Ani
Hi, and welcome to the Somatic Coaching Academy podcast. We are on episode 56 today. Hi, Brian.
Brian
Hey, Ani. How are you doing? We’re really good. How are you? Doing all right. I’m excited for today’s podcast.
Ani
Why is that?
Brian
Because we’re talking about some of my favorite people.
Ani
Oh, yeah? Today.
Brian
Who’s that? Occupational therapists.
Ani
That’s me.
Brian
Yeah, that’s some of my favorite people.
Ani
Thanks, Brian. Yeah.
Brian
So today we’re talking about occupational therapists and somatic coaching. Is it a match?
Ani
Is it a match. It sounds like it’s a game show. Is it a match?
Brian
Well, maybe it’s a game show. Is it a match? Let’s see. Yeah. Interesting. I think about occupational therapist, and I have to make an admission. Actually, so here’s an admission right in front of thousands of people.
Ani
I love it when you do this in front of everybody. You would have said it to me in our kitchen, but whatever.
Brian
I’ll say it right now. Yes, dear. When I was back in the School of Allied Health Professionals at SUNY Buffalo, where I earned my physical therapy degree way back when. In that school were exercise physiologists and occupational therapists.
Ani
And physical therapists.
Brian
And physical therapists, right? Of course. Yeah, and we all went through that school together. I have to admit, I had gross anatomy. We did a lot of classes together in some of those prerequisites classes, especially gross anatomy. There were some occupational therapy students that I got to know and such nice people. Really great people in a lot of ways, really emotionally attuned folks, which I did not get at all then. I did not have the emotional maturity to really understand what the heck was going on over there.
Ani
At the right age of 19.
Brian
21, whatever. I did not know what was going on over there in the School of occupational therapy. And because of that, I just didn’t understand it. Yeah, right. And so you all seemed a bit off. But that’s because I was off. That’s because I was not emotionally attuned. But that’s my admission. I did not have the emotional maturity to really appreciate how important and how wonderful occupational therapy and occupational therapists are. And over the course of my 30 plus years as a PT, Working a lot with. Teaching. Especially when I worked at Craig, we did a lot of co-treatment with OTs. I got to learn a lot more about the occupational therapy profession. Not as weird as you thought. No, I really gained so much respect and so much appreciation and just so much likingness. I don’t know what the word is. I’ve worked with a lot of OTs over the years that are just such great people, likable people, kind, open-hearted, knowledgeable, holistic. I think that’s really the word, really integral, holistic people, so much more than physical therapists that I’ve met over the time. Just because we haven’t been trained that way.
Brian
Most PTs are not trained with that level of holism that OTs are. Just kicking off the episode, just throwing a lot of love to my OT friends out there in the world and appreciation for you all.
Ani
I have a little admission myself going through LIDL School and then graduating into a system where the physical therapist job is actually quite revered. In general, the OT job is a little bit more misunderstood. I felt like the physical therapists in general were stuffy. I felt like a hard time relating to the physical therapist who… I had a lot of friends who were physical therapists in college and then graduating, working together. But there was always this more rigid nature that I had a little bit of a hard time relating to. And I will admit that what I did to myself was I made meaning that ‘I was less than’ somehow, which can be corroborated by how the system functions with occupational therapist. “Oh, you’re not the PT. We were waiting for the real rehab therapist.” I actually had people say that to me sometimes. Yeah, interesting. There’s an interesting dynamic within the profession anyway. Hey, when I went to college, my major was athletic training. Short sidebar story, the reason I chose athletic training was because I thought, and my mom helped me to come up with this idea, that as a physical, as athletic trainer, I was going to be able to help dancers because I was a professional dancer at the time.
Ani
When I chose a major, I chose athletic training because we know as professional dancers that we are athletes. I went to college, and they were like, right in freshman year, we were taping ankles for teams. I learned within the first year that athletic training is all about team sports. And it was physical therapists, actually, who helped dancers out there in the world. I went to the PT OT Department, and I said, “I’m in the wrong major as an athletic trainer. I’d like to do physical therapy.” They actually told me, “We think you would be better suited for occupational therapy.” I don’t remember all of the nature of that conversation, but I didn’t know what occupational therapy even was. But I did take their recommendation for that. They must have seen my uniqueness and my… What would you call it? Off-putting? What did you say?
