How to develop your career as a physiotherapist

On this week's episode of PhysioFoundations, I'm going to be talking to you about your personal development journey as a health practitioner, starting off as a student and continuing throughout your career as you progress towards becoming an expert and a leader within your profession. Welcome back to the PhysioFoundations podcast, where we talk about the knowledge and skills that provide the foundation for expert clinical practice. I'm your host, Luke Perriton. This is a really important episode because I'm going to talk to you about your own personal development journey throughout your career as a clinician and your life. This is you developing as a person while you develop as a professional and how you can be mindful, how you can mindfully and deliberately use your personal development, over time to become more effective as a professional and inform your professional decisions and thinking and your interactions with people and therefore have a more fulfilling professional career and be more effective as a clinician. What do I mean by personal development? You might be thinking, isn't this a professional development podcast that I'm and perhaps I hope I haven't clicked on a self-help podcast. Well, I would argue that your personal development is broader than just your professional development. So your personal development includes your professional pathway and that includes your career choices, where you went to university, clinical placements at university, where you work, who you work for, postgraduate qualifications, the courses you've done, the places you've travelled to, etc. It includes all of that. That's all your professional development, but it's also broader than that. Arguably, your personal development is more important than this, just the list of things that you've done and who you're becoming as a person informs who you are as a professional. So what I'm really getting at here is the process of ongoing reflection and learning from your experiences as a professional, but also as an individual and as a person. That process of reflection that you do on your journey through life and throughout your career, we're going to go into in detail in this episode and leave you with two or three take-home messages that you can use to be a little bit more mindful and create a vision for your life and for your career. It's quite a broad episode. It's a bit different to the episodes on the knee or episodes on the spine you might be used to in a physio podcast. We'll get there. We'll go through foundational, fundamental knowledge and skills such as those, but this is a really important episode if you think about planning your career and your life and the process of doing so. So as you go through your life and you progress through your training and through your career and you gain all these experiences, you should also be undergoing significant development as a person if you're doing it well. The reason this is important is that as a health professional, your job is to help people and when people come to you looking for help, they're coming to you. They're not coming to a book or a website or a curriculum vitae, a CV, resume or a profile filled with jobs and qualifications. Initially in your career, the focus is on gaining those requisite knowledge and qualifications because you need them to move forward, so that's fine, but ultimately people are coming to you to talk to you and they want you to listen to them. So your interpersonal communication skills are a vital part of your ability to help people and to be a good clinician and these interpersonal communication skills require development over time. They're not just something you're born with. Some people have stronger natural interpersonal communication skills than others, but everyone needs to develop them over time, so you don't just develop these interpersonal communication skills in your professional life, you develop them both in your personal and professional life. So that's why people list all of the things that they do in their personal life in their professional profiles because they matter and they influence their professional persona and that person that the patient's coming to see. So here's a key point I want to get across. How you develop as a person and how you use your personal development to shape your professional development is really up to you. So if you have no plan for how you want to develop personally and professionally throughout your life and your career and if you don't take the time to be aware of your own personal development as it unfolds and your own professional development as it unfolds and reflect on your experiences and what you've learned and where you're going, where you want to be going, what will happen is you'll end up floating around like a leaf in the breeze. You'll be drifting from one thing to the next and you can see this happening to people. They get excited by new things, they get bored of those new things and they move on. If you can't clearly state where you're going, where you want to be going and how you want to get there, in essence that's a bit of a problem, particularly as your career advances. So the reality is unless you plan your own path you will end up following others for most of your career and never making that impact that you said you wanted to make. So to avoid this it's obviously really important to have a plan and a purpose and a direction to your career and how you want to develop and move through all the various stages of your career and it's okay to develop your vision and your purpose of your life and your career as you go and for that vision to evolve and to change. As long as you're aware of this process and you have a plan and you can reflect on where you currently are in your life and your career. So we spend a lot of time consuming and digesting information and then trying to process and integrate and implement that information into our lives and as a practitioner or a clinician you're doing the same thing. You're constantly consuming and processing and implementing information into your clinical practice so you can continue to improve and develop and learn and therefore keep helping people. So when you search for an education podcast like this one or you attend a course or a conference or you go to university or you scroll through professional social media you should ask yourself what is it that you're actually looking for. So most people would say that they're looking for knowledge for new information and if you ask them why they want new information they might say that they could use this information to upgrade their knowledge base or their skill set and ultimately improve what they're doing and improve their patient outcomes and this is important this is good you need to do this and as humans we're hardwired to seek out information and seek out good information because good information is essential for our survival and having a good quality