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2: Scope of Practice
469 Plays3 years ago
Welcome to Episode 2 of the Movement Logic podcast! In this episode, Sarah and Laurel discuss Scope of Practice and how it impacts our work as movement teachers and the choices we make when taking on clients. Here’s what we talk about:
· How do we define Scope of Practice, and how does it define our work
· What does a top down “macroScope” vs a personal “microScope” look like
· How do we decide who to work with and who to refer out
· Are there any pitfalls to having a scope of practice
· Do yoga teachers have to comply with the Yoga Alliance Scope of Practice
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Transcript
Audio Issues Explained
00:00:01
Speaker
Hey everybody, it's Sarah. I just wanted to jump in before the episode and let you know we had some difficulties with the audio recording and there are some little clicks and noises that we weren't able to get out of the recording. We tried very hard. We are a work in progress still. We appreciate your patience and please enjoy the episode.
Podcast Introduction
00:00:27
Speaker
Welcome to the Movement Logic podcast with yoga teacher and strength coach Laurel Beaverstorff and physical therapist, Dr. Sarah Court. With over 30 years combined experience in the yoga, movement, and physical therapy worlds, we believe in strong opinions loosely held, which means we're not hyping outdated movement concepts. Instead, we're here with up-to-date and cutting-edge tools, evidence, and ideas to help you as a mover and a teacher.
What is 'Scope of Practice'?
00:00:58
Speaker
Welcome to episode two of the Movement Logic podcast. I am Dr. Sarah Kort, physical therapist, and I am here with my co-host, Laurel Beaversdorf, who is a strength coach and movement teacher. And today we are talking about scope of practice. What is it? Why does it matter? And how do we stay within it? Is it something that we understand naturally? Is it something that everyone follows the same way? What are the pros and cons of thinking about our work as movement teachers in terms of a scope of practice?
00:01:27
Speaker
And Laurel and I would definitely have some different perspectives because we're coming at it from different places, me as a PT and her as a strength coach and a movement teacher. Before we get into it, we just want you to know that while Laurel and I did decide on this topic for our conversation, we have not had this conversation before. Our dialogue is not scripted. It's really just us thinking out loud together, which is a great way to learn from one another.
00:01:52
Speaker
So the question Laurel is what is scope of practice and why does it matter? I'm so glad you asked me that. I am a word person. I process things verbally.
00:02:08
Speaker
And so sometimes when I hear the question like, what is scope of practice? I go, well, I use that phrase so much. And I think I know what my scope of practice is and isn't, but what actually, what is scope of practice? Like what is the agreed upon definition? So, you know, not that the internet is, you know, only full of agreed upon definitions of things, but I think Wikipedia, Wikipedia does a pretty good job of like, you know, crowdsourcing
00:02:36
Speaker
people's views of what things are, and what I mean, and what is true about them. So I looked up. And this is what Wikipedia says, scoop of practice describes the procedures, actions and processes that a healthcare practitioner is permitted to undertake in keeping with the terms of their professional license. It is limited to that which the law allows for specific education and experience and specific demonstrated competency. So
00:03:03
Speaker
When I read this from my perspective as a, as a, you know, strength coach, a yoga teacher, movement teacher, I see two things that make me go.
00:03:13
Speaker
Hmm, this is not the same for me. One is I am not a healthcare practitioner. And the second is I do not hold a professional license to teach yoga or to teach anything that I teach movement related because my industries that I work within are unregulated. So when I hear scope of practice, I think about it in the context of what yoga Alliance says about scope of practice.
00:03:44
Speaker
And we can talk more about that because I'm sure we're both going to be able to say a lot about yoga lines, but it's a little bit different in that what I need to understand about my scope of practice, I think first and foremost is that I am not a healthcare provider. And so if I provide a service and the way I contextualize the service I'm providing is in some way
00:04:14
Speaker
hinting at that I somehow am a healthcare provider, I'm operating out of scope. In other words, if I assess, diagnose, or treat, or say that I am assessing, diagnosing, or treating, and these seem obvious, but they can take kind of subtle form.
00:04:32
Speaker
in the teaching practice.
