The Most Important Tool of Your Trade – Exploring Self-Care and Professional Well-Being

Welcome to the first episode in Season 3 of The Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast. 

In this solo episode, Jo explores the most important (and arguably the most underestimated) tools of your trade. They aren’t your machines, your tests, your notes or your office – it’s you! So here Jo explores the ways you can look after your personal and professional wellbeing so you can bring the best of who you are to what you do.  

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• What Do You Feed a Million Dollar Racehorse? The Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast (episode 11)  
• Future Proofing Health Professionals Facebook Group 

If you know you need more support, please visit my website at https://jomuirhead.com

Transcript

Welcome back to the Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast. This is episode one of season three. I am your host, Jo Muirhead, the author of The Entrepreneurial Clinician, a book I wrote back in 2018, 2019 when I was incredibly concerned about the numbers of health professionals who were choosing to leave the industry through burnout, through ill-health, through disillusionment. And I wanted to find out why I thought I was gonna be writing a book about being entrepreneurial and what that meant, and how we could harness all that entrepreneurial thinking, and that was part of it.

But what I really ended up exploring was how entrepreneurial thinking can help us stay the course, maintain our work, and continue to make a significant difference in the lives of the people we want to serve. So in this season, I’ve got some great guests lined up for you. I wouldn’t have great guests, but I’ve got some really interesting people and people you’ve probably never heard of before who think about the world in a different way, who allow me to take them on sometimes quite vulnerable journeys. And I am looking forward to sharing their greatness and their goodness with you.

But in this episode, I’m actually gonna be by myself, solo episode <laugh>, and I’m gonna be speaking into something that I’ve spoken a bit about in other spheres. So if you were at the 2023 International Future Proofing Health Professional Symposium, you would’ve heard me talk about this. If you were at a conference in Hawaii a couple of years ago, you would’ve heard me speaking into this. But I do it kind of as a part of a bigger presentation. And I actually think this content and this subject deserves a little bit more of our attention. So we’re gonna be spending our time on it today.

So as health professionals, regardless of your discipline, I want you to spend a moment right now, and I want you to think about the tools of your trade. So what are the things that you cannot do your job without? So give you an example. Here in Australia, we like to call carpenters chippies. So you have a chippy and he goes off to work and he is usually driving a ute, which some of you may know as a utility truck. There you go, there’s some Australianism for you.

So we have a chippy driving a ute, and we know that it is unlikely that this chippy is going to be able to do his job without a hammer or a nail gun or a level or pieces of timber. There are some tools of the trade that he, she, they can’t do their job without. But on top of that, this person’s actually probably spent years learning and refining their craft in their trade. They may have done a technical college course or a TAFE course here in Australia. They may have even been apprenticed to somebody who was more experienced to learn how to do the job. So without that knowledge and expertise combined with those tools, it is unlikely that said chippy is going to be able to construct said anything. So why do I wanna talk about this today? Well, because many of us as health professionals get hung up on our tools or what we perceive the tools of our trade to be.

So let me give you an example. You walk into a physical therapy or a physiotherapy clinic, and quite often they’ll have an ultrasound machine. Quite often they’ll have heat packs. Quite often they’ll have a range of exercise equipment that is torturous <laugh>, thank you to all the people helping me rehabilitate my shoulders. Are they the genuine tools of that trade? Could that physical therapist or physiotherapists actually do that job without those tools present? I can think about exercise physiologists who like to teach us how to maintain posture and make sure that we’re moving our bodies and our minds in a way that promotes health and wellness. Can they do that outside of a gym? Do they have to be in a gym? Is it the only place they can do that work in a gym? Now, all of the exercise physiologists listening to this now are going no work in a gym. Correct? You don’t just work in a gym.

