162. 8 Things I Wish I Learned Sooner As a New Grad

Welcome to the PT Snacks podcast with your host, Kasey! While this episode is geared toward new graduates, the insights are valuable for all physical therapists and students. You'll learn about continuous learning beyond PT school, the importance of rest, the value of mentorship, and the need for emotional intelligence in clinical practice. Tune in next week for a deep dive into rib stress fractures!

00:00 Introduction and Welcome
00:19 New Year, New Insights
00:42 Eight Things I Wish I Knew as a New Grad PT
03:10 The Importance of Continuous Learning
04:46 Valuing Rest and Avoiding Burnout
05:58 Overcoming Self-Doubt and Seeking Help
07:56 The Value of Mentorship
09:00 Recognizing Physical Therapy Limitations
09:56 Embracing the Challenges of the Job
12:23 The Role of Emotional Intelligence
14:14 Conclusion and Looking Ahead

Transcript

0:31

Hey everyone. Welcome to PT Snacks podcast. This is Kasey, your host, and if you're tuning in for the very first time, first of all, welcome. But what you need to know is that this podcast has meant for physical therapists and physical therapist students who are looking to grow your fundamentals and by segments of time. Now, today is also a little bit different. Welcome by the way, 2026. Here we go. Um, it's the start of the new year and I hope you have all had a good December, a good holiday season, and a very good new Year start. And if not, will we still have the rest of 2026 to turn it around. So today is another unique episode as well. We're gonna be covering eight things I wish that I knew as a new grad PT and really. I define new grad all the way up to like three years out. Some of you who may not be in that range maybe you'll relate to some of these too, or if you are a new grad and there's other things you learned. That maybe didn't fit into this, send them my way and then I can share them.'cause I do think it's helpful to hear from other people what people are going through. So, let's start out the year sharing and next week we're gonna cover rib stress fractures, so back to it. But before we go into that, if you have listened to at least three episodes and you found the show to be helpful to you, if you wouldn't mind just leaving a review wherever you listen to this podcast, that would mean the world to me, and I very much appreciate you guys. Also, if one of your New Year's resolutions was centered around more continuing education, med Bridge is actually offering listeners over a hundred dollars off their year subscription, which basically includes over 2000 courses. There's a ton of webinars, specialty exam prep, so if you're studying for your OCS or SCS, that's also in there. And then an HEP builder is also in one of their options, so use the promo code below in the show notes. Students, there's also something for you. So for those of you who don't know me, which is probably most of you that are listening at least on a personal basis I went right into PT school from college. Grateful for that. And then right after I graduated PT school and my last year, I realized I don't think I'm ready for the clinic. I went on clinical rotations and was like, holy cow. There's not a lot of textbook patients in here. So went on into an orthopedic residency, which is huge blessing here in Houston, uh, with Memorial Herman and. I got the opportunity to stay on and teach in the residency I got to mentor residents, stayed on with the spine program here, which involved a lot of clinical data collection with spine research and then also got to hang out with some really cool neurosurgeons and round with them. So I learned a ton through that. But there are a lot of lessons I learned along the way and personally that I really wish I had sooner. Sometimes you just have to go through things on your own. But today we're just gonna cover some highlights, and I hope they're helpful to you. Diving right into number one. I alluded to it already, but pT school gives you a great foundation, but you can't learn everything there. You've gotta keep learning. There's only so much time to learn things, so you have to get the foundation down. You have to learn your anatomy, physiology, eval and outcomes exam, all of the things in PT school, specialty wise pediatrics, geriatrics, orthopedics, neurology. It's not like there's a whole lot of time. So really I would say the learning really begins when you're in the clinic. And the difficult thing about that is that now you have a caseload and ugh. Now you can't just sit and lecture and have the information given to you. You've gotta go out and find it. But meanwhile, you're also treating someone who's in pain in front of you, and it's. Feels a lot of times like how if they get better or not, it's dependent on if you're better. So there is a little bit of grace that needs to be taken for yourself, where you're not gonna know everything, but you also need to figure out a plan on how to figure out your job. Whether that's doing a residency or fellowship, something formal like that, or taking courses or finding a mentor all of those things will help you to be enlightened faster because then you can learn through other people's experiences as well as your own rather than just trying to figure everything out. There's only so much time, so try and figure out a plan now, number two. Valuing rest will make you a better clinician. Here in America, we have a hustle culture where people like to, not all people, but people like to brag about how busy they were. And I'm here to say that busyness is not the same thing as productive. So sleep, take care of yourself. I like to think of it as sharpening the ax so that when you do need to cut something down like a tree, You're not trying to use an ax like a hammer'cause it's so blunt that you're just working so hard and you have horrible results. There are times in life where we do need to hustle through it but you need to take care of yourself as a human. That needs to be restorative, not numbing. So I'm not talking about take some time to sit on the couch for an hour and scroll through TikTok, because the reality is most of the time you don't even realize where that hour went. Burnout is already high in healthcare workers. Make sure that you're getting sleep. Sometimes you need to say no to doing fun things so that you can rest. Everybody has a different social battery, et cetera, but know yourself so that you can know how you're doing and what you need. Now, number three, it will be tempting to think about yourself, but try not to, and what I mean by this is. When you are in scenarios where maybe you're not very confident in your treatment it might feel like everybody in the clinic is staring at you and wondering what in the world you're doing and might make you feel a little awkward. Reality is they're probably not. They have enough work on their caseload. Maybe they're curious. Maybe they're also thinking about, can I use that equipment? Wonder how many sets her patient has on it? Right. And even if they do build a relationship with those people to where they feel comfortable maybe bringing something up where they think something is weird that you're doing. And in that way it's an educational opportunity, right? But you have to make sure that you're setting up the relationship so that you can. Create an environment in which where you can receive feedback. Our job at the end of the day is to serve others, right? Here's another scenario