Brian
Off-ness?
Ani
My offness. They must have seen my off-ness. They’d put me in the kooky bunch.
Brian
I’m telling you, I don’t believe that anymore. I’m just saying that was my very immature experience at the time.
Ani
I can totally see why Well, you would think that. I’m thinking back to my graduating class of about 45 people, and we were a unique bunch. Some of us were really into kids, working with kids, and some of us were really into anatomy, and some of us were really into psychosocial, and some of us were really into the spiritual nature, and some of us were really into the physical nature. Like you said, holistic is a part of the OT curriculum and how you think as an occupational therapist inherently. There was a lot of interesting people.
Brian
Yeah. OTs do so many things. That’s one thing I’ve learned over my period of time is there’s so many different niches and places that OTs bring value and make changes and contributions in people’s lives. It’s really phenomenal.
Ani
One of my favorite ways that OTs make contributions, to be honest, is as they grow in their profession, and they… What word do I want to use? Transition into other jobs. Boy, I’ve seen so many cool OTs who are deans and leaders and managers and CEOs and entrepreneurs. It makes for a really unique skill set to be able to do other professions in a really unique way, too.
Brian
When we start talking about coaching and somatic coaching, because here we are, we’re asking, Is this a match? Is occupational therapy and somatic coaching a match? We’ll let you know at the end of the podcast, whether or not it’s a match based on our conversation is I’ve seen several OTs become really great coaches. I think a lot of that in my very thin knowledge about the OT profession compared to so many other people is the psychosocial background that is a basic part of all occupational therapy training. To be able to understand people holistically, not just as physical beings, but as multi-dimensional beings. When I travel and I teach, I’m always teaching to mixed audiences of physical therapists and occupational therapists. There might be a couple other professions mixed in there, but it’s usually PTs and OTs. A lot of what I’m teaching is about the integral idea of body, mind, spirit framework. And the OTs are like nodding their heads out there, and the PTs are scratching their heads in the audience. We learned that as a foundation.
Ani
It’s a foundation of how we’re taught.
Brian
So how does that map on to when you think about becoming a coach and a somatic coach? What’s the mapping there?
Ani
Well, I think there’s a bunch of things, but one of the things that comes to me is We teach here at the academy that everybody is already whole and there’s health in everything. I think that my OT schooling was the first place that I started to entertain that that was true because of our psychosocial background. And so as an OT, I was always looking for places of possibility where I might see my physical therapist counterparts. So I don’t know if this is a part of your training or not, but I would see my physical therapy counterpart come from a ‘what’s wrong? Let’s get you back to baseline’. We teach about this in our Level 3 program, the Somatic Coach Professional program, where we actually come from a very a different paradigm here at the Somatic Coaching Academy, whereas a lot of therapeutic-based professionals come from a paradigm of something’s wrong, something happened to you, let’s get you back to baseline. And then a lot of coaching methodologies come from a place of you’re at baseline, let’s go past your potential. But there’s no real bleed over into that idea that perhaps when something challenging happened, there was a seed of potential within that to create even more potential.
Ani
Some of that was baked into my OT training to think in terms of potential, even if somebody was coming to me with a problem. Interesting. Yeah. I think you nailed It right there with the psychosocial component. We think about psychosocial aspects of a person, and I don’t know that a physical therapist does. When I got out there in the system and I started working with clients, I could actually be looking like I’m doing the exact same treatment as a PT sometimes. We’re going to help a client who had a hip replacement, get out of bed and transfer. That’s something I could have done in OT and you could have done in PT. Sure, yeah, did both. But when I’m going to go do it, I’m thinking about, Where does this person live and what things do they need to do? And who else are they responsible for? Because I’m already starting to put them in a context of who they are as a person and what they need to accomplish in their lives. I think that that really matches up with how coaches think. They start to put people in context. It’s not just like, I want to do this one thing, and it’s isolated.
Ani
I think, especially somatic coaches start to put people into context. Those are things that.