of life. So that's why seeking out new information all the time is addictive even if it's you can call it work scrolling through professional social media and reading articles and reading blogs and consuming all this content in itself can be a little bit addictive because it has a purpose to improve your quality of life and ultimately your survival and professional survival keeping up to date. So we're always looking for new information the best information to update our knowledge base and cramming all that new information in there but in terms of developing the bigger picture of your development this is where I want you to think a little bit more broadly and change your focus for now from professional development to personal development in the context of your career and I want you to ask yourself how can developing yourself as a person help you develop professionally. So why is it important to reflect on your own personal development and your experiences in order to develop yourself professionally? How is personal and professional development related and linked? So let's get into that. Let's start with life experiences. So I want you to think about or perhaps look at a few professional CVs, curriculum vitaes or resumes and or look at a handful of people's professional descriptions on Twitter or their bios or or other social media the introductions to courses. So look at how people introduce themselves and so reviewing other people's profiles and their experiences is a really useful way for you to pick up on experiences that might be useful for you as you go through your career and to also get to know the person a bit before they start talking shop and it's a really useful thing to do when you reflect on the path that you're walking on and what you might notice when you look at some bios and descriptions of people's careers is that very few people only identify as a professional or as their job. The typical description is both it's a job description and a personal description. So typically look at a few Twitter bios or anywhere look at someone's website the biography that they put down there when you find out who they are. The typical description is a job description and qualifications and they usually also include life achievements or things the person's proud of. So they often list the sports they participate in or they watch outside of work and the team they support perhaps and there's often some hobbies that they're proud of and sometimes a bit of a humble brag in there as well and or maybe a self-depreciating sort of comment in there for example you know experts in this and that expert in musculoskeletal care senior clinician researcher of serious things and then we add on the end personal touches so terrible cook trying to learn the guitar the piano running marathon slowly every weekend you know so you've seen these before and they often want you to know what stage of life they're at and this is either in a subtle way or an obvious way and so that's where they might include that they're also a mum or a dad or a husband or a wife or a student or a grandparent or lifelong learner mentor so these personal touches are common we see them all the time people volunteering this information so why is that why do people add this stuff to their professional profiles when everything else about professional life is such an arms race you know to to gain positions and qualifications and know more than everyone else and know everything and be the best why do people then go and add personal touches and experience to their profiles well the reason i think is because it's providing an indication that they have diverse experiences and they aren't just qualified with a degree so they're more than their job they're more than just someone who's qualified with a degree registered in a profession employed in a job building their business they're a human they're a person and you can relate to them relate to them in some way so your life experiences shape you and they give you small insights into the interests of conditions that other people go through so you can share experiences so when people add personal experience to their professional profile they're asking other people to acknowledge the importance of this life experience to what they can offer professionally so your life experiences have a real influence on the quality of care you can offer to other people as a health professional so i'll give you an example let's say you're a former elite athlete you're a sports physio you've toured the world with the women's tennis association and you've got postgraduate qualifications in treating pelvic floor disorders and you're also a mum of three kids and you're doing your phd on pelvic floor dysfunction in athletes and i'm describing my office mate jody day kick from monash university it's a big shout out to jody here if that's your life experience when you go to work in pelvic health as a pelvic floor physiotherapist and when you're talking to people when you're teaching speaking to colleagues from your experience as a pelvic floor physiotherapist those life experiences those other things that you've done aside from pelvic floor physiotherapy they're going to influence the perception of others of your level of expertise and the respect and the airtime that you're going to get from people and that's why people put that stuff on their profile and a big part of your professional development is getting your foot in the door so getting a seat at the table with influential people that you want to work with and organizations and being a part of things that are bigger than you and to get your foot in the door and get a seat at the table people need to know who you are and know that you've walked the path and you have life experience or at least you have a plan for obtaining this life experience so that's you can tell me why you put personal information in your professional profile that's my take on why people do that and that's that's one example that i've given with jody about how your life experience can link to your professional experience but i think arguably a more important reason to develop life experience more important than a profile and getting your foot in the door and giving people the impression of your expertise a much more important reason to develop life experience and develop yourself personally as well as professionally is to improve the quality of care that you can give to people as a health professional it's the end game surely i've got an episode coming up on providing explanations and in this episode i'm planning to talk about the curse of knowledge we have knowledge but you can't see what it's like to not know those things and therefore you can't communicate your knowledge effectively to another person so you're cursed by how much you know having life experience helps you with the curse of knowledge it helps you understand what it may be like for that other person to not know what you know helps you put yourself in their