Phil:  All right, Jenna, here's another submitted question."How do you stay in a workplace when your coworkers are always talking negative, and you try so hard to be positive and encouraging in your job, and trying to make a difference?"  How do you do that?

Jenna:  That's a tough place to be in. It's hard to be the lone positive person. But I have two things with this. So one is if you're in a small clinic and it's you and one other person, that one other person is negative, I think that the only solution to that is to somehow distance yourself from that person and have a good community or support system elsewhere. I still message two of my good friends from grad school when I need that kind of thing. But if you're in a bigger clinic, then I will challenge you because it's usually not only one really positive person and the rest are negative.  Usually, it's one positive person, a bunch of neutral people, and then maybe a couple of negative people.  So if...

This was the simple question I was asked before I started working for RPI. I remember thinking to myself, “What a nice perk.”  I didn’t think much of it and chose a PC (the wrong decision, according to most of my co-workers). 

Yet over the last year, I realized that question wasn’t a nice perk at all. It was something so much more significant.

That question represents a core part of RPI’s culture. We are individuals. We have preferences and want different things from life and our careers.

We are unified in our desire to build healthier and happier communities, our quest for clinical excellence, and our support for each other. Yet we are individuals, and how we accomplish that, looks different from person to person.  

Some want a variety of patients, some want to treat all endurance athletes, some want to see the aging population, and others want to treat specific conditions.

Some want to work long days and have a day off, others want...

Many of us come up in the field wanting to make an impact. We see leaders from the time we are students and want to someday become one. But how does that happen? Is there something we can do?

PA is a great field and can be an amazing job, but it isn't physical therapy.  So, why are PTs always talking about switching?  It seems like every other week there is a discussion somewhere about how PA is the better choice. But besides both being in the medical field, are they that similar?  What do you think about this topic?

In this video, we discuss the difficult question of how do you know if it is time to leave your physical therapy job. While the answers to this question are certainly complex, thinking about it as we discuss in the video might help to bring some clarity.

“It’s been pretty good,” she said, sounding optimistic.

Her answer threw me off.  She was the third PT I had asked that day about how things were going since COVID started.  She was the first one with a positive response.  She had a lot of great things to say about how her employer was handling the situation.  She described that they were in it together, that they were figuring out telehealth, and that they were all offering ways to stay engaged with patients.  Her pay hadn’t changed although her caseload had decreased substantially.

Her feeling of camaraderie was a polar opposite to others I had spoken to who felt isolated and overlooked by their employer.  We are fortunate to be able to coach a variety of physical therapists around the world and we have gotten to hear how people have fared through COVID-19. It has been interesting to hear the extremes of how employers have treated employees during this time and how PTs have...