Brian
Yeah, it was interesting you’re talking about that because I’ve somehow absorbed that over time. I think a lot of it came from my formative training years at Craig Hospital, where we were so enmeshed with co-treatments with PTs and OTs. We did so much stuff together as an integrated team.
Ani
That was a really special place.
Brian
A really amazing place where everyone was on an equal footing in terms of how we all added value. There wasn’t a lot of boundary issues around ‘you’re doing my thing, I’m doing your thing’ thing. That never came up, really.
Ani
It sounds like your treatments really flowed and meshed, whereas I did co-treatments sometime where the PT would sit a chair and wait for me to, quote, unquote, finish.
Brian
Yeah, no, we did everything together. Of course, we had treatment plans that were very integrated that included everybody. What you were doing was affecting what other people on the team were doing. It was so much fun. I learned so much, again, I think I just really absorbed a lot of understanding from how the OT professionals were working with their people around psychosocial dynamics and understanding context and things you had about what it’s going to look like when you go home. All those kinds of things, I didn’t really, again, pick up a lot of stuff in PT school, but I learned a lot in those formative years at Craig.
Ani
I have to agree with you. I did a really powerful internship at the Denver Children’s Hospital in Colorado, and they’re a really big teaching hospital, and they do some really fantastic programming, totally awesome. And because we did these integrated, truly multidisciplinary team treatments, I got to really appreciate physical therapists and speech therapists on a really different level. And not only was my schooling not like that, but my professional work was not like that either. So it was this really special time, and it was so much fun. It’s so much fun, and it’s so exciting. And I think, again, ‘is coaching a match? Ding!’ I think that’s one of the things that I really appreciate about coaching is like that multidisciplinary approach where you’re like your peers and you’re in it with your client. There’s this relationship with the client where it’s not on the expert on the pedestal dictating to you what to do, but in that multidisciplinary approach, we are on a team and you’re a part of the team and I’m a part of the team and coaching is like that. It’s part of what I really love.
Brian
Okay, that’s a really cool ding. I mean, that’s like a ding that I hadn’t thought of. Like the idea that as OTs are trained in multiple disciplinary team formats that you’re actually creating a team with your client. We talk about that in the Coaching Academy, you’re a team with your client, but I hadn’t made that link between… But that’s a foundational part of the training of being an OT. That’s cool.
Ani
I don’t remember anybody said, and I Not like I would. It was 25 years ago, but I don’t remember anybody saying to me, You’re a team with this person. But I remember feeling like that. How could I not be? Because I need to know enough about you to be able to help to come up with a treatment plan that’s really going to meet you so that you can go home and do the things that you need to do. Or like when I was working with kids, so that you all can function as a unit better together, no matter what is happening with different levels of physical ability and all of that stuff. Just that idea about knowing enough in the context about the client and the family and stuff, that interest in that context, I think, helped to give that frame of reference that we’re on a team together.
Brian
Yeah. Another point that when I’m teaching, and at the end of one of the courses that I teach, when we’re talking about how to inherently help motivate clients, one of the secret elements in that is to make sure that whatever we’re asking the client/patient to do to help them, that it’s meaningful to them. When we’ve had that conversation about make it meaningful, again, the OTs are nodding their head and the PTs are like, Oh, wow, okay. That’s a good idea. That’s important, I guess. But so let’s talk about this, again, idea of making meaning. I think about, again, holistic training. When I think about holistic training, there’s a component of that where part of what you’re being taught is the importance of meaning-making.
Ani
Yeah, well, it’s a foundational aspect of… I mean, that’s what OTs do, I think, if you look it up in the dictionary, is using meaningful activity to help somebody to rehabilitate. So meaning is baked into the very definition of OT. And then we do a lot of training about what that means and how a person creates meaning in their life. From the way I learned it, from a standpoint of occupational therapy, is we create meaning as human beings through the roles that we play and the activities that those roles have within them. I create meaning in my life as a mother because I make lunches and I help my children with their homework or I drive carpool, or those doings that help to define the role and the doings have meaning to the role, which the roles have meaning to my identity. In coaching, we’re talking about who you are and who you want to be and how you show up and your identity. One of the things that I think is actually missing from the coaching training and talk that I’ve been a part of that I think OTs can really hear on a different level is, so here’s maybe another ding for Is it a match?