shoes so in other words it helps you develop empathy and not to assume that everyone understands everything you're saying just because it's clear to you even if they are nodding along so another example of where life experience can help you connect to another person and help you do a better job professionally so here's some more examples of how your life experience can help you be a better professional let's say you're a runner or you enjoy running and you work with runners as a clinician so your experience as a runner can help guide the questions you ask during your assessment of that runner when the runner tells you about their shoes you'll have follow-up questions guaranteed runners love talking about their shoes and probably even more than podcasters love talking about their microphones it's a road pod mic for your podcasters out there and you're loving hearing about that and everyone else doesn't care so you can find these little hooks that will connect you to people and that comes from your life experience from doing various things and it's so important and people trust you when the runner tells you about their goals and their running program you're going to have follow-up questions about running surfaces and mileage and periodization pacing heart rate monitoring coaching many other things when they tell you about their injury and their fears about not being able to run you will have shared experiences from your own running injuries and when a runner tells you that they don't want to rest at the moment when they've got something coming up or that there's more to their running than just the physical training mental aspects to it and they don't want to stop you're going to have more of an understanding of why they want to keep training than someone who hasn't shared those experiences with them possibly unless that person has never run but they have developed an amazing amount of life experience and can really connect with that person and is really listening to them you don't have to be a runner to help runners it's just when you do have that experience it's a really good idea to be aware of it and try to connect with people and try to link that into what you're doing professionally when they describe the nature of their foot pain they've got foot pain in the somewhere in their foot you're going to pick up subtle cues and clues in the interview and in your assessment and what they're saying and how they're moving and when they describe the symptoms and the behavior of the symptoms and these can help you pick up on a possible diagnosis and when you're doing this you're going to be drawing on your knowledge of anatomy and biomechanics and pathology and all the knowledge and experience you've got but you're also going to be integrating this with your life experience of having felt that pain yourself and you know this can influence how you respond and how you listen and the advice you give and ultimately the care you give and the patient outcomes so don't underestimate the importance of your own life experiences as you develop as a professional all right so this is a really specific example a runner you're a runner and you've experienced the same injury as another person but you don't have to have suffered the same injury as a person you don't have to have every condition that a person may have to be a great clinician what's important is that you reflect on what people are saying to you and you develop a deeper understanding of their experience of that condition and over time you can use your reflections to develop empathy and a better understanding of the experiences of other people with similar problems and you're going to be more likely to cut through to what their main problem is the real problem is underlying what they're saying and really help somebody and yes it comes from professional experience and knowledge and skills but it also comes from you as a person listening to another person and those highly developed interpersonal skills that you're working on inside and outside of work so my first piece of advice here is to consider your life experience outside of your clinical training and your clinical work as a part of your complete development as a professional and as a person so you can go a step further and actually deliberately integrate your life experiences into your professional knowledge and your skill set it doesn't just have to be incidental or accidental so i'll give you an example so my wife Susanna the other half of Periton Physio is a master of telling stories that link her life experiences to her patients or people's current circumstances so Susanna has a lot of different clinical roles she traveled a lot she's worked in a lot of different roles in clinical non-clinical positions and she's always finding take-home messages from her own experiences and using them to help patients so she's a great storyteller which helps so for example when she's teaching people how to do exercises or teaching clinicians how to prescribe exercises for example she teaches with the GLAD program for osteoarthritis or Latrobe University where she teaches physiotherapy students or football clubs where she works or in the clinic she'll often talk about how she used to work as a ski instructor over in Colorado where we met and when she did that work teaching kids how to ski for the first time she would use similar skills that's what she uses in her professional life she noticed there was a you know a connection there and what was working outside of physiotherapy could also work for inside physiotherapy so she'd tell this story and it worked really well for her she continues to tell the story of her ski instructing days it worked really well for her as a icebreaker it's fun people think ski instructing now I'm listening and it got people focusing less on the specific exercise the outcome of what they were trying to do or something they were struggling with and more on the process of learning which is where I'm going with this so when Susanna used to focus what she used to focus on rather with the ski instruction was trying to find one key thing that she could change that would help with all the other things that she'd observed so changing one key thing so instead of giving five different cues and instructions at the same time which is something we commonly do in a therapy environment she would focus on finding the one thing that she could change or ask the person to change or the child she was teaching to ski that would improve all the other problems that she could see so with skiing if you're a skier you'll you'll appreciate this one that change is often to lean forward push your hands forward in front of you and that shifts your center of mass forwards and that allows you to put pressure on the edges of your skis better and when you put pressure on the edge of a ski because of the shape of the ski that's how it turns and slows you down and gives you control and when you slow down and you feel like you've got control it