But what are the genuine tools of your trade? Let’s think about psychologists here in Australia or anybody who can use diagnostic tools. Are they the tools of your trade? Are they the things that you cannot do your job without? Yes, they make your job easier. Yes, they allow you to get paid by insurance companies. Yes, they make reporting easier. Yes, they help you contextualise what you’re working with. But can you genuinely do your work without these things? ’cause Many, many times we simplify the tools of our trade and we get hung up on things like a chair, a computer, how your office looks, where the lighting is, what type of screen should you be using on, do you co-create notes during session or after session? Is it your medical records, your EHR? Is it the way of getting paid? Is that the tool of your trade? Now, all of the, don’t get me wrong, all of those things are necessary. All of those things are important, but they actually don’t necessarily make you unique or make you empowered or help you to do the work that you really need to do with the client who’s right there in front of you.

Some of us might think it’s our education, our training, our credentials, CPD, CEUS, They allow us to stay licensed. They allow us to stay practising. Now, you might be sitting there going, where are you going with this, Jo? You’re labouring the point. Well, I’m kind of doing it on purpose because we don’t spend enough time thinking about what we are doing and why we are doing it since 2018, 2019. We have been, and it’s actually been going on for longer than that. But that’s when I did my research. We have just been reacting, reacting, reacting, reacting, reacting, reacting, reacting, reacting, reacting. And we don’t give ourselves permission or the opportunity or don’t even recognise it’s important that we need to actually pause, reflect, and go, what is the most important tool of my trade?

So I wanna share with you today what I think the most important tool of your trade is….it’s you! Surprise, nobody’s gonna be able to do the work that you can do unless it’s you. Now, please don’t think for a minute that I wanna make you all incredibly egotistical and walk around full of your ID and ego going, I am so amazing. This world can’t exist without me. That’s not what I’m saying. What I want to help you understand is if you were a chef working in a hatted restaurant, you would be incredibly possessive about your knives. Have you ever seen a chef take care of their knives? They sharpen these things. They polish these things. They even have their own special pouches. And gosh forbid the apprentice chef touches the chef’s knives. That is, they take such great care of their knives.

Let’s go back to our chippy example, the chippy with the Ute. He doesn’t just toss his tools in the back of the ute at the end of the day and leave them there until tomorrow. No. Most chippies that we wanna work with will have a special place for every tool like a shadow board in a mancave or in my dad’s garage where every tool had its place. And you know where those tools were? Well, maybe not my dad’s shed, but most people you knew where the tools were and they were kept in pristine condition. Yeah, definitely not my dad’s shed, but we know where our tools are. We know how they’re looked after. We know what is required, right? So what is it about us that makes it so hard for us to recognise the genuine tools of our trade? Because it’s very, very easy to keep our machinery, the ultrasound machine or the heat pad machine, or the battery of tests available online or on paper. It’s very easy to keep, for us to see that we need those in stock. We need power, we need them cleaned, we need them accessible. We need them in braille sometimes. Like it’s easy for us to see that. But what about us? Who’s administering and choosing to use these tools? Where do we fit into this thinking?

Well, without us, none of this other stuff matters. So what is it about us that we need to be thinking about in terms of tools of our trade? Well, our brain, number one, our ability to use our executive functions. Now, I don’t know about you, but I find it extremely difficult. And I have to work very, very hard to have executive functioning functioning if I’m in pain or if I’m distressed or if I am anxious, they might be working at the same time. I think some of us have that adaptive ability these days, but it takes a lot of work and it’s easy to get fatigued. So if you’re sitting in front of a client and you’re trying very hard to listen to their story and you’re thinking about the implications of the story and implications of how they’re moving their body or the distress that’s coming up for them, and you are already distressed and you are, or I’m sorry, for those of you who can’t see me, I just touched the back of my head there to play with my amygdala <laugh>.