Ani
OTs can really hear from a different perspective that when I’m going to change my life, when I choose to change my life, it means that there’s going to be identity shifts, role shifts, and potentially, activity, vocational, and by vocation, I mean meaningful activity, shifts within the context of that change. A person who usually, not always, but usually sees an OT, is coming to an OT because something happened, so a change was impressed upon them. But from a coaching perspective, our clients are choosing change, but the common denominator there is change. We are taught in OT school about how change has, for the most part with OT, the person is not consciously choosing it, change has happened to them. When there’s change, these are the ripple effect things that are going to happen. We already have a context around how to think about the changing nature of an individual in terms of identity, roles, behaviors, and things like that.
Brian
Wow, yeah, that is a core part, the core part of coaching. Again, if there’s already background in that, that’s a huge checkmark, huge thing.
Ani
Yeah. I did have so much education around that as an OT that I think when I heard it as a coach, I was able to go way deeper with the information and from just a deeper place than a lot of my colleagues who I saw go through it. We’re like, Yeah, I get it. When there’s a change, there’s a change in roles and identity and behaviors and Okay. I was like, Whoa. But when you see people go through that from a place of their lives have been destroyed from injury, car accidents, difficulty with all kinds of nature of things or surgeries, certain things, It just hits different. To use the phrase that my kids would say. It just hits different when you’ve had the experience to go through those kinds of changes with someone from a therapeutic standpoint, that when people are choosing conscious change, I think you have a deeper reverence. That’s the word I want to use. A deeper reverence for the profound nature of change, whether it is something that happens to us or something that we’re choosing.
Brian
Okay, cool. That’s great. Amazing. With all the amazing training that occupational therapists get around psychosocial dynamics, around holistic meaning-making, treatment, looking at people as whole beings, multidimensional beings. Why would an occupational therapist want to either become a somatic coach or learn somatic coaching skills? How is it going to benefit an occupational therapist who both decides to stay working in the system? Sure. And how can it also benefit an occupational therapist who decides to maybe start something new on their own?
Ani
Okay, so you just asked me three different questions. So the first one is this idea about- Yeah, why would an occupational therapist want to become a somatic coach or learn somatic coaching skills? I had people tell me in recent history in the occupational therapy world that basically occupational therapists can go out and just be coaches because we have enough background in our training to be able to do that. Now, coaching is unregulated, so literally anyone can go call themselves a coach. So of course, an occupational therapist can go just hang a shingle and call themselves a coach. And I’ve seen plenty of people do that.
Brian
But so can an accountant.
Ani
Exactly. Hairdresser, bartender, anybody can do that. But why would a person want to go and get trained as a coach? And why would they want to get trained as a somatic coach? Right. Yeah.
Brian
That’s what I’m curious about.
Ani
Right. So we’re not trained as coaches, I think, is one of the simple answers I want to tell you. And from what I was describing about that paradigm of therapists are taught that somebody comes in and you get them back to baseline, and the coach is taught that somebody comes in, they choose change, and you want to help them reach a potential. Just that right there is a very different way of thinking that when you distill it down and you learn how to help somebody who’s, quote, unquote, fine, then create change in their lives. It’s a very different thing. I see a lot of therapists actually struggle with this when they come in to learn somatic coaching, and we start to peer share and peer practice and things like that because they’re not trained to just ask any person who’s fine how they want to improve because we’re trained that something’s wrong. So the therapist is inclined to dig around until we find a problem. So that’s just why to have the occupational therapist go in coaching. Now, why would somatic coaching make sense? I’m just going to use the frame of reference from the Somatic Coaching Academy because each somatic coaching program is very different.