Scope for Physical Therapists
00:04:35
Speaker
Assessment sometimes happens when teachers do hands-on adjustments and then they get ideas about what it is that they're feeling. Or they look at a student's posture and they decide that based on their postural uniqueness that there is some specific problem that underpins that postural uniqueness. Diagnosing could be something along the lines of, oh, I think you're back because you have
00:05:02
Speaker
tight hamstrings, I've now diagnosed you with tight hamstrings, or I've used tight hamstrings as a way to explain your low back pain. And then treating, right? So if I say, I'm going to help you overcome your low back pain by giving you these five postures that you will do twice a week, you know, under my guidance. These are all examples of me operating outside of scope, but I actually think there are other,
00:05:31
Speaker
more subtle ways that yoga teachers can operate or, you know, strength coaches, Pilates teachers can operate outside of scope of practice that has less to do with, um, in some way insinuating that they are healthcare providers when they're not, but we're going to probably talk about all of that. So that's to answer your question. Yeah.
00:05:50
Speaker
So I am a healthcare practitioner, as a physical therapist, and we have a very clearly, very clearly outlined scope of practice. And in fact, each state has a slightly different one that defines what physical therapists are and are not allowed to do as part of their practice. For example, I'm in California and in California, physical therapists are not allowed to do dry needling, which is the sort of Westernized version of acupuncture.
00:06:17
Speaker
but in some other states, they are. Another one that I remember jumped out because we learned all about it in school. We're not allowed to give dietetic or nutritional advice to our patients because that's considered something that's out of the scope of what we do, even though a lot of us have a personal interest in nutrition and may know quite a bit about it.
00:06:42
Speaker
but we're not supposed to sit down and counsel our patients beyond something like you may benefit from seeing a nutritional specialist or something like that. What is interestingly included is not that we can position ourselves as psychotherapists or psychologists, but
00:07:04
Speaker
the definition of our job actually does include the mental health, the psychic state, if you will, of our patients. So we are allowed to kind of dip a toe into that, as long as we're obviously very clearly not providing, I was about to call it mental therapy.
00:07:24
Speaker
We're not treating them, but we might shine a light on how a particular aspect of their mental health may be impacting their physical health, for example.
00:07:37
Speaker
So it's not ambiguous at all, but there's also like, I have a license and I can get it taken away from me. And if my license is, if I step outside the scope of practice or if you step outside the code of ethics, and if my license is taken away from me, I can no longer practice as a PT in that state. So it is, the stakes are much, much higher to that end, right? Because you literally cannot do it if you get your license taken
Personal Interpretation of Scope
00:08:05
Speaker
away.
00:08:05
Speaker
right and the cost of becoming a pt is also much much higher oh yes yes it is and it takes a much longer time did you go to school for more than 200 hours sarah did i go to school for more than 200 oh that you're joking i was like uh over three years yes 93 exams yes
00:08:26
Speaker
And so, yes, I mean, the other thing that I was thinking about I do want to hear what you were talking about as far as, you know, a more and less clearly defined as opposed to, you know, the sort of assessed diagnosed treat ways that
00:08:42
Speaker
yoga or Pilates teachers kind of find themselves outside of the scope of practice. One of the things that I sort of think about is this idea of like a macro scope of practice versus a microscope of practice, macro being like something like for me, which is defined from the top down to everybody.
00:09:00
Speaker
and something like a micro kind of a scope of practice, which is sort of your personal sense of this is beyond what I know how to do. This is going into territory that I don't think is appropriate for me. And maybe this patient, this student just doesn't know it, you know, things like that. So what are your thoughts around that?
00:09:21
Speaker
Yeah, the microscope of practice is to me what I am competent and qualified to teach within the realms of movement. And so when I try to explain what I do, maybe on a kind of a meta level, so I don't know if this is what I would say to like a regular student who asked what I do, but I think what I would say that I do is I teach people how
00:09:49
Speaker
to understand their bodies through movement, or I teach people how to move so that they can understand, appreciate, enjoy, feel better in their bodies. And even though the services that I provide might actually, in some cases, I've even had students tell me that they outperform the services provided by their PT. In other words, that they feel like they feel better after practicing
00:10:15
Speaker
to the classes that I offer than they do from the exercise of particular treatments that they were given by their PT, that doesn't necessarily, in fact, it doesn't at all mean that what I'm offering is therapy. What I am offering though are ways that students can condition their bodies and create changes within their bodies. And so that can include things like the asana practice, which is passive and active stretching. It can include things like
00:10:44
Speaker
kettlebell training, it can include things like lifting weights. And even though those are not all within the scope of practice of a yoga teacher, they are within the scope of the other modalities that I teach self massage, for example. And the microscope is
00:11:02
Speaker
It comes into play with, I mean, I think there's a lot of things that make me qualified and competent to teach those modalities, not least of which is that I've been teaching those modalities, but that's kind of putting the cart before the horse. It's sort of the paradox, which is that oftentimes when we become more competent and capable of working within our chosen scope of practice by operating within that scope of practice. And so we all have to start somewhere, but additionally, personal practice
00:11:28
Speaker
And also, um, you know, work that I've done with other more experienced people along the way certifications surely can be a good place to start trainings can be a good place to start. But I have to ask myself before I teach certain new things, like, you know, even now, like when I want to teach a new move, for example, in kettlebells, or if I want to, um, with a particularly challenging yoga posture in a class in a particular way, in a new way that I haven't before.
