This is where it all begins. Before we get into postural systems and praxis and everything to come, we wanted you to know who we are and how three paediatric OTs on opposite sides of the world ended up in conversation together. It is a warm, honest start, and underneath the introductions sits the thread that runs through everything here: mentoring, clinical reasoning, and bringing your whole self to the work.
In our very first episode, the three of us simply introduce ourselves. Michelle and Cory are in Orange, regional New South Wales, and Tracy joins from Denver, Colorado, where she co-founded Developmental FX. We trace how we each found our way into paediatric occupational therapy, how Camp Jabiru and years of mentoring brought us together, and why we felt these conversations were worth opening up to a wider audience.
It is part origin story, part mission statement. We talk about the SPIRIT model that gives the podcast its name, why mentoring and clinical reasoning sit at the centre of advancing practice, and our quiet hope that these episodes might be a bit of backup for therapists carrying a heavy load. We also map out where the series is headed: starting with the postural system and building a shared language as we go.
Lightly edited for readability. Speaker labels and chapter markers match the published episode.
Michelle: Welcome to episode one, series one of our podcast. We are Michelle Maunder and Cory Johnston, from Seed Paediatric Services, a small private practice here in Orange, New South Wales, Australia. We are so happy to be here. And we are joined by Tracy Stackhouse.
Cory: Tracy is an absolute legend in my mind, but she is also a paediatric occupational therapist based in Denver, Colorado, in the United States. She is the co-founder and executive director of Developmental FX, a not-for-profit organisation. They specialise in children with fragile X, but also all children with neurodevelopmental differences and challenges. Welcome, Tracy. We are so excited to have you.
Tracy: I am so excited to be with you, and I love this technology that lets me be in Denver and you all to be in Orange, and somehow together we are going to have these amazing conversations. I am representing my team here at DFX. We have a multidisciplinary team of extraordinarily talented and dedicated folks doing the really hard work of taking care of complicated kids and seeing them move forward in their lives. You all are doing that as well, and I think the people who listen to this podcast will be occupational therapists, but also all different kinds of disciplines. We really welcome people in to listen to our conversations, to deepen your passion and your commitment, fend off burnout, and have a blast with us. Spirited Conversations is named after a clinical reasoning tool I developed in collaboration with my team here in Denver and with people at Camp Jabiru, the SPIRIT model. We are not going to talk all the time about the SPIRIT model, but the spirited conversations are drawn from it. So we are all in spirit here together, in the spirit of thinking and the spirit of collaboration, and it is going to be a great podcast.
Michelle: We cannot wait. We should give a shout-out to our director, Sarah MacInnes, who just got married, so it is Sarah Fleming now. Sarah is the director of Seed Paediatric Services and has certainly encouraged and endorsed us doing this. She is with the team of other therapists, and Tony, our support, working with kids right now as we do this. So thank you. Go Seed, go DFX. First episode.
Cory: First episode. I cannot believe we are actually here and recording this. Today’s episode is more just about us, getting a chance to let everybody know us a little, how we came to decide to do a podcast together, how we came to know each other, and how we got to where we are in each of our individual careers. So I can kick off, or if anyone else has a desire to kick off, go for it.
Tracy: That sounds great. Go for it.
Cory: I am going to start with how I met Tracy, and funnily enough it is the same time I met Michelle. In 2015 I decided to do Camp Jabiru as a practicum. I had just started working at the sensory gym, and the two went hand in hand, because the sensory gym runs Camp Jabiru. Tracy runs the practicum.
Tracy: Colleen Hacker and Lynette Burke are the heads of Camp Jabiru, and they graciously invited me, so I run the practicum. That is where I met both of you.
