Ace the 2026 Certified Peer Recovery Specialist Exam – Your Path to Empowerment Starts Here!

The Decisional Balance Tool focuses on the peer weighing the positives and negatives of changing versus staying the same, with the emphasis on the peer’s own values, goals, and solution. By guiding the peer to list benefits of making a change and the costs of not changing—or of changing too early—this tool surfaces ambivalence and helps them articulate what they want to do in their own words. That autonomy-supporting, self-directed process is why this tool is best for helping a peer find their solution rather than having the facilitator prescribe it.

Other tools tend to steer toward applying a predefined method to solve a problem or choose among options. A Problem-Solving Grid guides steps to reach a solution, a Decision Matrix weighs external criteria to pick an option, and a Pros and Cons Worksheet covers similar ground but without the same explicit focus on weighing change versus staying the same from the peer’s own perspective.