Designing a Treatment Program Without Overwhelm

• Take the Gretchen Rubin "Four Tendencies" Quiz
• OT Pioneers: Intro to Pelvic Floor Therapy opens Sept 16-20, 2024! It's self-paced, 100% online and comes with 5 group mentoring calls!

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Pelvic OTPs United -- Lindsey's off-line interactive community for $39 a month!
Inside Pelvic OTPs United you'll find:​

• Weekly group mentoring calls with Lindsey. She's doing this exclusively inside this community. These aren't your boring old Zoom calls where she is a talking head. We interact, we coach, we learn from each other. The power of these community calls is staggering. Plus, she's got a lineup of experts coming in you don't to miss (see the P.S.).
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• Highly curated forums. The worst is when you post a question on FB just to have it drowned out with 10 other questions that follow it. So, she's got dedicated forums on different populations, different diagnosis, different topics (including business). Hop it, post your specific question, and get the expert advice you need.
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• Private podcast. Miss a group coaching call? Not a problem, the audio is uploaded to a private podcast so you can listen on the go. Turn your commute into a transformative
  
  More info here. Lindsey would love support you in this quiet corner off social media!

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Transcript

New and seasoned OTs are finding their calling in pelvic health. After all, what's more a DL than sex peeing and poop? But here's the question. What does it take to become a successful, fulfilled, and thriving OT in pelvic health? How do you go from beginner to seasons and everything in between? Those are the questions, and this podcast will give you the answers. We are inspired OTs. We are out of the box OTs. We are pelvic Health OTs. I'm your host, Lindsay Vestal and welcome to the OTs and Pelvic Health Podcast.

Today we're going to be talking about increasing client enthusiasm by designing a treatment plan without overwhelm. Once we know the symptoms or the diagnoses that our client is experiencing, once they find us and we know that pelvic health therapy is right for them, we have our list of ever-growing tools. We are a little bit obsessed with adding to our toolbox, which I think is amazing, but do you ever yourself feel a little bit overwhelmed? How do we make a plan of what our sessions will look like? How do we go about using all of our amazing tools that we've cultivated? How do we prioritize them and of course, how do we dispense this information without overwhelm and that actually helps to motivate them? I don't know about you, but sometimes this seems like a tall order to me, right? Not so fast. You're an OT and you were made for this.

Let's use the concepts of task analysis to break this down for ourselves. Alright, here we go. Here we go. My very first recommendation, and I share those with all of my OT pioneers students, which by the way, OT pioneers is opening September 16th through the 20th 2024, and I would be honored for you to join us. You can find a link in the show notes to learn more or just go to my website, www functional pelvis.com, focus on know more than three things per session. Now, I just love this framework. It causes me to really focus on three concrete things, and it helps me to weave all the other aspects of the session into this framework. All the education, the movements, the home exercise program, it stems from what three priorities I identified for that in that particular session. I think sometimes in order to help the client to feel like they're getting their money's worth or we just have so much passion and so much desire to share everything that we know, and we have learned that we sometimes feel like we have to stuff everything into one single session.

I want to encourage you to resist that urge. It is simply not true. We want clients to walk away feeling empowered, and that happens when we offer bite size, digestible pieces of education. Focus on the super practical, figuring out how to make our education super practical and fit into their life is paramount, right? Head knowledge is just one thing. A client can know all the tools, but they really need to implement them, right? And this is where so many clients struggle in traditional therapy that is not person focused. They have trouble making that leap from head knowledge to practical knowledge, and this is where your OT training really comes into play. You can help them take these tools and turn them into smart goals while building rapport with them, and you kind of get a sense of what will work for them and how much time they actually have to devote to our work.

The success of your therapeutic session is actually determined by them implementing the tools you just gave them. It's definitely worth taking time to figure out how it will work best for them. Don't just assume they can make the leap of exactly in their house where it is. They need to do the movement, where they need to focus on their pelvic floor movement. Actually ask them, Hey Susie, where do you envision doing this exercise in your house? Don't assume they know when in their day they're going to do this either, so ask them, do you think this will work in the morning? Do you want to do it in the evening? Once the kids have gone to bed? Kind of get a sense of what will work best for them. Those of you who have taken OT pioneers know I love the four Tenancy framework created by Gretchen Rubin.