00:11:56
Speaker
The question I have to ask myself is like, am I fully prepared to offer this in a way that's reasonably safe? And also, have I created this opportunity for students to opt out, right? So that if what I'm presenting to them
00:12:14
Speaker
doesn't seem safe to them or doesn't seem even maybe useful to them. Have I offered them alternatives beyond that? And so that's the microscope that I look at. And so microscope. I like it.
Improving Teaching Skills
00:12:28
Speaker
Whoa. And I was just like, I'm going to let her keep you calling it microscope. Microscope and the macroscope. So the macroscope is I don't, I don't, I don't assess, treat or diagnose, right? Yeah. You know, or assess, diagnose, treat.
00:12:40
Speaker
But the microscope is that I am every step of the way along my journey of improving my skill as a yoga teacher, as a strength coach, as a kettlebell specialist, being self-critical of my own ability to do that competently and safely. And if I don't feel that I'm competent and safe in my ability to provide some type of movement scenario or experience for students,
00:13:05
Speaker
I look for the opportunities that I can find to become competent and to learn about how to minimize the risks. So the longer we're at this, I think the more, if we are being self-critical and if we are investing in our own continuing education, if we have a practice, I think that the wider our scope can get. That's the very first class I ever taught, had two people in it. Thank God, because I didn't know what the heck I was doing. We're always
00:13:35
Speaker
hopefully, improving our skill just by the very act of doing the job. But then what I found, ironically, as I got better as a yoga teacher, as I did more certification, as I learned more, I would have more and more people come to me. This is before I was a physical therapist and it would be like, oh, this person has Parkinson's disease, can you do yoga, Lily? I was thinking about when I first became a yoga teacher and with them.
00:14:05
Speaker
And, or like I just had a hip replacement can you help me after my hip replacement.
Sarah's Career Journey
00:14:11
Speaker
And, you know, it's sort of, it puts you in that a bit of a quandary position because if you're just a movement just not just but if you're if you are outside of a healthcare professional.
00:14:22
Speaker
uh scope of practice there's nothing there's no reason why you can't because there's no there's nothing that says you cannot do this or you can't teach yoga anymore that's the the gift and the problem i think of an unregulated industry um but it also becomes a question of the me taking my own microscope and saying to myself
00:14:46
Speaker
do I legitimately possess the skill set that this person needs right now? Or am I close enough to it that I can with some study and with some, you know, talking to people who know more about this than I do and, and, you know, I think
00:15:05
Speaker
Is this like a 10% stretch for me to work with this person or is this a 75% stretch for me to work with this person? And I'll say at the time, the ones that felt like the 10% stretch, I just sort of went for and things turned out okay.
00:15:23
Speaker
what I would always do is say very, very clearly, I am a yoga teacher. I am not a physical therapist. This is, we're going to be doing movement stuff, you know, just making sure that the person knew that, that I was not there in a position that I, that I did not hold at that time.
Approaching Private Sessions
00:15:38
Speaker
But I think that is 100%. I think that is what gets harder for people as they become more skilled, you know, the, your, you know, your cousin's nephew's brother refers you to their friend who's got back pain.
00:15:49
Speaker
you know, and somebody told them they should do some yoga. Like you must've had some people ask you for private sessions where you, where you maybe had a pause and we're like, I don't know if this is quite within or if I know enough about this condition or things like that. I still do. And so I still do every single time and it's the same, it's the same feeling, but now what I think I've gained over the years is an understanding that my first job is to actually reorient the person's expectations that I'm going to be meeting with.
00:16:20
Speaker
So that it's very clear, like you just said, what my job is, what I'm showing up to do and what I'm not showing up to do.