helps you relax and this changes your upper body helps your jaw and your shoulders relax and it helps you bend your knees even more so you get the point you've changed one thing rather than giving someone 15 different instructions so Susanna would relay that story and that teaching point how to learn how to ski back into the prescription of exercises and simplify but try to hone in on the most important part of the exercise and the cuing but the point is this was taking personal experience that ostensibly has no relationship at all to teaching physiotherapy students in a classroom and finding that connection and using that to have a stronger more a deeper appreciation of what you're doing and how you're thinking and how you're learning so it doesn't all have to happen subconsciously you can really develop the ability to reflect on what you've learned in your personal life and then try to apply what you've learned in your professional life to what you're doing what you've try to apply what you've learned in your personal life to what you're doing in your professional life and this leads me to the second point that I want to make the second main point from this episode about your personal development as a clinician and that's that you're unlikely to fully develop yourself as a person or as a clinician or practitioner by accident so of course there's twists and turns and there's things you can't predict and you have good luck and bad luck and that helps steer you on the pathway that you end up taking but you still need a plan and that plan needs to include not only training qualifications courses professional development mentors but it needs to include you think about a day recently that was really productive for you think about a day when you got a lot of stuff done and it could be a day where you were getting things done at home could be at work think about a day that you were proud of recently you probably had some sort of a plan going into it it's unlikely that you randomly chose to do all those productive things you must have had some goals and things you were ticking off as you went through this day and as you did that it came with a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction so now contrast that to a day when you didn't have a lot on you drifted around a bit from one thing to the next maybe felt a bit bored boredom has its place for creativity as you know but a nice feeling you didn't get a lot done and contrast to that you to your really effective day that you've had the difference is a plan if you don't have a plan you're not going to be able to set an agenda and set goals and you're not going to be able to tick off important things and if you don't have a plan other people are going to make plans for you so if you're smart and capable which you are you're going to be a value to other people so as an employee we're helping people in some way and this is good this is fine as long as it's part of your long-term vision for your career and your personal development to have a plan and the third point I want to make about your personal development as a clinician is that you have to have a broad vision for your career and what you're doing beyond what you're doing immediately in your job or your study so it looked it actually took me a long time to get where I am now so I've been a physiotherapist for 20 years my first memory of wanting to work in physio education was about five years five six years into my working life when I did a clinical master's I worked as a clinician for 10 years in various roles I was gathering experience I was learning a lot I when I did my master's I loved going over the foundational knowledge and the skills again and I loved teaching them to myself and working on teaching each other teaching them to peers and I knew teaching was a calling so from that point on I knew I had a clear pathway so from the master's to PhD postdoctoral research and becoming an early career researcher and educator so along this pathway I was doing a lot of different seemingly unrelated things but if you look at it from a broader perspective a broader vision of where I was trying to go they were all part of this broader plan of getting to where I am now so have a vision Susanna taught me the importance of doing this back in the early 2000s when we met she told me she had a plan to work in the AFL the Australian Football League as a physio this is when she hadn't even graduated yet final year physiotherapy and that was a big deal back then and she wanted to work in the AFL as a physio and then she wanted to do research on the hip and groin hip and groin pain in athletes straight up it's what she told me 20 years ago so fast forward to 2022 and she's worked in the AFL and she's doing a PhD in hip so look it could have happened by accident some things do you know some things just appear and take the opportunities when they appear but for the most part a plan like that comes into fruition because you developed it you develop the long-term vision for that plan and that vision then guides the things you say yes to and the things you say no to and the opportunities that you notice and pick up on along the way that you wouldn't have noticed if you didn't have that vision it's really important to develop a vision for where you're going in your career and personally but this takes time and often people need to get started on the path first before their own before they realize their what their own personal and professional development journey is and their destinations become clearer so i'm talking to you students when you're a student or even before you become a physiotherapy student you need to invest time in finding out what all your options are for your career and the many pathways you could take if you don't know what all the pathways are a bit like starting a journey you don't know that there's various paths that come off the main path and you might just come across them randomly it's a good idea to spend a bit of time when you're researching your career and when you're a student just thinking broadly about all the different directions you could go in so when you get to that fork in the road you knew it was coming and then while you're doing that you do what comes naturally as a student you invest time in your own personal development and life experience and meeting and talking to a lot of people and diversifying your experience and you can sort of let the vision of what you want to do evolve naturally over time because it's a better way of doing that than locking into a vision early on before you really have the experience the beauty of health professional occupations of being a health professional is you can go in so many different directions and you don't have to choose a direction and stay in that direction as well you can choose jobs or fields of health professional education research clinical work that suit you and your personality and what you know your interests that's why they're so hard to get into