motivational interview terms is, well, on the one hand, I do enjoy drinking. And it is sociable. I like my beer.
But on the other hand, I don't like feeling tired and a bit hungover and a bit useless the following day. Now that's my ambivalence to beer. And in motivated interviewing, it it's basically accepting the fact that actually all of us already have.
Our internal. Dialogue going on, which is the pros and cons to any change that we're likely to make, and we have to trust that people already have that internal dialogue. So if we look at some of the examples we looked at before, About pair rearing, for example, the farmer going to pair rearing, we kind of have to trust that a farmer already knows that, oh, OK, there's a few things that might be positive to pairing, might be, you know, they might, they might be beneficial to me and my herd.
But there's a few things that are putting me off. I've got some barriers into implementing it. And that would be someone's ambivalence to pair earring.
So let me use an example here. I'm, I'm sticking with calf health again because it's kind of the theme that's run through this webinar. And the example we're going to use is using a new vaccine to reduce calf pneumonia.
The farmer in this internal dialogue will have change talk and sustained talk. The change talk will include these kinds of phrases. Using the vaccine will help protect my calves from the challenge of pneumonia.
I'd like to have better calf health. I'd like to improve the growth rates of my calves. We As a coach Really want our farmers to articulate their own change talk.
What we don't want them to do is to articulate their sustained talk, because in the other half of their brain, they'll be thinking this. Using a vaccine is another job to do. Vaccines are expensive and a hassle.
You make money out of me buying vaccines from you. My calves don't need this vaccine. They're fine as they are.
Now these are all examples of how that sustained talk might sound when a farmer is kind of pushing back against you as the farmer, as the farm vet. We hear our voice louder than anyone else's voice, that's just a known fact, OK. So we want the farmer to hear their own change talk actually coming out of their mouth.
Let me show 2. Kind of ways that the conversation might go, we're going to start with the same opening phrase, you're having a conversation with your farmer, we're talking about vaccination for calf health. Pneumonia vaccines, for example, and the farmer might say, I know there are a lot of vaccines I could use, but it would just be something else to do.
I can't afford them, and anyway, my calves seem OK as they are. So thrown together a few sustained talks there. We could come back with this.
Which is But your cows would grow faster and you'd have less disease. Now this is called the writing reflex. This is the advice giving trap we have to avoid.
Do you see, the change talk is coming out of our mouth, not the farmer's mouth. When the change talk comes out of our mouth, you end up with a game of ping pong. Change talk from you, sustained talk from the farmer.
Change talk from you, sustained talk from the farmer. So the farmer's gonna come back at you and say, well, you're bound to say that, you make money out of buying vaccines out of me buying vaccines from you. If you're the person giving the change talk, the farmer's going to be the person giving the sustained talk.
The voice they hear the loudest is their own voice, not their own. And we Fall into this trap all the time as farm advisers is that we're giving advice and we're telling farmers what to do. We're telling farmers what we would do.
We're saying, well, in us, if I was in your situation, I'd do this, this and this, and the natural response for a farmer is kind of to match what they're hearing from you with the other side of the argument. So the trick is to try and change the dynamic of the conversation. Like I said, motor has got a lot that has a lot to think about in motor interviewing, and it isn't necessarily the easiest thing to start off with.
So the farmer starts with the same phrase, I know there are a lot of vaccines I could use, but it would just be something else to do. I can't afford them, and my calves seem OK as they are, sustained talk. We could try this.
You're a busy person with a lot of responsibilities to juggle, and certainly vaccines do have a cost. What benefits do you think using a vaccine might have? So what we've done there is we've resisted the writing reflex.
We've not come back with our own reasons why vaccinations is the right thing to do. We listen We actively listen and we show we've listened by validating the farmers' concern. We reflect back what we've just heard.
The farmers just said. I could use it But it would be something else to do. I can't afford them.
My calves seem OK. Sure you've heard that you're a busy person, a lot of responsibilities to juggle. Certainly vaccines do have a cost to them.
And then follow up with an open question to change the direction. What benefits do you think da di da di da now if you do that. You're more likely to get a change.
Talk response and the farmer might say, well, I understand the calves could possibly get this pneumonia and I might have less to treat. Validate. Yes, certainly.
Pneumonia is not an easy problem to treat. Most antibiotics don't work too well either. There would be benefits to calf grades.
Would you like me to explain a bit more about that? So you validate, you expand, and you ask another question. And by asking the next question, you're asking really for permission to give information.
And if the farmer says, no, I don't want you to explain that, fine, you don't. But most situations like this would be followed by the farmer saying, yeah, go on then, Owen, yeah, tell me, tell me a bit more about it, or there's a few things I don't understand or whatever, and it's an invitation to then give some information. So there you are, a little, a little conversation, a made up conversation, but a little conversation to illustrate some of the aspects of motivational interviewing.
A motivational interview, and this is my brief summary, and I've tried to summarise that book into just one slide. It is a form of coaching. It's very targeted, as coaching is.