But it makes our work so much harder. And sometimes the stories our clients can tell us can be distressing in themselves. I know I am certainly reliving with a therapist, some of the stories that I heard very early on in my career that I didn’t realise were still causing me significant distress nightmares. Yeah, I know. And some of you’re going, that’s vicarious trauma. Yep, I’m aware. I know what it is, but I didn’t know, like I’ve been doing this work for 30 years. So my brain, my executive functioning, that is a key part of me being able to do my job. Some of you who have coached with me and some of my clinical clients will say, how did you know that about me? Like, it’s like you’re a mind reader. It’s like you are, you know exactly what to say and it’s been perfect for me.

It’s like, well, that’s my years of experience, my executive function, my emotional regulation, all of the things that you can’t see. I don’t just turn up out of a box like this. So that brings me to my second point. So we’ve got our executive functions. They’re a pretty critical part of the tools of our trade. Well so is our ability to emotionally regulate. We do this in session with clients all the time. We’re not necessarily so good at understanding when, and we need to turn it off and we might overregulate in some places or then over remote in other places. But our ability to have healthy emotions, our need to have healthy emotions. And if this doesn’t inspire everybody to find a mentor, a supervisor, a consultant, a coach, somebody that can help them work through the emotional demands of your job, that I don’t know what will, because I do not know any health professional on this planet who could not use somebody to talk to about the way the work impacts them.

Then we’ve got our own general health. How hard is it to do our work when we’re sleep deprived? Anyone got young children and still turning up? I see you, you are incredible. You are amazing at sleep deprivation. And sleep deprivation and I were not friends. I did not enjoy those first three months of being a new mum. Didn’t. And my son knows this, but I did not enjoy it until he started sleeping. I found that sleep deprivation thing hard. But it’s not just me being a mum. I’ve also had years and years and years of insomnia, years of it, but then I can still turn up to work. But how much more functional could I have been? How much more effective could I have been? How much more caring of myself could I have been if my own sleep had improved?  

Nutrition? You hear me talk about nutrition.I’ve got a whole episode on what do you feed a million dollar racehorse? You can go back and check that out. It’s one of the early episodes of this podcast. Our sleep, our ability to get out and move our bodies otherwise known as exercise. What we read, what we listen to, what we consume, not just in terms of nutrient value, but in terms of cognitive value or emotional value. Social media, anybody, TV anybody, news cycles, anybody. Now, none of those things are bad in themselves, but have you ever noticed if you’re starting to feel a bit low or a bit irritable or a bit burned out, that sometimes our responses to new cycles can become more pronounced. Some people might suggest that we’re overreacting or we notice it in ourselves. For me, irritability, I can get irritable. The irritability of all of the things. My poor husband, he ends up getting the brunt of that, the irritability of Jo, not irritable with him. I’m just irritable with the world and I don’t have a way of being able to express that right now. So we’ve got our health that we need to be looking after. That for me means that you’re allowed to take a toilet break. You should not be sitting there holding on for hours on end, waiting for the clients to leave so that you can go to the toilet, making sure you’ve got nutritious food and snacks. Now that doesn’t mean you can’t have coffee, God forbid, or you can’t have chocolate or you can’t have snacks. Like I’m not here to tell you eat what you wanna eat, but just make sure you’re eating. Please eat during the course of your day, especially if you’re using that much brain power.

If you are seeing six clients, eight clients, 10 clients, please, please, please eat. Understanding the nutrition that your brain needs to function. I think if we all understood that we would be eating a lot more. We need to protect our energy. We need to make sure we’ve got energy, but the right type of energy, not the hyper functioning, over functioning energy that I can sometimes come with. But then also I need enough energy to be able to do the things that need to be done. That’s a delicate balance in this day and age. Cause most of us are living from places of exhaustion to over-functioning and we’ve lost sight of what it’s like to just have this lovely sense of having enough energy to do the things that I need and wanna do today.