Cory: So Tracy heads the practicum element of camp. Michelle and I, and probably fourteen other occupational therapists, decided we were going to go and learn at camp that year. It was a full-on year for me personally, but it started me on my journey of learning really deeply about sensory integration and piecing all these pieces together. That week gave me the foundation, and I realised there was a lot I needed to learn, which was exciting. If I come back to how I got into occupational therapy: none of my friends who went to uni with me knew what it was. My mum said to me before I applied that she thought I should look at it, because it lets you be creative and I like helping people. Luckily I really enjoyed it, and when I graduated I fell into paediatrics and realised I really enjoyed it, but that I also needed supervision. I was lucky enough to be mentored by Colleen, which ultimately led me to working at the sensory gym a year or so later. I genuinely loved my time there. Over the years I was exposed to many exquisite and skilled leaders in paediatric occupational therapy, and many of the people I worked with are still some of my dearest friends today. The nicest thing I got out of that time was the permission to treat and be myself in sessions. You get to watch other clinicians and learn from them, and at first you sometimes try to copy that because you are not sure how to do it yourself. Seeing so many people come at it in a different way let me find my own groove, and that always feels so much nicer when you are true to yourself in sessions. When I think about the sensory gym, camp always comes to mind, because it is such a significant part of what the sensory gym does. Camp Jabiru was started here by Colleen Hacker and is modelled after Camp Avanti in the US. It is designed to give children with disabilities a typical camp experience, supported by occupational therapy group leaders. In each group you have two leaders, one practicum occupational therapist, and a number of occupational therapy students, many of whom volunteer their time for the whole week. Being a group leader gives us access to skilled master clinicians, one of whom is Tracy. These clinicians support us to learn and to use the treatment model through the week to help the children achieve their goals. So camp is really set up to invite learning. The biggest change I have seen over the last few years is that a program evaluation turned into a research study, in collaboration with Dr Shelly Lane, who was at the University of Newcastle and is now at Colorado State University. Tracy, Shelly Lane and the research team worked together to establish a fidelity to the treatment model, which is the SPIRIT model Tracy mentioned. It has been amazing to watch this evolve over the years I have been at camp. I am a little devastated not to be at camp this year, because it has been such a consistent part of my life. Funnily enough, it has also been a significant part of my fiance’s life, who I met when I was working in Sydney. He grew up in Bathurst, about forty-five minutes from Orange in rural New South Wales. We really wanted to get back to the country, which is why I ended up in Orange. When I got here I worked in the child and adolescent mental health inpatient unit and in a local public primary school, and then I joined the beautiful team at Seed, and I absolutely love it. I cannot wait for what my future brings here. What about you, Michelle? Do you want to go next?
Michelle: I am happy to go next. My name is Michelle Maunder, I am an occupational therapist, and I am going to start my journey earlier than you, Cory, because it illuminates how I landed where I am now. I was raised and spent my childhood in a small country town, a farming community called Trundle, six hours from Sydney. I grew up really connected to the landscape, to nature, to family and to a small community. As farmers we grew up in harsh environments, and there was a physicality required there: I saw that we needed strength, endurance and agility to manoeuvre stock and machinery. I also saw that we were at the whim of the seasons, which meant my family and the community faced drought and floods and everything in between at random times, with a massive impact on our lives. That started me observing people, their different strengths and interests, and how they managed in adverse conditions as well as when they were thriving in the boom times. People did it really differently, and that planted the seed for my interest in the body, mind and spirit connection. People were engaged with the land and with farming, and that kept them there even in the harshest of times. We had some really harsh droughts, and the environment reflected a little of where we are in the world today, with fires, dust storms and floods. I kept wondering at how people did it differently. We were all in it together, but we all did it differently. My cousin from a metro area introduced this idea of occupational therapy, which in a town of five hundred people we did not get exposure to. It sparked a curiosity in me because it seemed really broad and diverse. I love change, so I thought this small country-town girl is going to be able to go around the world doing lots of different jobs and observe more people thriving through adversity, ideally to see us all thrive. That took me to OT, to Sydney, where I studied. I continued observing people. My interest was in supporting people clinically, but also in supporting OTs to thrive, so I did a master’s of adult education to see how I could support professionals. How could other OTs