Ani
So we come from a place where the body-mind split never happens. So it’s a very embedded body-mind-spirit philosophy, and it just jives. It just speaks to an occupational therapist when they hear how we think about coaching. They might hear, Do I want to get a coaching certification? They might hear from different coaching methodologies and think, Does that resonate with me? Does that resonate with me? But a lot of times, OTs hear our philosophy, and they’re like, Yes, that’s how things work. That’s how humans work. That feels so aligned to me. So it feels in super alignment. And it’s so much fun to learn more things that feel super in alignment for us. And so they just get in there and with their background already, you’re able to dive in and dig in and make these connections that people will say all the time are the missing piece. There was just a little something that was missing, that’s the missing piece. The other missing piece that’s a part of that is a lot of OTs in some capacity are interested in, although they might not be able to articulate it, energy medicine. That’s baked in to how we teach here at the academy.
Ani
A lot of times, they don’t know it, but when they come in and we start using words about energy and energy medicine, they’re like, Oh, I never had language around that. It’s I feel like I operate or what I believe, but I didn’t know it was a thing, and I didn’t know how to do it. Now you’re showing me and you’re teaching me, and that’s really exciting. That was the first part of your question. Then the second part of your question was in the system- The next question is-in the system.
Brian
Yeah, if an OT is in the system, how can having somatic coaching skills help them internally?
Ani
One of the ways is because in the system, we are compressed to a certain amount of time. It’s dictated by insurance companies, and we have to do things in a certain way. I think that having somatic coaching skills has a giant benefit because you can help your clients to get results quicker and more sustainably. You can make a deeper, more meaningful connection with people quicker. I mean, we’re talking quick because a lot of times in the insurance-based systems, we don’t have tons of time. As an occupational therapist in the system, at least at the end of my career in the system, I was primarily doing assessments with people, and then the people who worked under me, the assistants, were doing most of the treatments. With somatic coaching skills, I could hone in and ask very laser-pointing questions more easily, more effectively to determine more quickly and easily and effectively the ideal treatment strategies that are going to help them get where they want to go. Yeah.
Brian
Actually, I just want to make sure you brought up a good point right there, looping in that we’re also talking… When I talk about OT, I’m also talking about OTAs. I’m talking about the OT profession. Everything we’re talking about, hopefully, I know there’s different training between OTs and OTAs around evaluations and those kinds of things. But certainly, what you’ve just talked about in terms of doing treatments, helping with deeper connections more quickly, helping to learn how to ask the right questions that create a deeper change, learning to ask questions that specifically are geared towards motivating a client or a patient to help themselves. Those all apply to OTAs as well.
Ani
Yeah. You’re going to have a better time at work, and your people are going to get better outcomes when you make a meaningful connection with that human being. And somatic coaching skills can help you to do that really quickly and effectively. Yeah.
Brian
I just want to, before I ask you the second part of that question, just put a plug in for this, too, that when I know when people go through our program, all of our students are more confident when they’re done with the program, just because the basis of what we do with folks. So we create coaches that have just more confidence. Oftentimes for professionals working inside of a system, whether it’s OTs, PTs, OTAs, PTAs, whoever, lots of times when we’re lacking confidence, it’s very difficult to advocate for ourselves in healthy ways. Our lack of confidence will also perpetuate challenges for our patients, too, in certain ways. It actually will feed into there. What I see a huge goal internally for any professional, not just OTs, but we’re speaking about OTs right now in OTAs, that just having more confidence working in the system actually makes your life a lot better.
Ani
Yeah. I was recognized… Gosh, Brian, I must have been about 23. I graduated when I was 20. I must have been on my second or third OT job. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was using… Well, I did know I was using energy medicine principles. I was using some energy medicine principles, and I was starting to use some coaching questions with my clients, and I quickly got recognized in my department, was asked to chair a research committee at 23. It was really cool to be able to be a part of the system in a bigger and bolder way, not just be the person who was there punching a clock. It was awesome to be with my clients, but to know that I was affecting the system in bigger ways and being recognized for that was really cool.
Brian
Yeah, and making an impact in other professionals’ lives, too, right? That within the department. Okay, so now let’s ask the question, so how can learning somatic coaching or becoming a certified somatic coach be a benefit to an occupational therapist who is like, Listen, I’m ready to grow out of the system that I’m working in?