00:16:31
Speaker
And so when I would, for example, get an offer to work with somebody with a very specific diagnosed condition. So in the beginning, my first question would have been, have you seen a doctor? Because that's what I was taught to ask when they come up to me with a very specific request for help for a very specific problem that they were having. And I don't actually know how,
00:16:56
Speaker
I think that was a cop-out question, honestly, for two reasons. It's kind of a cover your mask question. I think there are better questions that I could have asked first. And two, because of the state of healthcare in this country, it's almost kind of a cruel question for some folks to be asked, have you seen a doctor when they actually don't have a health insurance and seeing a doctor would be a financial hardship. Or they have seen a doctor and it was not helpful.
00:17:22
Speaker
Right, or they did see a doctor but there was no specific diagnosis because there's no actual specific biological problem underpinning their pain, right? Which is very common with pain. So I think the way I respond now, and now it's usually emails, right? Where someone will email me about a very specific problem and I will actually explain to them what I can do
00:17:52
Speaker
I won't talk as much about what I can't do because basically I think they understand that I'm a movement teacher, but I really reiterate and reinforce what I can do. And it usually goes something like, well, I'm happy to meet with you. This will be largely a dialogue about what seems to be helpful for you to do movement wise and what seems to be less helpful for you to do movement wise. And then based on what I notice about how you move and based on that background information that you've given me,
00:18:21
Speaker
I will be able to suggest potentially other ways of moving that will help you feel better and help you maybe, you know, if you do have some type of movement pattern that is showing up in your life that feels less helpful, maybe we can work on honing a, you know, a different pattern or just working on building some capacity around that area, like strength, for example, or, you know,
00:18:50
Speaker
engaging in novel movement practices that might actually be helpful for your particular level of sensitivity around an area of your body. And so things like that, or maybe what I'm doing when I'm working with these people is really just helping them take their mind off of what's going on in their life and de-stress and relax and learn something which is enjoyable inherently in and of itself.
Movement Logic Tutorial Promo
00:19:18
Speaker
And so I try to convey all of this to them. And I also say like, if you're working with me one-on-one, it's largely going to be a dialogue where I'm constantly checking with you and asking you how things are feeling. In the moment, sure, a couple of times, but really like the next day, I'm gonna email you and ask you how things are going. So I actually, I think it's pretty simple. Honestly, as long as people understand what I can do,
00:19:45
Speaker
They don't necessarily need to know what I can't do. Right. So I don't need to tell them that like, I can't diagnose treatment. It's like, I think they kind of know that they're coming to me for help because they get this idea that I might be able to help them within the scope that I operate. So then I can just tell them kind of how that's going to go. And then if I somehow notice, or they tell me that it's not getting better.
00:20:07
Speaker
and we come up against
Yoga Alliance's Scope of Practice
00:20:09
Speaker
a situation where it doesn't seem like the services I'm providing are helpful, then that's when, of course, we would look for another person or another modality or something else that would potentially be more helpful to them. Yeah. That's something we do in the PT world a lot. I have
00:20:30
Speaker
other PTs who, PT that I know very well, who's a pelvic floor specialist who refers people to me all the time because she's like, this person needs your skillset before they, before my skillset can be effective for them. I remember there was a yoga teacher who wanted me to sit in on a session where she was working with a client of hers who had shoulder pain and like help her maybe give her some ideas for things. And I was like, sure, no problem. So I showed up and I'm watching this woman.
00:21:00
Speaker
And the way that her client was moving, there were some very clear signs.
00:21:09
Speaker
uh, that point to someone having Parkinson's disease, which is something that I learned in PT school. That was not something I ever learned. You know, we, we learned to screen for, for different conditions. Uh, and I started asking her some of the questions that you can ask people that are very, very odd questions. Um, like are you constipated, which is a weird question to ask someone with shoulder pain, but in the, in the, you know, of the world of, of.
00:21:35
Speaker
Parkinson's is not that uncommon. And I didn't know if this woman knew that she did and just hadn't told the yoga teacher or, so I just kind of shut my, I didn't say anything about it at the time, but afterwards I emailed the teacher and I was like, this is what I saw and this is what I think. And it turned out that she did, you know, as it turned, she was early stage Parkinson's disease. And, you know, that's the kind of thing where this is not, this now is well out of the scope of,
00:22:04
Speaker
Not that a yoga teacher or a movement teacher couldn't help someone feel good with chronic degenerative neuromuscular disease, but there are just specific things that you learn how to do because those are the populations that you're working with. We're working with people sometimes with really serious conditions. And that's something where it would be disingenuous of me
00:22:34
Speaker
to as a movement teacher be like, oh, I'm totally gonna help you get your rotation back when I really have no idea if that's even a possibility.
