Check Out More OT Pelvic Health Content here.
Find me on IG! @functionalpelvis
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Pelvic OTPs United -- Lindsey's off-line interactive community for $39 a month!
Inside Pelvic OTPs United you'll find:
...
Check Out More OT Pelvic Health Content here.
Find me on IG! @functionalpelvis
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Pelvic OTPs United -- Lindsey's off-line interactive community for $39 a month!
Inside Pelvic OTPs United you'll find:
...
This podcast episode, my friends, is a little bit different. I <laugh> came home from the Western Regional OT Spring Symposium and was fired up. So my kids were home. I normally record my podcast episodes when they're at school, but my kids were home. So on occasion you do hear them in the background. And after I get done playing back my recording, and I heard that you could hear my kids playing on occasion, and you could even hear me kind of flipping my notes as I was looking through some of the journal entries that I made while I was at the conference and I was reflecting on them, I thought I should rerecord that. There's a little bit of background noise. You can hear my kiddos, you can hear my journal pages. And then I thought, nah, you know what? Life is messy. <laugh>. So many things about what we do on a daily basis aren't perfect. And there was something about the way that I literally walked in the door, fired up my mic and shared my experience with you that I don't think I could recreate. So I apologize for a little bit of the background noise, but I hope the message still resonates with you and comes out clear. Here we
Go. I'm gonna share with you three comments, three different distinct comments that my clients have shared with me throughout the years. First up is Rosie. Rosie had been working with me for about four months, and the last time she was intimate with her partner was five years ago. And after working together for four months, she said to me, I cannot believe that I'm having sex with my partner again. I literally never thought this was possible again. All right, next up is Jill. Jill said to me, it seemed impossible to me that I would ever stop peeing every 30 minutes. And I came to see you because I was in a meeting and my coworker turned to me and said, do you know that every time we meet 30 minutes into the meeting you're getting up? Are we that boring <laugh>? And she didn't know how to answer that because she didn't want them to think they were boring, and she definitely didn't want them to think that she had to pee, which is why she was getting up every 30 minutes.
And she said to me, now I can go two hours and I can't believe we've accomplished this in six weeks. Next up Tanya, Tanya said to me, I can't believe that I can now just sit on the toilet and have a bowel movement just by breathing. For the last 20 years, I literally have gone purple in the face with how hard I used to push. And that was about four months into working together. I'm bringing all this up, <laugh> as a way to help us think about how we can increase our hope and our resiliency within one another. So I don't know about you, but I have so many clients who say to me, I can't believe the progress we've made. And then I have other clients who say to me, I wish I was better sooner. And I thought long and deep about the difference between these two sentiments and these two reflections on their life.
And when I looked over the goals and the functional outcomes that my clients had had, those two sets of people were not very different than one another. In fact, their goals were met often in tandem, right? So the first group that felt the appreciation weren't making goals any faster than the group that didn't realize they weren't. So I kind of just studied it for a little while and thought, what makes the difference if they're both reaching their goals in approximately the same time? What makes one person realize their gains and the other person not? And honestly, I came to the conclusion that by being conscientious about the progress that we make, we have so much more hope and optimism in our lives, and we see things and frame things differently. So I started taking on the job of actually pointing out the progress my clients were making in a more timely way.
This could have been through outcome measures. This could have been through informal conversations like my client telling me that her coworker told her, why do you get up every 30 minutes? Right? But I'm making notes regardless of how I'm doing them. And then I'm reporting back, especially when I feel a milestone has been made. Can you believe just three months ago, you were not having intimacy with your partner? Can you believe six weeks ago? You know, and we kind of go through it in a way that reminds them that these things can be easily forgotten if we're not reminding ourselves of these important moments. Given how slow progress can be with pelvic health, this is not uncommon, and this is not unusual, right? There's always something more to improve upon in most of our lives. And remember, pelvic four therapy doesn't happen in isolation. Our clients' lives are continuing to progress around them.
And so sometimes without seeing our progress, it's easy to burn out and it's easy to give up. Even the smallest or seemingly most insignificant form of progress when shown and when appreciate is often the fuel our clients need to keep going. If we're not progressing, we can often kind of take the other stance, which is to give up on ourselves. And if we don't believe that someone else can make progress, if we don't believe our client can make progress, we're kind of giving up on them in a way regularly. Appreciating progress is key to maintaining motivation, intrinsic motivation for our clients and for ourselves. In psychology, there's this principle called inattentional blindness. And this happens when you're so fixated on the one thing that you fail to see everything else going on around you. It's kind of like tunnel vision, right? And so maybe our goal is to be able to have penetrative intimacy.