who found their work meaningful thrive, when we are so often in the face of really difficult times ourselves? My family then moved from Sydney to Orange. By then I had a gap in my career while I loved my own little children. I went to preschool to watch an OT, Sarah MacInnes, deliver a presentation on children and development, and it blew my mind, because it was not what had been presented to me through uni. I wanted more of that, so I rang Sarah and said, I want to work with you, I want more of that. That is how we started, many moons ago. I came to paediatric occupational therapy in my forties, so I am a late starter, but I have definitely found this to be the most rewarding area of practice, and I love working at Seed. From that moment forward I gathered people around me, or gathered around them, to support me to learn as much as I could as fast as I could. I eagerly attended as much professional development as I could with whoever came to Australia. We were treated to the likes of Sheila Frick, Julie Wilbarger, Patti Oetter and Shelly Lane. We even pulled a few all-nighters to join some live online courses, mostly with Sheila Frick. I also went to camp as practicum, which is where I was lucky enough to meet you beautiful ladies. I fell in love with Tracy there when I saw her work and heard her wealth of knowledge, and Tracy started mentoring us at our clinic shortly after that, back in 2015. We were also mentored by Beth Osten in DIR Floortime for a while, and by Kim Barthel in trauma. Seed hosted Kim to come to Australia and co-treat in our clinic, which was an amazing experience. Sometimes we attend courses that are just available, but mostly at Seed we are really driven, and I am driven to learn as much as I can to solve the problem of the child in front of me. That has organically led me on a wild and wide-ranging journey of topics, and to seek out people across the globe. That is what this lifelong journey is about for me and for us at Seed, solving challenges for kids and families in regional Australia so they get access to international-standard occupational therapy.
Cory: To add to that: at Seed, Michelle and I and the team, Sarah, Kylie and Tegan, are all lucky enough to have mentoring with Tracy. It is just such a pot of knowledge, this enthusiasm and passion we all bring and work on together as a team. It is so awesome to have people around you who are passionate about the same things, where you can ask super-geeky questions, like, when you tip your head back and you get this reflex and the eyes go like this, what is happening there, and people do not look at you like you are a bit odd. It is very cool to have a little team where you can jive like that. What about you, Tracy?
Tracy: This is already so fun. The three of us are having a blast and I hope everybody else is too. Part of it is that the journey we are on as paediatric occupational therapists is such a surprising one. There is so much to know, and at the end of the day it is always about the children thriving, always about what we can bring to the situation. We are going to talk a lot in this series about kids who struggle, but what we bring to it as OTs is so rich and deep. When I first met you both as your mentor, there was a special spark and a special quality in both of you that makes our mentoring sessions so fun, and that felt worth sharing. Seeing that spark, that passion and that urge to know and to come to a deeper level of understanding, is what we want to do in this podcast: to educate, to elevate and to engage people. That is why we say engaging and elevating paediatric OTs. I have been on the journey of engaging and elevating paediatric OTs for a long time. I became an OT because my father told me about occupational therapy. I thought I wanted to be a psychologist, but he knew me better at that young age, and he knew I was connected to wholeness in a way that might feel frustrated in a different field. He knew a bit about OT, fortunately, so he suggested it. I took the intro course in college not really knowing anything about it. In our paediatric world, one of the leading groups of theorists who continue to guide my thinking wrote a book together called Children Adapt: Eleanor Gilfoyle, Ann Grady and Josephine Moore. Ellie Gilfoyle happened to teach the intro course I took, and she became a mentor I still cherish to this day, partly because I am a tall person and she is a very tall person, but also because she really understood that the shifting story of development underpins excellent paediatric practice. Their theory of spatial-temporal adaptation is pivotal in my own mind, and it underlies a lot of the processes we end up looking at. I had a chance to learn it from the very best people. Ann Grady was later my boss at Children’s Hospital, and Joe Moore taught neuroscience classes to us a couple of times a year. I fell deeply in love with trying to understand the brain, which led me to a degree in neuroscience and to really trying to understand development and what creates roadblocks for kids, and then what we might best do to unblock them. In my own need to know, I became a supervisor at the Children’s Hospital in Denver and started to supervise a lot of therapists. The common thing I saw was that therapists would either live in a particular treatment approach and let it guide them, which serves a critical purpose, or they would get overwhelmed by how much there is to know, and sometimes forget that it is the light of themselves that they have to bring to bear in the situation. You have to know a lot, but you have to be fully present