Ep #33: How to Create the Best Results

Episode 33, How to Create The Best Results. 

Welcome to Clinicians Creating Impact, a show for physical therapists, occupational therapists, and speech-language pathologists looking to take the next step in their careers and make a real difference in the lives of their clients. If you’re looking to improve the lives of neurodiverse children and families with neurological-based challenges, grow your own business, or simply show up to help clients, this is the show for you. 

I’m Heather Branscombe, Therapist, Certified Coach, Clinical Director, and Owner of Abilities Neurological Rehabilitation. I have over 25 years of experience in both the public and private sectors, and I’m here to help you become the therapist you want to be, supporting people to work towards their dreams and live their best lives. You ready to dive in? Let’s go.

Hi there, friend. Can you believe that the summer is rapidly coming to an end? I don’t know why it surprises me almost every single year, but here I am again today just in awe at how quickly time actually passes. I’ve been wondering, is this a sign of my age? Maybe. Maybe it is. And I can also say that I have very much enjoyed the summer and I can’t wait to see what the fall is going to bring. 

I’m about to travel to Boise, Idaho this weekend to watch my niece get married and it is such a bittersweet moment. It’s sweet because, of course, I love my niece so much and I can’t wait to spend time with my family this weekend in total celebration. And, if I’m being honest, it’s going to be tough. 

It’s going to be tough because my sister, who is the mother of this beautiful niece that I have, suddenly passed away when my niece was only nine months old. My sister herself, only being in her late 20s at the time. 

So of course, I’m going to be thinking of her this weekend, we all will. And even after all this time, I really do miss her terribly. One of the gifts that I have learned through my sister’s death is that life really isn’t guaranteed. I think that we also have the opportunity to see that in the work that we do as clinicians. 

For me, this knowledge really does help me to motivate me to create the results that I want to create and intentionally live my life. I really do want to create the best results possible. And maybe you do as well. It may not come from a life lesson or even from your work as a clinician. I know that for some of you, often it’s just something that you’ve always felt inside. That need to create, to serve and to do a little bit better. 

And, of course, you want good things not just for yourself, but for the others that you are surrounded with and that you serve with as well. I see so many of you like this in the work that I do day to day. And I’ve noticed something in the past few months, sort of a pattern or a key piece that can really help you to get the results that you specifically are looking for, again, for yourself and for those that you’re serving in a much faster and easier way. 

So I wanted to share that with you today so that you can apply it at work, even today, if today’s a work day. But before I do, can I ask you a small favor? As excited as you may be to get this information, I know that you have colleagues that need this for them as well. Can you help me spread this kind of information by following and rating the show wherever you listen to podcasts? 

This really does help the podcast get to the clinicians when they’re looking for it. And then, finally, if you could share this episode or another episode that really resonates with you with a colleague that you think might benefit. Thank you so much for your help. And now let’s get back to helping you. 

When we’re looking to create some kind of result at work, be it an outcome for our client maybe or an outcome for ourselves, we typically use goals and goal setting as a framework. And I still do that to this day. If you’d like to know more about goals and goal setting, I would offer episode one of this podcast, How to Create A Bigger Impact, episode three, Why Create A Bigger Impact, and or episode eight, The One Key To Your Goal, would be some amazing places to start. To explore goals from perhaps a new and different lens. 

Having said that, as we work towards our goal or that certain result we’re looking to create, what I notice is that we often rely on external measures to help us to see if we’re creating success or not. So, for example, if you’re looking to create a certain outcome or result for your client, we’ll use things such as subjective and objective information or feedback from the client, and perhaps even information from other members of the clinical care team. 

If we’re looking to create a result of, say, getting our documentation done at work, we’ll look at things like how many hours we have to complete that documentation and how much time we estimate we need to complete that kind of work. Like I said, I even use that kind of stuff myself. 