And we're at the point where maybe our goal is to pee once every three hours, and we're only at 45 minutes. But when our client first started to come and see us, they were peeing every 20. It is easy to miss the gains that have happened because we are seeing what we want to accomplish in the end. We're fixated on that one thing. And seeing the gains can give us hope and confidence and motivation to keep going even when progress is difficult or slower than desired. And let's be really honest, sometimes progress is slower than desired in pelvic floor therapy. Now, I started off this podcast today talking about seeing clients in New York City in the functional pelvis in my private practice, which I started a decade ago, and I'm now since returning back to the United States from Paris. So I moved from New York City to Paris in 2019, and then I just moved back to the United States in 2022, where I am now 100% solely focused on helping pelvic floor OTs become pelvic floor OTs.
So I do this through OT Pioneers, which is my introductory course, and I do this through OT Elevate, which is the bio psychosocial approach to co colorectal conditions. It's kind of my follow up course to OT pioneers. So now you are my, my occupational therapy colleagues are my clients. And I got this be real. I got this beautiful inspiration to do the podcast today on this topic because I just got back from the Western Regional Occupational Therapy Spring Symposium where I gave a talk on pelvic health with my dear friend Carlin Daley Ray. And a student came up to me afterwards and said, I have tried to get a job as a pelvic floor OT for over a year, and I keep getting turned down. It doesn't get past hr, it doesn't get passed the hiring manager because my qualifications say ot, and they don't see pt.
Well, this very quickly reminded me of my beginning and how I didn't get my first job, even though the job had been opened for over a year. It, my resume did not get past hr. Some of you have probably heard this story before where I went directly to the hiring manager and talked to her about my passion, told her how I was committed to this, told her about the coursework I had put myself through, told her how I thought the unique voice of an occupational therapist in our bio psychosocial lens could really serve her clients. She gave me a shot. So at first, I was a volunteer and I wiped down tables, even though as I was already an occupational therapist and I already got all my volunteer hours under my belt, I was happy to be a beginner again. And within just a few short weeks, I got hired on to a full-time position.
So this student's worry and anxiety and stress really resonated with me because I remembered my story of how I wasn't able to get a job either. And if you had told me over 10 years ago that I would now be offering two flagship courses, OT Pioneers, and OT Elevate, I've had the privilege of supporting close to a thousand occupational therapists in these two programs. I now offer an OTs and Pelvic Health Summit this year. It's gonna be in person in 2023 in Phoenix. Last year we did it in virtual and a virtual capacity, and we are able to spend, send all of our proceeds to the Ukrainian Women's Fund that I now have a podcast, obviously, that I am offering a trauma informed pelvic health certification in 2024. I think my jaw would've dropped. I in complete disbelief, I would've thought, are you sure you're talking about this Lindsay vessel?
My point in bringing this up is that as humans learn, we quickly adapt to our new normal, even when our new normal is very different from what our life used to be. And after talking with this beautiful student and having this recognition myself, of almost doing what my clients did, kind of forgetting the progress that I've made and forgetting how far I've come, I actually went home that night and wrote down 10 things, 10 things that I've done over these last 10 years that I was really proud of that I didn't think I could accomplish. And that felt so good to me because I was practicing what I told my clients to do for so long, and it's come full circle, given that my clients are now you, my clients are now my OT colleagues, this OT student that came up to me after my talk, right?
And so being able to reframe that and to help my own sense of perspective was incredibly inspirational to me. Now, psychologists can call this principle of kind of going from doing something consciously to doing it unconsciously called automaticity, okay? And automaticity is important because we often forget how many gains we've made through this process. Now, it's an important process, it's a positive process. But if we're not conscious about that progress, it can, it can be disillusioning at times. So there's actually a model, it's called the Conscious Competence Learning Model by William Howell. He broke it into four stages, and he did it as a way to explain this phenomena. I'm gonna briefly review that with you now. So stage one is unconscious incompetence. This is when you literally don't know how to do an the skill that you've just learned about, and you don't even know your, or recognize your own ignorance.