We talk about it in our kickoff call. It is so worth taking her free quiz if you haven't already, because once we understand our personal tendency, we can see how it shapes our behavior and helps us to make better decisions, to meet deadlines, to suffer less burnout and engage more effectively with other people. Use the same framework to find out what your client's tendencies are and then how you can tailor your suggestions to what would work best based on what motivates them, right? So the whole four tendencies is a super quick free quiz online where you end up finding what intrinsically motivates people to take action, and I promise you will not see the world the same way. I don't see my kids the same way. I don't see my clients the same way. Once you start to see how accountability tracks into motivation, which is kind of what this quiz highlights, it just helps you think long term because the other thing I want to bring up here is that many times our clients come to us and they're motivated for the first couple weeks, but what happens, right?

Best laid plans, life gets in the way, and so part of our job is to also take a step back and figure out how a client maintains motivation. And this quiz is a really fun and interesting way to do that, and most of my clients have had a trip taking it and then they've shared it with their family, so it's pretty cool. I'll link to the quiz in the show notes, so please don't shy away from asking your client things such as How was the work for you last week? And based on their feedback, see what could be done better, figure out which of the four tendencies they are and cater to their strengths. Design a realistic home program with their input. Have a candid conversation around how much time they have to dedicate to that program. Honestly, I ask my clients to think about a realistic amount of time that they think they can devote to their work, not just what I think they want me to hear.

They're usually surprised when I ask them this, right? I don't think they're used to being brought into this part of the discussion. Traditionally, this aspect is not done collaboratively with the client. They're just assigned exercises in therapy, not with input from you and from them, not a collaboration. Working with them is key to their success. Listen to their answer when they tell it to you, I have 10 minutes, three times a week. Great, Susie, whatever it is, I'm going to work with you on that. I'm going to circle back around to see how they did. If there's room to add more, if they felt successful with fitting in 10 minutes three times a week, awesome. But building slowly helps them to experience how doable it is and how that success actually builds motivation and satisfaction and agency because it is about that just right challenge.

You are teammates. Make sure the client understands that them contributing to their part is key to success. It's not just about showing up to each session and having work done to you. A key part of the OT session is our clients owning the material, taking it home, and implementing it through strategies that we have just discussed. They are an active member of the team. We are just their guide, right? They are the expert of their body and the power of ADLs helps them to figure out how to incorporate our work together into everyday life. The power is in the ADLs. I use unloading the dishwasher, picking up a toddler carrying grocery bags all as part of therapy. My clients love the carryover and how every aspects of their life, even the mundane, especially the mundane, is an opportunity to connect to their body and make it mindful.

Gone are the days where we wait for those precious 30 minutes of the gym. The power is in the ADLs. Trust your intuition. The best advice I got early on and my career was to trust my intuition that if an idea popped into my head of where to go with a client, just go with it. Trust yourself. Trust yourself that you know more than you think you do, and you don't always have to understand exactly why you've decided to go in a certain direction, my friend. You have so much wisdom and tools at your disposal and your clients need your loving support. Clients use this as an opportunity to be loving and supportive to themselves. I also talk with my clients about the importance of self talk. I will mention things like if you didn't follow through, if you didn't get to your exercises, pay attention to how you are having that self dialogue.

You're not doing enough, you're not good enough. Or all things I've heard from my clients when we've had this conversation, and I want my clients to approach all of this compassionately in a place that encourages them and acknowledges all of the myriad of things they've got going on in their life. I say to them, you're doing the best you can, and that absolutely is okay. I know doing new things is hard, but you've got this. You're making progress, and we're going to work together today to make this even more accessible. Carve out time in that session to do just that. I find that this is a skill in and of itself that many people need to work on. I love using pelvic floor therapy as an opportunity to practice it. I would love to hear from you. If any of this resonated with you, if you've tried any of these things, what would you add to this list?

What are other ways that you're compassionately considering your client in their temporal needs, in their spatial needs, and in this idea that considering not overwhelming them is a critical part of our work with them? Thanks for listening to another episode of OTs and 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 want to hear more of. Thanks again for listening to the OTs and Pelvic Health Podcast.