Our finances. Now our finances are a genuine tool of our trade. We can’t escape the fact that we live in a capitalist economy. If you don’t like it, I’m sorry, you’re probably not gonna be listening to this podcast anyway, but we exchange goods and services for money. That is how this works. But if you’re constantly in front of your clients worrying about how you’re gonna get paid and whether or not there’s gonna be enough money to put food on the table this month, I challenge you. Are you doing the best for that client? If you have thousands of dollars owing to you and you don’t know how to get that money back to you how are you surviving? Isn’t that stressing you out? Isn’t that causing anxiety in your stomach? If not, okay, you’re a different person to me. But I like being paid. In fact, once I worked out the systems and the processes in my business to make it easy for everybody to pay me, now we don’t get it right all the time. We still have people who lag. But I got the debt owed to me from 90 days and it was about $60,000 owing on a regular basis. Where we are currently right now, we are owed no debt. We have no outstanding debt. Everybody has paid. Now, for those of you living in the United States, you wanna tell me that it’s impossible to do that with your insurance companies? I want to say hoop. I don’t believe you because I’ve actually worked with some of you and we’ve got it down. What it does take is clarity, persistence, persistence, consistency, persistence, consistency and dedicated effort. And unfortunately, when we’ve been seeing clients all day and we’ve been listening to their stories all day, or we’ve had to help them get in and out of chairs and in and out of beds, and maybe we’ve done three shower assessments today and you’re just sick of being in gumboots all day, thank you, occupational therapy friends. And you’re just like, I just don’t have it in me to deal with that anymore. Can you see how that works? I just don’t have it in me to deal with that anymore. And I’ve gotta just turn up tomorrow and I’ve got another five shower assessments to do tomorrow. I’ve gotta make sure Mrs. Smith can get home without tripping over and breaking her hip again. And I’ve gotta make sure that Mrs. Smith’s family has access to the social worker and you’re exhausted. And the last thing you wanna have to do is deal with a bureaucracy that is supposed to be helping us. Yes, I said that with a goofy voice on purpose. So we let our finances slide and we let them slip because we are not protecting our energy. So there are people and resources that can help you with that. But I digress.

So the tools of our trade are our finances, because if you can’t pay for your rent or for your subscriptions or for your ultrasound machine to get repaired or for you to have a comfortable chair to sit in, that won’t necessarily take away your back pain. But I digress. If you can’t have money to do that and you can’t put food on your table and pay back your loans, or go and do the courses and the training that you wanna do, if your finances are gonna make you anxious. And then if they’re not making you anxious, they’ll make you resentful. And then when you get resentful, you’ll become resentful to your boss. You will get resentful to the industry that is sapping your energy, that becomes an obsessional thought that you can’t let go of. And pretty soon you find yourself burnt out because you’re in values conflict.

Yeah, tools about trade. Our caring for ourselves. Now, all of these things I’ve been talking about are components of the things about ourselves that we need to take care of. But when I’m talking about self-care, I’m talking about how you start your day, how you end your day, the breaks you have in between clients, the things you do in between client sessions, keeping your notes up to date, making sure that you’re getting paid, making sure that you are moving around, making sure that you’ve got nutritional food for yourself to eat. And when you start listing out all the things that it takes for this, and I’m circling my face and my body right now, to be able to function, it’s a lot.

And we can’t do it in isolation. Which brings me to my next point. Tools of our trade are also community, healthy community, community where you feel inspired, where you feel like you belong. Community where you’re allowed to be you. Community where people, you know, iron sharpens iron. So sometimes you might have some strong personalities that don’t always agree with you, but you can have healthy debates where you can express a concern without fearing that you’re going to, that somebody’s gonna threaten you with your licence, your ability to practise. We need community. And too many of us are trying to do this work in isolation. Too many of us are not allowing other people to come along alongside us and support and, and help us be accountable. We are full of shame, we are full of guilt. We are not letting people get close because we are terrified that if I do that you are gonna find out that I’m not as good as I need to be and I don’t know what I’m gonna do. It’s gonna be so embarrassing and I’m gonna be full of so much shame that feels like I can never cope. But we’re not meant to do this work in isolation. We need to do this work in community, multidisciplinary teams, interdisciplinary teams. You don’t want your clients to try and recover on their own. Why do we expect ourselves to be able to do all of this work? Listen to all of these stories and hide away. Please find a community where you are accepted, where you feel like you belong and where it’s okay for you to express yourself.

