Strategies for Thriving in Seasonal Changes as an OT Working with Animals & Aquatics

 In this episode of "Animals and Aquatics," your host Gina, a mom, wife, occupational therapist, private practice owner, entrepreneur, and OT educator, delves into the crucial topic of seasonal planning for occupational therapists working with animals and aquatics. She highlights the importance of adapting to the changing seasons, particularly in a four-season climate, and shares strategies for planning client care, maximizing the benefits of each season, and aligning personal and professional schedules. The concept of backward planning is explored, ensuring that therapists can meet their goals and provide a seamless experience for their clients. Listen in for her insights and practical tips on thriving in the world of Occupational Therapy. 

Transcript

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Hi, welcome to animals and aquatics. This is Gina. Your host. I'm a mom, wife, occupational therapist, private practice owner, entrepreneur and OT educator. And this podcast is designed to help OTs who want to work in unique settings. With animals and aquatics. And this episode, we're going to share some of our strategies around seasonal planning. As an occupational therapist, working with animals and aquatics, we need to plan for seasonal changes. It's just part of the work that we do. We really need to consider. The seasons where we live. And we live in a four season climate. So right now we're transitioning from summer into fall with winter coming up very soon. And really thinking about what those seasonal changes mean for our practice. We need to plan for seasonal changes so that we can be successful. It helps us to keep our clients engaged and safe. Planning for seasonal changes means that we can maintain their plan of care even throughout winter or the heat of summer. If you live in a hotter climate. That we can also plan for rest and downtime for ourselves taking an account to this seasons. We can maximize the benefits that we get from each of the seasons that we have. And when we're working with animals or quad X nature based, we're outside a lot of the time and in our areas, some of our therapists and our colleagues that work with aquatics, they're using their own pool. That's only open for part of the year. So they really need to plan for that seasonality. As far as the pool availability for us, our pool availability is available year round, but it does change seasonally based on the school calendar and swim meets. For our other. Sessions that are outside. We need to plan for the changes in the weather, the changes in daylight. We need to take those into account. As we go through each season, again, we have opportunities right. That we can maximize for. And we also have things that we just, we have to take into account. So as we get started today, currently, we're looking at a couple big seasonal changes coming up. At daylight savings time. Right. Just happen. And so that's a big one that really changes the availability of daylight that we have. And so it means that it's getting dark earlier. And some therapists are fans of having evening sessions that are into the dark. And so it just depends on what your facility or what your setup is of weather. Going into the evening hours when it's dark out is an option for you and for your clients or whether you need to reschedule. So that might mean moving into different days, or it might mean. Rescheduling clients into different settings that you're working in. We're also making that transition of fall and looking ahead to winter. And thinking about. What that's going to mean for some of our clients that may not be able to tolerate the cold as well. Or what parent education do we need to start doing now to help our parents understand. What are some of the benefits of cold weather, OT sessions? What are the, some of the things they need to prepare for having communications around the proper clothing? That certainly always a big one. When we're thinking about planning for seasonal changes. And often we think about it from our perspective, but making sure that we're planning from the families that we work with and their perspective, what do they need to have? What do they need to get ready? What can we source for them? If it's heavier cold weather gear. What do they maybe already have that they're not thinking of like ski wear. That they could repurpose for our outdoor OT sessions. And our winter holiday school breaks are coming up. And so we are starting to do some planning around that as well, communicating with families, whether they would like any additional sessions during the OT winters school breaks. So currently for us, we have some kind of immediate. Plans that we're making for the seasonal changes. One of the big things to consider is really backwards planning. What is backwards planning? Well, it starting with the end in mind. And then working backwards. So if I give you an example here, When we start planning for summer. We need to have we're thinking like summer programming, whether that's a summer camp. Right. So that's going to happen the end of June. Well, where we live, we need to have signups open by the end of February or beginning of March. That's really the hot signup time for camp. Some start a little bit earlier, but pretty much by mid-March. Most people have their summer camp, summer activity, summer plans done. And signed up and paid for. So we need to have that done by March so that they can come in June. So if I'm backwards planning, then I need to get my advertising starting the beginning of January. That way I have a full six weeks of ramp up of advertising and awareness before signups open. So if I need to have my advertising done the beginning of January, then I need to have my marketing materials and visuals working on in December. And if I need to have my marketing materials. And visuals and everything in December. Then I need to have the dates and the plans of exactly what I'm going to offer done by November. And so that's an example of what backwards planning is. And why we do it is because. It allows us to make sure that we're hitting the target dates that we need to for each of the seasonal changes. And it's really hard to think right now in November. And go, okay, what am I going to do in June? Like what do I want June of next year to look at? But we had a very funny now, but was not funny at the time, our first year when I was really super proud of myself, that in April, I had my signups up for June. I was like, wow, this