from high school these degrees is because they're such a good career path but if you don't know what a physiotherapist does even if you're studying as one and you're still not really clear about what a physiotherapist does or you have a really narrow view of what a physiotherapist does it's going to be a lot harder for you to stay on any sort of a path as a student especially when things get harder so all the work you do as a student yes you're studying specific things you've got assessments and that's fine but it all has to be part of a broader vision for where you're going even if that vision at this point in time is vague or embryonic that's fine it'll develop over time as long as you're aware of the need to have that vision and have that planned long term all right final point the final point i want to make here is about your personal development as a clinician and how you learn so i think there's so many free and high quality resources out there that you can access for learning so i'm talking about how you how you're going to educate yourself across your career not just when you're at university and there's so much information out there high quality free you can access it and you get so much information presented to you at university and in courses and online and that's all important that's all good but aside from just collecting information just take a moment here to reflect on not just what you learn on your professional and personal development journey but how you go about learning it and this is where this podcast and where i come into it my interests lie at least as an educator because it's not just about pumping more information out there onto the internet i'm really interested in the process of education how you learn so how to learn is a topic for future episodes hopefully lots of them um you know there's many many books and experts written books are on this topic and there's um people's careers have been dedicated to this topic of how to learn the first step for you though is to be aware that you do need to develop skills in learning no matter what your level of expertise is you still have to actively work on your skills in learning it's not a process of just absorbing information as it appears when you go and scroll through things online oh i've read that i will remember it but once you're aware of the need to learn how to learn and how to personalize your learning style to what you're doing then you can dedicate time set aside time for this part of your personal development journey so this is inside and outside of your work what do i mean by learning how to and you learn it right not so fast so very generally everyone's different there's a few learning techniques that tend to work well for learning and there's techniques that aren't as effective so we know that active learning is more effective than passive learning for example taking notes making your own summaries discussing with other people analyzing teaching what you've just learned back to other people etc this is a much more effective way of learning than just listening to a podcast or a lecture or watching a video or attending a course and now hopefully i'm not telling you anything you don't know here so as an exercise in active learning if you've made it this far you might as well make some more better use of your time take out your notebook and note down in your notebook or on your phone what you think are the key points from this episode and you should be doing this every time you consume content online or every time you're doing any sort of education actively engaging yourself in that content what resonated with you from this episode if anything what action could you take moving forward to be more aware of your own personal and professional development write it down and put it in the comments as well if you're watching this on youtube it's early days with this podcast i haven't had any comments yet so you could be the first i've had one from pat balance thanks pat pop it in the comments and i'll respond put it in a tweet tag me in we'll start a conversation and by doing so by actively engaging with what you're listening to you will have a better experience you'll have a better outcome for your learning so that's just one example of being mindful of how you're learning and not expecting information to just sink in if you've made a commitment to your study and your profession and your professional development and you're spending all that time and resource on that part of your life you owe it to yourself to invest some time reflecting in how you learn the best strategies that work for you at universities we've got learning skills advisors they're probably called different things different universities and colleges librarians experts their job is to help students develop effective ways of thinking and learning so people have a whole job dedicated to this it isn't just a matter of absorbing information and hoping it sticks so you need to invest some time in developing your own strategy for learning so there's all there's all sorts of approaches we won't go into them here this is really just an overview of personal and professional development but we're thinking about you know everything from note-taking and summaries and mind mapping through to deeper reflections analysis but active learning and it's really effective sorry it's really important to set up an effective learning environment as well and quarantine or block off time for yourself to study and to learn not just expecting it all to happen naturally just because you were listening to something there's so much on this topic for now just commit to the idea that you are going to have to learn how to learn across your career and that's going to be a part of your personal and professional development journey that's it for now now it's your turn i want you to start putting these ideas into action please let me know what you thought of this style of episode i'm thinking most of the episodes on this podcast will be interview based but i am planning to do more of these solo episodes where we dive into some more education focused content let me know what you think okay and and also put down your ideas and share them with me okay and that's it and now it's your turn it's time for you to start putting some of those ideas into action and please let me know how you go connect with me it could be a tweet it could be an email it could be a comment i'm talking to otherwise i would really like to know what you think of this style of episode it's a bit different from the interview episodes that i'll be doing but it's all important it's all a part of developing strong foundations in your thinking and learning and then applying that into clinical practice to make you a really good clinician and that's my passion it's what i want to help you do so that's it for now thanks everyone until next time i'm luke perryton now wishing you all the best with your studying professional development and lifelong learning