Ani
Well, that’s easy because it’s pretty easy to set up shop as a coach because, first of all, at this point, pretty highly recognized profession. A lot of people have heard of it. You can help people in so many awesome and creative ways. You can help people in so many creative ways when you have a coaching certification, when you have coaching as a part of what you do. It also elevates you as a professional, which is funny because I didn’t think about it like that at all. When I started doing coaching, it felt like it was actually a back step because I had my master’s degree in OT, and now I’m going to go do something that people and it’s unregulated. How could that possibly elevate my status in the recognition from my peers and my community and stuff? But it totally did. When I started coaching, it elevated my status in my community and how people thought about me and how I felt about my work, and I was able to just create more opportunities for myself. For me, I don’t know if everybody feels like this. I know a lot of people feel like this because we’ve talked a lot of people about it.
Ani
For me, I felt like there was a massive glass ceiling that I was under, I literally was born into the system under the glass ceiling. My very first job, I was the head of the OT department at 20 years old. Yeah, I was the only person in the department, but still. I was making basically the same amount of money that the head of the Department of Physical Therapy was making. It scared the crap out of me because it felt like I just graduated. I’m 20 years old. I got my whole life ahead of me, and there was nowhere to go. There was nowhere to go. The only thing that I could imagine was becoming the head of the rehab department, which, by the way, looked awful. Send me paperwork, okay? Oh, my God. So that was terrifying. So I was already thinking about the glass ceiling. And being a coach, coaching professional, working for myself, allowed me to actually… There’s so no ceiling. It’s limitless. Not only is there no ceiling, there’s no limits to the amount of creative opportunities I can create for myself.
Brian
Yeah. And so it sounds like, is it a match?
Ani
Is it a match?
Brian
Bing, bing. Everything we’ve talked about, I mean, listeners, you can decide for yourself whether you think it’s a match or not. It sounds like for me that it’s an amazing opportunity for occupational therapists to learn a new skill, a new way of being within themselves, to grow and advance their own confidence, to learn to think differently. And this is whether or not an occupational therapist or OTA decides to stay working within a system. We need OTs and OTAs working within the healthcare system, we absolutely need that. Or an OT decides, Listen, I’m ready to grow outside of that, have a different life experience, no judgment either way. Then also learning somatic coaching skills can be hugely beneficial for that to bring more income in. We might also say, too, for an OT working inside of the system, having somatic coaching skills, it could pick up some coaching clients on the side, which can also add revenue and meaning and purpose and community and networking into their lives if that’s something that they want to do? There’s all kinds of options for flexibility and freedom that somatic coaching, learning and being trained in somatic coaching, can be a benefit for occupational therapists.
Brian
I think it’s just an amazing opportunity for a connection and certainly a match.
Ani
It’s such an amazing match. I feel like one of the biggest things that I didn’t know when I was in my very first job. I’ve told this story before, but I was in my very first job. It was two weeks after graduation, and I stood in the clinic and I realized that was not completely in the right place, and I didn’t know why. One of the biggest things that was missing was the dynamic growth that happens as a coaching professional. That is really inherent within the coaching profession that I’m growing too all the time. As a therapeutic professional, when I graduated, it felt like my growth was done. Now I just had to live my life for the next 80 years or whatever, the same. I love that about the coaching profession is that we get to just continue to explore our own purpose and ourselves and how we think and how we perceive and how we feel right along with the questions that we ask our clients and the connections that we make for them. So certainly a match for me, Brian. We love to talk to OTs and OTAs, and we love to talk to OTs and OTAs, and we love to have them in class.
Ani
We give secret high fives to each other in class. We’re like, OTs, yeah. So it’s really fun.
Brian
I guess I’m not seeing those because I’m not in the club.
Ani
That’s because they’re secret. Ooops I just outed our secret handshakes.
Brian
Secret OT handshakes.
Ani
Yeah, we love to have OTs in class. It’s super fun.
Brian
Yeah, it is great. It’s really wonderful.
Ani
Yeah. It was fun to take a little trip down memory lane. Yeah, great. I appreciate that. Yeah.
Brian
Thanks for joining us this week on the podcast. OTs and OTAs out there we look forward to hearing from you soon. Otherwise, see you next week.
Ani
Thanks for joining us.