is two months ahead of time. And we got, I think, one sign up. And another mom reached out to me and she said, oh, I would have really loved to have done this. This looks awesome. And I was like, That's great. Like, why don't you sign up? And she's oh, we already have our summer planned out. And I said, I really hope you don't mind me asking, but could you tell me a little bit about your, like, how you plan for your summer? And she said, oh yeah. She said, by January I'm doing my research. So that way by February, I can have. signups started. I need to have that all done by March. That way I know what's going to happen with our summer because some of the programs that I really want to get into are filled. And so I really start my planning early. And that was my first insight into how far backwards planning might need to take me how easy it was to miss deadlines for things that I wasn't even aware were happening. And when we work in this outdoor environment and we have the seasons that are part of things, we really need to take that into account. When we think about. That backwards planning. We're always doing it. And this allows us to, again, hit those target dates. It allows us to be more successful, collect, connecting with clients when they need. Us. We do it on a 90 day basis. And so every 90 days we're starting to do some backwards planning. We're looking ahead at each of the other 90 days throughout our yearly cycle. So we can pencil in what we need to do. And each of our 90 day quarters, we have one sort of big event for each month that we need to handle, whether that's website updates or looking at financials and this backwards planning again, it allows us to be successful in meeting our goals. It allows us to plan for downtime and vacation. And it allows us to have things to look forward, to, to communicate in advance with our clients. It really has a lot of advantages when we think about it. But it does require us to be more organized. It requires us to definitely be working ahead of maybe where we feel like we're at the moment. And sometimes it can feel a little worrisome because you really don't know. If the things that you are planning well ahead of time are going to work out. So sometimes it's having kind of an AB and C strategy. Coming down the pipeline of, we know this strategy is working really well for us. So we're gonna keep that going. We know that's working, but we also want to try something new. So we need to give that enough time to get the information out, to ramp up. To get the, families in our area to have some awareness of what we're doing. And, sometimes I tend to be a very jump all in type of person. We will give it a 90 day circuit and see if that works. See if we get some traction and if we don't, then we can pivot. So with our next 90 days, we're planning for our winter. Period for us and thinking about, for us, January, February, March are really cold, long. Dark. Months. And I'll still be seeing some clients at the stable where I have an indoor arena. And I need to plan for activities that we can do when it's cold, if we're not going to be using the movement of the horse as much, because it's just too cold, we need to move into our heated activity room. What can I do with that space? What can I do to keep things fresh and interesting? When we're not able to go outside as much. So I'm looking at a little bit of the intervention planning, which I'll be covering in our next podcast episode. We'll be doing a little bit of a deep dive into some of the intervention planning piece, but. On a bigger level, looking at that next 90 days. Right. We're going to be putting out our summer plans. We're going to be advertising a winter. Community activity that we're going to do. And we'll really be looking at what are our spring ramp up plans. There's a variety of different things that we're really planning. In that next 90 days. Now I already went through. That backwards planning for our summer program, but that's also going to be happening because we don't want to get to April and find out, that we haven't. Put everything in place where we can be successful and thinking about seasonal planning. We're. As we're coming into winter, we're planning summer. And then as we come into spring, We have thought a little bit about our spring. Ramp-up. So when the weather starts to turn nice, we want to make sure we have our advertising and marketing materials out. So that way families can join us in the spring. We'll be expanding our days again. So that will open up some new spots and. W it's nice to be able to help families move right into those spots. We know that some of our families who are moving either into different programming with us will want to come back to some of the days that we're opening up. And for us since Ryan and I are husband and wife and parents. And work together. We need to be coordinating that along with childcare duties, who's taking the kids on what day? What activities do the kids have? That we need to work around as well as any other work commitments that we might have with the college or with aha. So those are all components that go into that planning. And again, already thinking now for spring, what that's going to look like. We've done our backwards planning for summer. But with our summer, we're going to start looking at. If we're running daytime programming. In addition to our regularly scheduled programming of like our individual sessions, we like to run groups in summer. And we haven't done a lot with summer camps. We've had. I've done some summer camps in different settings. But my big thing with summer camps is. There are two things, I suppose. One is the commitment level. So. If two kids sign up for your summer camp, like you're committed to those kids. They've signed up. And you don't want to cancel on them last minute, or even not last minute, April, because there are limited other signup opportunities, right. That are going to happen. And so the amount of staffing that you need to have to cover the hours that you're gonna offer for camp can be significant. And unless you know that you're going to have. At least one full week of camp. Then that's always a concern I've had about, meeting the numbers that we need to meet. In order to have the staffing that we need to have in order to make that be really be a successful program. And again, when we're talking about animals and aquatics, It's not a one to three or four ratio. It has to be much more. Supervised. And so. It's great to have fieldwork students, but I don't always feel like you can count