How to Stay Positive With a Busy Caseload

 

Jenna:  "How do you stay positive with a heavy caseload and be as passionate as possible to give your best to your patient?"

Phil:  We've got to recognize that healthcare in general is burnout prone and that feeling is real.  There's nothing you can do to just magically get that to go away.  I think the key things are, first, make sure you have your purpose, your overall big purpose in mind -- what that exactly looks like for you, and remind yourself of that, going back to that on a daily basis.  

But, that only goes so far, though, I will say.  You need to also make sure that your physical activity is where it needs to be.  I find that for me personally, the busier you get, the harder days are, it's harder to get physical activity in. It's harder to eat well.  So you need to make sure that's dialed in because that will fuel what you need to do. 

The other thing I would say is to make sure you're getting around and meeting with...

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Tips for Increasing Motivation at Work

 

Jenna:  "What are tips I can utilize to increase motivation and improve professional values in the workplace?" 

Phil:  You might as well ask this question about how do you maintain your diet?  How do you keep exercising?  How do we do the hard things in life?  Right. Because it's hard.  I wish to say it's just easy to wake up every day and be doing all the things you need to do, the way you need to do them.  From a professional perspective, I think the key things are have something that you're going after that is bigger. 

Know what that is, and then surround yourself with the people who will help you get there.  It's good to have people who will hold you accountable.  But I think also if you can get people who are trying to do the same thing, that really goes a long way.  One of the rebellion groups that I love formed around people who have started their own private practice and where they just meet up once a month...

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What do you do if you're stuck in a job with no advancement?

 

Phil:   What do you do if you feel like you're stuck in your job and have no room for advancement, but you still love your job and would like to stay there? 

Jenna:  That's a good question.  One, I love that the person loves their job and wants to stay where they're at.  That's always a good thing.  It can be frustrating, though, if you want more, but it doesn't seem like there is more.  Maybe there's no leadership position, or maybe you just don't even really want that leadership position.  I think this is where we need to get creative either in our role or what we're doing on a daily basis.  So I think you can either maybe expand your role or maybe expand your skills and do so in terms of either what you're interested in or what your strengths are. 

For example, if I want to expand my role, like, let's say I am a staff physical therapist, but I do love teaching.  Well, maybe then there's an opportunity where you create a...

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How to Deal with Negativity at Work

 

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...

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Do you want a Mac or a PC?

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...

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How do you become a leader in your field?

 

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?

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Why Do So Many PTs Say They Want to Switch to Being a PA?

 

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?

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How Do You Know When It' s Time to Leave Your PT Job?

 

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.

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Do you feel better or worse about your PT employer since the COVID-19 pandemic?

“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...

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