Tools of our trade are also lifelong learning. If you are a health professional, you have been learning, you have been learning and learning. We learn every day. It’s not necessarily a formal course or a structured course, but often we are going to short courses or we are learning, we’re learning a new technique to help a client. We are trialing something with a client that allows us to learn and to stay engaged for us, most of us. Learning also helps keep our brain in executive functioning functioning. But healthy learning also is usually done with other people. So we get to be in a community. Lifelong learning offers so much for health professionals. We still can go somewhere else to do the learning. Get ourselves out of our normal routine, get ourselves to experience different things. That’s why retreats and opportunities to go and learn in different countries are just so powerful.

But then our final one that I’ve got on this list is our nervous system. Our nervous system is a tool of our trade. Now you might think that that’s the same as emotional regulation and all of these things are interwoven. You can’t kind of separate them out and have a checklist and go, today I’ve looked after my executive function at the expense of my emotions. It doesn’t work like that. You’re a whole person and a whole human. What I wanna help you understand is if we start thinking about these things, our nervous system, our brain, our emotions, our self-care, our finances, the way a hatted chef thinks about their knives or their fresh produce, then I think we are going to start seeing the changes in healthcare that we know need to be made. We understand that the systems that we are in are broken, they are ineffective, they are often toxic. They do not add to us. They detract from us. They’re not changing and they’re not gonna change if we continue to tolerate them. So how do we start to not tolerate them? Most of you’re going, I can’t not have a job. Well, that tells me your finances, right? The tool of our trade is our finances. A tool of our trade is our finances, which helps us to feel safe, which allows our nervous system to calm down and our emotions to be better regulated and our executive function to be able to function at its optimum level. So can you see how that works? Because money, if we don’t have it, we end up homeless. We can’t do the things and participate in the life for where we are living. It is really hard. And yes, I get to say that as a very privileged white middle class woman living in Australia, but most of you listening to this podcast are probably having a similar experience. Although you may not be a white middle class woman living in Australia. So we can’t ignore the fact that finances are such a big part of the tools of our trade, and we can’t ignore our brains and we can’t ignore our executive functions or our emotions or our health or our energy or our self-care, both on a daily level, on a weekly level, our community, our need for community, our need for a place to belong, our lifelong learning. We can’t ignore that. This is a genuine tool of our trade. If you don’t have a certain amount of continuing professional development done in a year, then your licence ceases to exist. And we can’t ignore the importance of our nervous system as a tool of our trade.

 So I’m really curious to know from those of you who have listened to this podcast today, if you can think of other genuine tools of our trade, are there anything on this list that I have actually forgotten? Because I don’t have all the answers all the time. I am just really curious. I’m curious and I want us to continue to provide the healthcare that we need to be able to provide. That’s important to me. And if I can do that today through this podcast by helping somebody go, oh, I get it, Jo. I get why my self-care is so important and I’ve been thinking about it all wrong. Then I know that putting this together for you has been worth all the time, effort, and yes, money. Cause It takes money to put a podcast together.

So this is my challenge for you. What tool of the trade would you like to spend some time thinking about exploring, getting to know better? I invite you to come over onto Facebook to the Future Proofing Health Professionals Facebook group and let’s have a conversation about this. Let’s find out what the tools of the trade are and where they’re being most neglected, and how we can actually help each other in community to actually be inspired and affirmed.

And maybe you can start thinking about how you’re gonna take yourself into 2024, having looked after the most important tool of your trade, that being you.

Until next episode, go be your awesome self.