00:22:45
Speaker
It is important, I think, for all of us. And even in my work as a PT, there's times when I'm like, I am not getting this person better and I'm doing everything I know how to do. So that means we need to step back and, you know, from my perspective, it's something like, let's get an MRI of your shoulder and see what's actually going on.
Challenges of Adhering to Scope
00:23:03
Speaker
And more often than not, something's like way more severe than we thought it was to begin with. And it may not change what I'm doing treatment-wise, but it changes expectations around
00:23:11
Speaker
the process of healing and how long it's going to take, which is actually a very useful thing from my perspective for the patient to know.
00:23:23
Speaker
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00:23:53
Speaker
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00:24:16
Speaker
Physical therapist, Dr. Sarah Court, yoga teacher and strength coach, Laura Beaversdorf, and Pilates teacher, Anula Miberg, have created this foot and ankle tutorial to help you better understand and connect to your feet and ankles and improve your overall function and health. Click the link in the show notes to learn more and to purchase. I don't think there are any pitfalls or negatives to having a scope of practice, but do you think there are? Do you think there's,
00:24:45
Speaker
any reason why, you know, the, the, the yoga Alliance obviously created a scope of practice. Um, do you think there's any sort of negative around that being an, uh, well, based on my reading of it, no, I, I really, I think it's quite reasonable. Um, you know, like I, I, again, because I'm a word person, I wanted to, I wanted to see, you know,
00:25:09
Speaker
and like kind of take in what the language they're using around scope of practice. And a couple of their principles stood out. One was members must limit teaching to practice and learning that aligns with yoga philosophy, the lineage style and methodology for which the member is qualified, and in accordance with the competencies described in its common curriculum standards, which too. So it seems like, you know, in other words, like,
00:25:40
Speaker
If you're presenting yourself as a yoga teacher, do your teachings align with the philosophy of yoga? I think that the weakness there is that that's really open to interpretation. It's really unspecific, especially since we all have our own idea of what yoga philosophy, you know, how it translates with regards to teaching, teaching Asana specifically.
00:26:08
Speaker
And then the lineage and style that you are qualified to teach, I do think that is a little limiting in the sense that if I were trained to teach in the Ayyengar lineage, but then I decide to move beyond teaching Ayyengar yoga,
00:26:28
Speaker
But I don't then take a 200 hour or 300 hour teaching that is presented exclusively through a particular lineage. And I start kind of changing the IANGAR practice and maybe adding and subtracting things from it according to my practices with other teachers and other practice communities. Am I operating out of scope? I think lineage is potentially a sticky word there. What does that mean? What does lineage actually mean?
00:26:57
Speaker
And, and, but then methodology is also included in some methodologies just really, really broad again. So then we can go, well, this teacher that I practice with regularly uses this prop methodology. And so, you know, a lot of teaching yoga is apprenticeship based, which, you know, is actually one of the best learning models according to learning experts.
00:27:28
Speaker
that you can have. My husband is an assistant professor of English education and talks and thinks a lot about learning and how we learn and how we teach and what's the best way to actually help people understand and know something. And it turns out that
00:27:44
Speaker
Apprenticing is really high up there. And so when you practice with other teachers who, you know, have more skills than you do and have a particularly, what seems like an effective way for transmitting those skills, I would say that taking that understanding and information in and letting it come through your teaching is also operating.
00:28:06
Speaker
Within scope of practice if you feel again on that microscope competent you've been you've been sitting within practicing that stuff for long enough to feel competent to share it then with with the students in front of you. I want to jump in here quickly because that actually completely lines up with the medical model of learning, which is see one do one teach one right so you watch.
00:28:26
Speaker
your senior surgeon do an appendectomy, and then you do an appendectomy, and then you teach someone else how to do an appendectomy. And that's considered like when you're able to teach it to someone else, it means you actually know what you're doing.