where this is important, asking for help. You may feel like if I ask this question, they're gonna think I'm so stupid. If you don't ask, they might think you're stupid anyways. You might as well ask and learn from it, right? Don't let your ego get in the way of asking for help, because if you think long-term wise better to go through short-term suffering and become an excellent clinician. Then avoid any sort of discomfort and then all of a sudden you're a very average physical therapist forever. This also applies if you're on the other end of that spectrum. If you are the mentor, you might feel like I've gotta be so impressive and be smarter than them. It's okay if you're not. Stop thinking about yourself because the person you're mentoring is probably thinking about themselves. So if everybody's just thinking about themselves, you can't really focus on actually learning together, right? It's okay to say, I don't know the answer, but let's figure that out together. Number four, finding a good mentor is absolute gold. A mentor is someone who can help you to realize. The things that you didn't know you didn't know, they can help you to think through tough cases and build better clinical judgment in a way that you just can't do alone. That combined with your own experiences will help you to improve at a much faster rate. And even maybe to the point where if you were by yourself, you would never have gotten to that level. So definitely one of the biggest accelerators in your early career, whether formal or informal. Just make sure that you're respecting their time. If you have a question and they seem busy, maybe don't interrupt them unless it's an emergency, but ask them when would be a good time to ask a question and tell them how long you think it'll take. Do your own research first and then ask questions based off of that. If it's something you could have looked up, again, that's not really respectful of your mentor's time, so do that. Number five, physical therapy. Is not for every patient, and that's okay. It's really tempting right out of physical therapy school to feel like, yes, I have all the tools I need to heal everyone. And the reality is, especially after rounding with many, many physicians. There's a lot of people that end up in their offices that are definitely not appropriate for physical therapy. It is our job to help treat people who are appropriate for physical therapy, but if they are not, it is a fantastic opportunity for us to help triage and get them to where they need to go faster. It's not that you failed, that you were a bad physical therapist if they end up needing surgery, we as a healthcare professional are part of a big team. We're not competing for patients. We are working together to take care of these patients. So the sooner that you can recognize the patients that shouldn't be in physical therapy, the better it is for that patient to get to where they need to go. Number six, you're probably not gonna love your job every day. It's a job. There's pros and cons to every single job, right? There's gonna be weeks where you feel emotionally drained. Overwhelmed, maybe unsure of yourself doesn't always necessarily mean you made the wrong career choice. That's where it's important to do things. Like I said before, rest, take care of yourself. So maybe you don't feel. So drained. But we work with people who are in pain all day, and there's a lot of emotional load beyond physical and mental, and it can be a pretty hard career. But on the flip side, we are in a profession where we get to help people every day. So on those hard days. Just remember why you're doing this. Try and focus on people that you helped today.'cause it's very common on your schedule. You could have like 15 people on your schedule and that one person's doing horrible and that takes up so much mind space. Try and counteract that by coming up with other patients that you did help that day. Small victories,'cause we as people tend to pay more attention to the negative. And then. And disclaimer, if you're in a horrible setting there are things going on in your clinic that are not legal or inappropriate or things like that. You're, you feel like it's not a safe setting for patients, all that kind of stuff. I'm not saying to stick that out. I'm talking about more of the day-to-day grind average clinic. But the information that you have picked up is valuable to so many people out there. So that's all I have to say about that. Now, number seven, expertise takes time. There are no shortcuts. Yes, I did say mentorship can accelerate your career, et cetera, et cetera, but you still have to put the time into it. You can take courses, join mentorships, go through residency and fellowship. All that does help to shorten the learning curve. But there's also experience that is so important You have to refine your own reasoning and make mistakes and learn from them. Good thing is you've probably got the most updated research, but you gotta put the time in. So again, be patient with yourself. Don't beat yourself up too much, just keep at it and you'll get better with time. And number eight, these are in no particular order, by the way. This might be a hot take. Emotional intelligence will take you further than any manual technique. When I mean emotional intelligence, that could mean a lot of different things. I'm talking about things that show up in our soft skills, our ability to communicate, our ability to regulate our emotions, or recognize emotions in other people. Our ability to lead others day one. Regardless of if you're a staff PT or not, you are a leader because you are leading your patients. But all too often we tend to overestimate our communication abilities. I will say going from a large hospital system to, I'm now in a cash-based practice. It is so much more evident the value of communication to be able to speak with our patients. No matter how you feel about selling or not, we are all selling something. We are selling the idea of physical therapy. We are trying to convince our patients that our treatment can help them to get them where they wanna be. So I would as humbling as it can be, really dedicate the time to developing emotional intelligence, communication and leadership skills, because that is something that you will need at every level, not just as a physical therapist. But in life and it will take you so far. We all know clinicians who maybe are have a high EQ or emotional intelligence. While maybe their clinical skills might not be that great, but I really think the perfect combination is develop both. Develop your clinical skills and your soft skills and that is a good career foundation built there. So I definitely didn't go over every single lesson I learned, but these are just some that stood out to me while I was reflecting and making the outline for this episode. But if there are other ones that you learned. Reach out to me, shoot me an email or a DM on Instagram. Um, if you feel comfortable with me sharing that, I would love to do so because again, the more that we can learn from each other, the better we can all be. So I. All that being said, I hope this was helpful. I hope you guys are ready for 2026. Let's go. I'm so excited for the start of the new year, and like I said, we're gonna be going over rib stress fractures and more exciting content in the year to come. But if there's anything that I can do for you, please just reach out. But that's it for today, guys, and until next time.