Coaching does not take longer than telling. It's it's a myth to think that you need more time to coach. You don't.
But elicits behaviour change. And it helps farmers to explore and resolve their ambivalence and there is their internal dialogue. And it has these different parts to it.
So first of all, expressing empathy, and this is coming from a place of curiosity, and I've used that expression earlier on in this presentation. You come from a place of curiosity. You ask open questions.
You want to seek to understand. These are part of the open questions. You just, you just want to understand where they're coming from.
You want to see their worldview. You want to understand it. Then you roll with resistance, rolling with resistance is honouring your client's difficulty.
It's avoiding the writing reflex. You resist telling. You certainly don't lecture, and you kind of back off.
You kind of have to have a lot of confidence. You want to hear, you want to hear the farmers say all their problems, not their problems, but all their, all their barriers. Because when they say it out loud, actually a lot of those barriers kind of fall away anyway because they kind of realise that some of those are ridiculous.
Some of them are just catastrophic fantasies, for example, or performance limiting thoughts, you know, when they hear them, people, when they, when someone hears themselves saying them, they realise how ridiculous they are. So you roll. Of the resistance you back off.
You just ask more questions and you honour your client's difficulty. You develop discrepancy. This is helping a farmer see where they are and where they want to get to.
So it's a little bit like helping a farmer with their building their self-efficacy. You're helping farmers think forwards again. You're evoking this change talk.
You're asking the right kind of questions. They're coming back at what they want to achieve. They set themselves some goals.
And then you support self-efficacy. So this is, this is celebrating the wins. This is really creating a cascade of success.
You're, you're helping fans with these small achievable goals. You're recognising when they achieve them, and you make sure that they recognise them as well, celebrating success. And all of this is backed up with some basic motivational interviewing skills.
These basic motivation interviewing skills are applicable to all types of coaching. You ask open questions. You affirm people's answers to show that you are listening attentively.
You reflect. Really to show you you've been listening, but also to check in that you've understood and summarise, and that helps people again, check in. Well, it helps you check in that you've understood what someone's saying.
So OARS is the acronym. Coaching, you discover has lots and lots of acronyms, and I've kept, I've kept them away from you for this presentation, but OARS is a motivational interviewing acronym. OARS stands for Open questions, affirm reflects summarise.
OK, In summary then, Farmers, and let's not forget, farmers are people, so we're all people. So people really are motivated to act on their own ideas. Than ideas that are presented by ourselves to them.
Same with ourselves, so I motivate on my own ideas rather than what people tell me to do. So people are more motivated to act on their own ideas than others, you know, the best ideas are always our own. As a farm vet, developing a more transformational versus transactional communication style, we Are more likely to effectively affect change, and I've got two effectively that effectively affect, maybe it sounds a bit too much on the effects, but we're more likely to invoke change by having this transformational rather than transactional communication style.
There's science behind that. Understanding a little bit about behaviour models can help us understand more about it, and I've given you two behaviour models, both quite different, as the theory of plant behaviour. And the trans, transreical cycle of change.
Cognitive behavioural coaching, which I say is a broad church, it's just a kind of an aspect, it's an avenue or a style of coaching. Helps people solve their own problems. It's probably true that all coaching helps people solve their solve their own problems.
Cognitive behavioural coaching, which is kind of what I've focused on here, is a well established approach which is very directional. And time limited and directional in the sense that you You kind of There's something that you're trying to help someone with. Coaching begins with questions and then listening to understand.
The listening is more important than the questioning. We can build efficacy with intelligent goal setting, celebrating success. And then I would say to you listening, of course I don't know.
You will But generally speaking, when starting out on this kind of quest to get better at this farm of vet communication. Approach start small. Get in the habit of asking more open questions.
Get into the habit of developing listening skills. Is beyond the bounds of today. And I'm a big fan of structuring how we do this type of work.
And I'm not a fan. Of being a vet advisor whilst doing clinical work. We kid ourselves that we're Giving high value.
Advice or coaching or Input with our farmers when we're trying to Pregnancy test TB test, do other stuff. It's an important time to build rapport and relationships, sure, and it's an important time to explore some aspects of what's concerning a farm, farmer, but it's not effective in actually achieving change. So That's about frameworks around which we can develop our advisory work, but practise more by getting in the habit of asking open questions and developing listening skills and be very aware of when you're listening distractedly or with filtering.
Practise at home, practise anywhere, stick to open questions. Try and listen more than you. Talk and try and avoid giving advice.
Remember, the greater power is in the listening, not the questioning, and that's when the magic happens. So thank you for listening. You don't get the chance to ask questions, I'm afraid on this session.
And it's all been very one way. Which I'm conscious of, but thank you for listening to this presentation. I do hope it's been helpful.
I hope it's stimulated some thought for yourselves and perhaps a quest to explore further. If you feel I can help you further in this topic, then you're very welcome to get in touch with me, and there's various ways that you can do that, but via my website and an email is probably the most logical, and good luck with your ongoing farmer vet communication. Thank you very much.