on them ahead of time. So sometimes our forward planning, backward planning. Calendar is not aligned with the academic field work. Placement calendar. And so I may not know for sure whether we're going to have fieldwork students. So I've been avoiding. The larger summer camp types of opportunities for kids because of our team model and having to align everything with the team, organize the different facilities. And certainly if we had our own facility, that would definitely make that type of planning much easier. So we work with what kind of planning we can work with. And so groups work really well for us. We like offering groups in the summer when parents and families have more availability. And we can offer, after noon, but not after school hour. Types of groups. Make an offer drop off types of groups for a little bit longer period of time. And we found that to be a really successful opportunity for us for the summer. So we want to make sure that we have that planning for summer. And then we start to look at. Fall of 20, 24 and what that looks like with the academic calendar. So I can align. My session dates, time off and everything with the fall calendar. And we know for us that the transition between. School right summer and then school families. Sometimes, that's a really busy time for them as they're getting into their new school schedule or sometimes families can't confirm with us until they know their school schedule and their new therapist schedule. Thinking ahead, we just try to plan it. So our. Session times when we're going to take a break. And have our vacation is going to align somewhat to set us back up, to get started. Either right after families have gone through that transition back to school. So sometimes we actually take The last week of summer and the first week. Before the first week of school starting off. And that way families can get into their new routine. And then it allows them to move into our schedule more easily. And then that takes us back around to winter. So as we plan for each season and the more we do it the better we get at it. And that's true for you as well. So when you're thinking about planning for seasonal changes in your business, first of all, think about what your seasons look like for each of them, write down some of the characteristics. Just of the weather, the availability of the animals that you work with. If you're working in the aquatic setting, is it an indoor pool, outdoor pool? Another body of water that you're around. And how does that change throughout the year? So even again, though, we're at an indoor pool location. It does still change. Depending on the seasons because of school. So we kind of sketch all that out just based on the outdoor availability. Component. Then we look at things that affect our clients and that can be things like school, school breaks. Temperature extremes in temperature can be challenging for them. And we know all those things in each of those seasonal quarters. Then we look at us and our family and the things that you know are important to us. When do we want to take breaks? When do we want to take vacations? When do we have other commitments to our other jobs that we work? So the college. Working with aha. As a faculty person conferences, things like that, or continuing education. And we start to plug all of those in. Then you can go ahead and start to put in things that you would want to try or what your kind of business metrics are. So we have business metrics that we're meeting for each quarter for each 90 day goal. And one of those is a community outreach event. So we can put that in there for each of those periods. What would be a good one? And we've done. Spooky Saturday. Has been a really popular one and that's an easy one for the fall. And Thinking about, a winter activity. Well, our winters have been very hit or miss as far as the. Wintery ness of the winter. So we haven't really been planning a lot of winter Wonderland types of events, but we found like a beach bash at the pool in the middle of winter is actually pretty enticing to get people. Out of the cold and into the pool and into the water. So that's a bit of a reverse. Seasonal planning component, as opposed to summer when everyone's been in the pool all summer. And it seems like, well, of course the pool goes better with summer, but for us, that. Doesn't work as well. Right. Because everyone has access to it. Spring. I mean, spring for us is such a beautiful time of year. We all feel renewed with spring energy. We have the baby goats are usually born early in the spring, so. We usually do a baby goat group is one of our events around spring time. And summer, it's, there's a lot of fun things to do around summer. So we put in what are. Seasonal event is going to be, that's going to help. Get the word out in the community. That's going to help. Celebrate our families and their successes. And those are all important things that we plan in. And then we just start to look at what those dates look like. And that really sketches out our calendar. And we just, every, every 90 days when we sit down to do our planning, We take a look at that. And make sure that it's aligning with what our goals are for finances, what our goals are for our family. And make sure that we're still on track for that. So I hope that's helpful to understand what our process is. And I hope that you can take a little bit of that and put it into place for yourself, even if you're new and just getting started. Or if you need some more support, certainly reach out. We'd love to touch base with you. As I get ready to wrap up for today. If you are a nature-based OT working with animals or aquatics, you really need to take into account the seasons and then create some seasonal planning for yourself. That way you can meet your business goals, you can maximize the benefits of each of the season in your area. So for our counterparts down south, we have really, really hot seasons. And, taking advantage of doing some activities that are a little bit different. When maybe you don't want to be out in the hot as much. Right. There are opportunities for each season that we have. So there's lots of ways to maximize the benefits of your unique seasons. When working with animals and aquatics, I'd like to give you a little reminder that there'll be plenty of time to catch up on any episodes that you've missed. During December and January, while we take a little break. If this episode has been helpful to you, please like our podcast and leave us a review so that other OTs can find us. Thank you.