One thing that could be work related as a clinician but actually is a little more personal to me, has been about my journey with my blood pressure. My blood pressure has always been something that I needed to monitor, sometimes more closely than others. And while I’ve never been on medication to manage it as of yet, not that that would be a bad thing if I needed to do so, I just haven’t gotten there yet. 

I have noticed in the last month or two that my blood pressure really wasn’t in a place or I wasn’t creating the result with my blood pressure that I was looking for. So as any good health care practitioner does, I reached out to my health care practitioners. I reached out to my family doctor, who asked me to do a couple of things and to get some further testing. And then I decided that I wanted to purposely decrease my blood pressure. 

Now, again, there’s nothing wrong with medication and I just wanted to explore if there were some lifestyle things that I could do to help to create the results I was looking for, which was a normal blood pressure. And again, this was something that I wanted to explore. 

For me at first, this meant looking at diet and exercise first. So as I was doing that I was diligently taking my blood pressure day and night. And I did that for about 20 days straight and I noticed some really interesting things about what I was doing that indeed it really did reduce my blood pressure. And that was amazing. 

What I noticed next is I almost got a little bit obsessed with the numbers or that external information, and more specifically having those numbers go down. And at the time, they really were. What I was missing in this situation, and what we’re often missing when we rely almost exclusively on external information to decide if we’re on the right track or not in creating our results, is our own inner wisdom. 

Now, this might sound a little woo woo to you. I’m sure the me of maybe 15, 20, 25 years ago would probably say that’s very woo woo. If not, that’s amazing, and if so, just bear with me for a moment. When we have a goal or result that we’re looking to create, especially when it involves other people, it is so easy for us to decide that the focus needs to be on the things that are outside of ourselves that need to change to create the result. 

And of course we do. There is an element of truth to that. When we focus exclusively there, what we forget is that we ourselves are also part of the system that is also an important part of the result that we’re creating. So for an example, as a clinician we are the catalyst for change for the client results we’re looking to create. We are part of the experience. 

And as someone who might be trying to create a result at work like, again, maybe getting documentation done in a timely way, we’re also part of that system. So as a person who was trying to create a more normalized blood pressure through lifestyle changes, what I thought and felt about my blood pressure, as I came to learn, is also an important part of the result that I was looking to create. 

As new clinicians we will often rely on frameworks and clinical pathways to help us to create the result or the outcome that we’re looking for. And as we get more experienced as a clinician, we often transition to calling our experience as something like intuition. The key I want to share today is we don’t need to wait to gain experience to be able to benefit from our own inner wisdom and create the results we’re looking for. 

So what could that look like for you? It could be something as simple as thinking about how you want to think and feel as you create the result you’re looking for. And then checking in along the way to ensure that you are on track, not just from the external feedback that you’re getting, but from your own internal feedback. 

It could also look like seeing the external feedback you get and noticing what you instinctively think and feel about that feedback. It can be asking yourself, what do you think your next best step is and why? So for me and my blood pressure, one major shift I noticed is that I was really trying to control my blood pressure. And if the number didn’t go down, my brain was making it mean that somehow I wasn’t doing enough. 

So through some introspection and some coaching from an amazing peer, what I realized is that while there are some things that I can absolutely do to influence my blood pressure, there may also be things that are outside of my control. And ultimately, trying to worry and control my way to a lower blood pressure was actually having the opposite effect of what I was actually intending to create. 

So my challenge for you today is to notice how much you do or don’t use your own inner wisdom, no matter how experienced or less experienced you are as a clinician at work. And decide how you want to feel about that. Where do you think your inner wisdom could actually make things faster and easier for you? And how do you want to learn more about your inner wisdom? 

As always, if you have questions, I want to help you. Feel free to reach out if you have questions. And I can’t wait to see the impact that you create with this. Have an amazing week and I will talk to you soon.

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Thanks for joining me this week on the Clinicians Creating Impact podcast. Want to learn more about the work I’m doing with Abilities Rehabilitation? Head on over to abilitiesrehabilitation.com. See you next week.