Manage yourself. Lead others. I work in patient/therapist, client/consultant, and employer/employee relationships. I don’t want to manage a patient, client, or employee. I want to lead them. At the same time I want to be led by them. The truly great thing about any interaction is that each party brings something of their own to the table, the table is shared, and everyone then takes something away from the table. Leaders create tables where effective sharing occurs. Which tables you allow others to share with you and what you take… Read more Something to strive for →
Are you a creature of habit? Of course you are. We all are. It’s how we’re built. Habits allow us to act without attention. And I don’t know about you, but I can use all the spare attention I can get. But are you aware of your habits? I am aware that I habitually check my pocket for the keys before shutting the car door, even though this doesn’t require my attention. However, I may not be aware that each time I do this I also clear my throat. I… Read more Movement Enrichment 2: Variation. If all you have is a hammer, is everything a nail? →
Pain is an opinion. Novel movements are those that your body has not yet made an opinion about. Novel movement creates a window of opportunity for your body to come to a non-painful opinion about a movement. If you get enough non-painful opinions accumulated, your body might change its overall opinion.
Did you ever notice how unpleasant it is to have a bright light in your eyes after they’ve acclimated to the dark? Or, how about when you take a hot shower immediately after playing in the snow and it feels like molten lava? Of course you have. This is a totally normal phenomenon that we’ve all experienced. Vision and temperature sensation are both mediated by the nervous system which is very adaptive. It adjusts its sensitivity to attempt to match your current setting. A big change in the setting creates… Read more Do you stare at the sun? The real story behind warming up. →
1. (noun) enrichment act of making fuller or more meaningful or rewarding People are demanding more enrichment in their lives. We’re seeing it addressed at the cutting edges of many sectors, like Google’s approach to employment and the rise of social networking’s role in marketing. There is a huge outcry and demand for Healthcare that is more enriching, and while I don’t pretend to have the answers to that, I do have an approach to the enrichment of movement. Let’s break the definition down into 2 parts and make some… Read more Movement Enrichment →
Novelty is king when it comes to moving with less pain. There’s some pretty cool brain chemistry at play in this. Dopamine is released in the brain when we encounter something novel. It’s like a messenger to the rest of the brain saying “Hey everybody, wake up and pay attention. This is something new.” Novelty is so useful because it is something you don’t yet have an impression of. In pain, you keep encountering movements that give the impression of danger and thus the response of protection. Novel movements give… Read more Novelty: A Window of Opportunity →
Saw this quote in a toy store with my son last year in the San Juan Islands: We don’t stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing.
I recently posted about producers and the similarities with my work as a physical therapist. I said that I’m not a director and that people shouldn’t try to hand over their director’s chair to me. When I wrote this I know that some readers would think about the various movements and exercises that may be provided in physical therapy and how directed they can seem. So, let me further clarify. I was recently watching some of the extras from Pixar’s Cars with my son. They were discussing the setting at… Read more What can we learn from Pixar? →
Forward Motion 