00:28:37
Speaker
Um, but I really love it. It has that apprenticeship quality to it and makes a lot of sense. Um, I think the other thing that happens is when we get into, I mean, full disclosure, first of all, I was on the advisory committee when yoga Alliance was creating their scope of practice. So I had a very small amount of something to do with this document. Um, not a lot. Uh, but, um, the other thing that I think comes up that kind of jumped out to me is that,
00:29:04
Speaker
I'm assuming that Yoga Alliance really feels that they can only talk to describing yoga in a sort of traditional sense, but so many people are teaching classes now that pull in other things like resistance bands or weights or massage therapy or all of these other tools that are not, certainly wasn't in my yoga, my 200-hour teacher training.
00:29:30
Speaker
Um, not that there is, I mean, maybe there are teacher trainings for, for using resistance bands, but I'm not, I'm not aware of any, but it is that thing where you are. I've, I've taught, I've taught one. Hi. Oh, sorry. I didn't know it was a teacher. Oh, sorry. And then the panda and then the pandemic struck, but apparently I'm teaching another one soon.
00:29:48
Speaker
I didn't realize, I knew you did a lot with it. I didn't know you taught a training. But this would be an interesting story about scope of practice. Yeah. Because how am I qualified to teach a teacher training on resistance bands? Where did I learn to use resistance bands? Right. According to who? And this is the other thing with the yoga alliance is that it's not a governing board. They don't take your teaching license. You don't have a teaching license. So they can't do anything. Right?
00:30:17
Speaker
They can't come along and be like, well, you can't teach that because it's not a nerd. I mean, they can say whatever they want, but they can't actually stop you. I think the biggest hole that yoga lines has over teachers is being able to remove their name from the registry, which will
00:30:34
Speaker
potentially create a problem for a teacher's career when they then want to be a teacher trainer for a 200 hour and 300 hour teacher training, but they are not a registered teacher with the Yoga Alliance. And I think that that right there is kind of the crux of the issue with why people are not on board with Yoga Alliance is that they do have some hold over teachers
00:31:01
Speaker
in the sense that they can take their name off the registry. That's it though, they can't prevent them from teaching.
00:31:09
Speaker
No. And, and I think the other part is, you know, most teacher trainings want to be yoga Alliance teacher trainings. So if you are a yoga studio or a person who was holding a teacher training, that's, that's, has some cache. Um, but I do remember at the time when that scope of practice came out, uh, there was a very upset corner of the yoga teacher world and, and, um,
Building Competence
00:31:36
Speaker
I don't remember who it was exactly, but they created a Facebook group and added me and several of the other people who were on the advisory board to the group and then basically said, explain yourselves. And that one felt really good. Yeah, well, I don't respond well to a lot of things. So I certainly didn't respond well to that. What I did was just not respond. And I took myself out of the group because I was like, if you open your mouth, Sarah, you're going to say some things that you really, there's no reason.
00:32:05
Speaker
But ultimately, I mean, you know, it's this idea of, I think that the microscope idea is the most useful thing to not only movement teachers and yoga teachers, but to anyone. Like in the world of PT, we take continuing education courses, we train in different modalities and, you know,
00:32:29
Speaker
just because I went to this weekend training, does it mean I can turn around and apply everything I learned the following week? Probably not. I probably have to slowly start to integrate some of that material, but I also rely on my own microscope to know that I need to practice this a whole bunch or I need to work on this a lot before I unleash it on somebody who's like actually a patient who is paying, who is in pain, any of those things, right? Right. I think that it can also work the other way where people, um,
00:33:01
Speaker
people don't feel ready when in actuality they, one, are ready and two, won't ever feel ready until they start applying what they've learned. And so when we look at ourselves under the microscope, some of us look with a little too much confidence. I just finished my weekend certification and
00:33:27
Speaker
whatever neurodynamic yoga moves or whatever it is. And now I'm ready because I'm certified. And then there are people who are maybe a little bit self-critical and are cautious to a point, but then feel like, okay, yes, I can reasonably apply these like more basic things in the moment and then take it from there. And then other people are just like, nope, not ready yet. I haven't read enough books.
00:33:53
Speaker
haven't taken enough classes. And you know, I think that these, these levels of confidence and humility or, um, exist, they exist on a spectrum. I definitely feel like I was a little bit overconfident in the beginning. And now I almost feel like it's the opposite work. I feel less confident because of the fact that I, I think that I know more about what I don't know. Yes.