So for example, this would be when I first learned that we could support someone, uh, when they're leaking urine or having painful intimacy, I realized this was a profession. This was a beautiful specialty that we could have, but I didn't even know the first step I could take to study it. All right? Stage two unconscious incompetence. This is when you know you don't know how to do something, but you can actually see your lack of skills. So you know, kind of that you need to gain knowledge and you need to address that deficiency, and you kind of put a plan into place to secure that growth. For me, this is probably taking my first course, right? So at the time when I was studying, only PT led courses were available, but today's equivalent would be taking an OT LED course such as OT pioneers, right?
Putting up path in front of you to gain competence. Stage three, conscious competence. This is when you have knowledge and you can reliably perform your new skills. You have to concentrate quite a bit, but you're gaining that competence. For me, this would be probably my first three to five years in practice. I probably had more competence that I realized, but I had a lot of self doubt. I had a lot of imposter syndrome. Or would I like to reframe and say self-doubt? Sally, kind of wondering if I could do this, if my bio psychosocial approach to pelvic floor therapy was enough, did I have to practice like my PT colleagues? Did I have to have that biomechanical, you know, sometimes manual skills-based approach, or could I talk about the nervous system? Could I talk about kind of how everyday occupations were being impacted and how habits, roles and routines could be shifted to make progress towards their goals?
And I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure, but I kept leaning throughout the years more strongly into that, especially on those days when I felt like a salmon swimming upstream as I was adopting my PT skills, it just didn't feel right to me. That's when I got to stage four, the unconscious competence. That's when you really feel like you're in the zone. It doesn't mean you have, don't have self-doubt that never disappears. I still have self-doubt to this day, but you have a perspective that can kind of help you feel more encouraged. And I truly believe that only stage four unconscious competence is gained through taking a retrospective on how far you've come. I think this is so incredibly important because you now have new experiences and perspectives and skills and habits and relationships that influence how you see the world and how you see pelvic health and therefore, how you behave.
Oliver Wendell Holmes said, A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions. How awesome is that? <laugh> cheers to being stretched and having new dimensions and new experiences that give us a story of resilience and robustness. This matters because without being conscious and intentional, you can really lose sight of the gains that you've made. You can take Grant, how gr you can take for granted how far you've come. You can ignore your progress and you can miss out on the confidence of remembering where you came from. So I wanna encourage you to take a moment and do what I did. Kind of think about some of the accomplishments you've had over the last 10 years. It could be bullets. Don't over falsify it, don't overcomplicate it. Mine. Were just bullets and lean on how your goals, your lifestyle, your health, how many things have changed for you this shift.
Taking this moment to recognize that shift is fundamental, and it's so important. The more you practice this, the more you lean into re recognizing the amount of games you've had, the more inspired you'll be, the more you will recognize that you are not who you were 10 years ago. For me, that's a good thing. <laugh> you, you are constantly accomplishing and achieving things in sometimes a roundabout way, but it's gotten you to where you are today, and that's a really beautiful thing. The more you practice this, the more specific you will get and the more easy it will be to see, appreciate, and really recognize how much growth is all around you. Now, we're always gonna see where we wanna be. We always are gonna see where we wanna go next. But taking a moment to allow empathy and compassion and respect for all of the knowledge and tools and skills and things that you have learned in a short period of time is the key, is really the key to having that resilience, abundance mindset.
Now, I randomly chose 10 years. I think it's because after talking to that student, I, I was reflecting on how far I had come, when I had had those same thoughts that she had had. You can pick any time period you'd like. I'm gonna start doing this on a more regular basis. My goal in my calendar is to do this once every three months, just to write down five to 10 things that I have learned, that I have done, that I have grown from. Because again, it can be so easy to forget the gains that you've made and being reminded of those gains boosts your hope, your motivation, your confidence, and your resiliency.
Thanks for listening to another episode of OTs in Pelvic Health. If you haven't already, hop onto Facebook and join my group OTs for Pelvic Health, where we have thousands of OTs at all stages of their pelvic health career journey. This is such an incredibly supportive community where I go live each and every week. If you love this episode, please take a screenshot of this episode on your phone and post it to ig, Facebook, wherever you post your stuff. And be sure to tag me and let me know why you like this episode. This will help me to create in the future what you wanna hear more of. Thanks again for listening to the OTs and PE Health Podcast.