Physical Therapy Haven

Here’s what you will learn from this blog post: fail early, fail fast, and grow.

Seriously.

I’ve accomplished some pretty awesome achievements in my early career. On the surface you likely think I just did everything right, but that just isn’t true.

In residency, I needed a talk from my residency director to get my attitude in check.

In fellowship, I failed to miss the obvious objective signs with an initial evaluation - during a fellowship live patient exam.

These are just a few examples of when I failed, but I argue to change your perspective on failure. Failure is the opportunity to grow. In the clinic, it is an opportunity to be a better clinician.

Let’s take a look back at you educational career thus far.

Failure isn’t encouraged to learn from. You’ve made it to PT school mainly by a long stream of successes academically, and that’s okay. You need to have an adequate knowledge base. But having 18 plus years of academic excellence rarely translates to being a great clinician. Knowledge tested through exams is based on a finite number of data. It’s a body of work that’s tightly presented and once you studied adequately enough, you can confidently score 80% or above.


So let’s ask yourself, when evaluating a new patient for first time, can you possibly know everything about your patient enough to make the right treatment plan?


Likely not - and this holds particularly true when you’re a student and new grad. Even with the freshness of book smarts, you simply don’t have enough experience of data to make the best decisions.

So when you’re a student and new grad in clinic, I’d encourage you to fail. Fail quickly, fail fast, and grow.


Now remember this too - absolutely do not fail in regards to patient safety and contraindications!

If you’re early in your career I’d encourage you to be in situations where you can fail purposefully, in an environment that subtly encourages you to fail.

Take for example residency training. During mentorship, where you’ll be observed in how you work with your patients, a great mentorship session is when you fail - fail to recognize certain details in that subjective exam, fail to ensure that exercise is performed with the correct verbal and/or tactile cues, or fail to say “thank you for coming in today”.