00:34:22
Speaker
It's always like the more you know, the more you realize how much you don't actually know. Yeah. But it doesn't prevent me from, it doesn't prevent me from getting started though. And so that's always my advice to new teachers is like, you have to find a way to get started. Yeah. You have to find one thing that you can start applying because if you never get started, you, you will never feel ready. Yeah.
00:34:46
Speaker
And I think the longer you wait, that was something that was kind of driven home in my teacher training. If you, they were like, as soon as you get done with this training, you need to turn around and just start doing something.
Self-awareness in Teaching
00:34:56
Speaker
Teach your friends, teach your church group, you know, self practice, talk out loud and teach yourself because you have to start using it to make it something that you can do for sure. Right.
00:35:09
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, this is off topic, but it's the sort of ignorance is bliss idea. Like I am learning how to ride a motorcycle and it's super fun, but I know nothing. I don't know anything about what I'm doing. So I'm getting some coaching and.
00:35:23
Speaker
There was one moment where I had, I did, I did the whole thing that I was supposed to like started. I went and I was so happy and I'd stopped the motorcycle and I turned around to look at my, who was coaching me behind me. And I accidentally like revved the throttle with my hand because I wasn't thinking about my hand.
00:35:40
Speaker
And then I was like, ah, I turned back around and I could hear him yelling at me like, clutch, clutch. And I was like, well, what's that mean? Not that bad. I just pull a clutch in and whatever. And he came running over and he was like shaking because he knew what I had missed by two seconds, which was the bike flying out from underneath me and me lying onto my ass, right? But I didn't know. I was like, why is he panicking so much? I just accidentally revved the thing, whatever. So it's like,
00:36:09
Speaker
He knew enough to be scared right in that moment. And I knew nothing. I was like, whoopsies. We all start out a little more, a little too whoopsies, I think maybe, and benefit from the wisdom that practice gives us.
00:36:25
Speaker
Isn't ignorance is bliss. Just another way of saying done in Kruger effect. Yes. It's exactly right. It's like, if I don't know what I don't know, I can feel really, really good about what I do. I feel really smart because I know all of the things. I know all the things that we're going to know.
00:36:41
Speaker
So I want to actually, I wanted to just like, um, you know, give this example in kind of another way, which is that, um, when I did my 200 hour and 300 hour yoga teacher training, I was assessed by trainers who I respected and learned a lot from, but I don't know that they were as capable of assessing my ability to teach yoga given the constraints of the assessment process, which, you know, as we probably all.
00:37:09
Speaker
have recognized in some way or another, oftentimes what gets assessed is what's easy to assess and not what's important, right? And so when they assess me, it was easy to assess my ability to teach a room of my peers for seven minutes and it was easy to assess a multiple choice test and it was easy to assess a long answer test.
00:37:29
Speaker
And based on the fact that I passed those assessments, by the way, I had no idea what their criteria was. None of us really did. But as long as I passed their tests, according to them, I was deemed qualified by this particular certification program. Now with 15 years of teaching under my belt, how do I know I'm qualified to teach yoga with resistance bands? Well,
00:37:57
Speaker
I know, I know myself as a teacher, I've taught a lot. I've learned a lot about what works and what doesn't. And I spent a lot of time practicing with the resistance bands, which by the way, actually do present their own risks. I mean, they're elastic that can snap and like shoot at your face at any second. If you, if you hold them, you know, incorrectly.
00:38:16
Speaker
And, and, and so, you know, this idea of the microscope is as actually really important because 200 hour and 300 hour certifications do not equal competency. Yeah. Right. And either, by the way, do 15 years of experience. Right. It depends. It depends on what we're trying to do. And so we got to look at, you know, where we are in that process, who we're teaching in that process and where we want to be. And it's a step-by-step game. Absolutely.
00:38:46
Speaker
A note to our listeners, you can check out the show notes for any references we might have mentioned in this podcast. You can also visit our MovementLogic website where you can get on our mailing list to be in the know about sales on our tutorials. The uncut version of this episode, if you want to watch the video version and see what our faces look like, is also on our website movementlogictutorials.com forward slash podcast.
00:39:11
Speaker
And finally, it really helps if you like the episode. It really, really helps
Podcast Conclusion
00:39:15
Speaker
us if you subscribe, as well as rate and review on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we will see you next week with some more strong opinions, very loosely, very loosely held. Not that we're loose or anything.
00:40:04
Speaker
I'm leaving that in. Strong and loose. I'm leaving that in.