to do this work: to connect with children and to be an effective co-occupant of their developmental space. I found I had to help people shift gears between the thinking part of the work and the doing part, to understand children deeply but also always stay present. That is a beautiful thing, to move between those levels. So I started to get really interested in the clinical reasoning process. In the mid 1990s, Mattingly and Fleming wrote some books for occupational therapists about clinical reasoning, so I studied that. At the same time, our team at Children’s Hospital was doing research on what we then called sensory modulation disorders. We do not really call it that anymore, but we had to develop a fidelity to treatment process as part of that study. Lucy Miller was the principal investigator. Separate from Dr Miller, Julie Wilbarger, Sharon Trunnell and I developed a tool we called the STEPPSI, which was the first fidelity tool in paediatric occupational therapy. I had to learn how to think in that more scientific way, but also keep it grounded around who these children and families are and what we are trying to help them do. So I entered that space of clinical reasoning and distilling knowledge in a way that is really accessible to therapists, and I have been involved in that in different ways for years. In tandem, I was also really involved in the world of fragile X syndrome. I was the OT on the very first clinical team in the world dedicated to fragile X, and I had a chance to work with extraordinary mentors, Randi Hagerman in particular, in a real multidisciplinary team trying to understand really complex kids. In that field I had to go to science meetings all the time. One of the scientists, Bill Greenough, who has passed away now, is the super-guru of neuroplasticity. He did the pivotal studies on how experience is the marker of how brains shift and grow and change, and how dependent our brains are on experience. He was eager to help the world understand that this is all experience and all processing, not just cognitive processing. As OTs we are often in a place where people do not quite understand how the sensory, affective, motor and body-based work we do is so critically important. Yet here I had the chance to talk to one of the top scientists in the whole world, and he said to me, you have the audacity to believe that the work you do changes the brain, and you should believe that, because that is what you are doing.
Michelle: As an occupational therapist, Tracy, or as you, Tracy Stackhouse?
Tracy: As an occupational therapist. Maybe a bit of both, but he was very impactful in my life. I felt emboldened, like, no, come on, OTs, we are doing something remarkable and spectacular. We should be able to talk about it to each other, and we should all be working at a very deep level. That has been my commitment since then, because I see what happens when you light that fire of passion and knowledge and skill and bring your whole self to the work. I have had a chance to mentor all kinds of people all over the world, and I have a special connection with Australia because of Camp Jabiru, and a special connection with Seed because your team caught the fever of clinical reasoning and are so committed to it. The work you all are doing is so deepened and enriched by the conversations we have, and we felt we should share those conversations.
Cory: Listening to you just then, Tracy, was a fascinating experience for me, because to hear how people have influenced you and shown you the potential to create change and support development, that is exactly what you do for us and for me. That was the biggest drive for me in wanting to do this podcast: I kept thinking, what if more people had access to this conversation, what if they could join in and catch the fever? Each of us can only treat so many children, work with so many families, support so many people. The more of us who engage and elevate our own practice, to be a bit corny, the better. Some of this I am hearing from you for the first time, even though we have known you for over five years, so I am loving that we are doing this.
Michelle: I am too, and I am loving that we serendipitously found each other. When I look back on my career, and perhaps this is true for Cory and Tracy as well, we have bumped into people who offered us some ideas and we moved towards them. Sometimes that took a leap of faith, like doing a podcast. If you can harness the energy and contain the excitement and nervousness, and move in the direction you are compelled to move in, things can unfold for you. That can be as small, or as important, as your dad saying, hey, Tracy. I was too interested in psychology as well, and my dad cautioned me away from that and from teaching, so I had to land on something, and I am so grateful I landed on OT. We moved pretty organically and with a leap of faith, and we have found ourselves here at different ages and stages of our careers. We did not plan this. Even the podcast idea happened from Tracy and us separately saying, this is precious, this is wonderful, I wish I had this to listen to when I was starting out in paeds. It also takes the audacity to be brave enough, at a conference or at Camp Jabiru or wherever you are in the world, if you hear somebody speaking in a way that resonates with you, to approach them as boldly as we did with Tracy, to literally email and say hello. She is going to be inundated now, so maybe not Tracy, but find your people and gather them round. Find a safe group of people you trust and value and align with, to help move you in the direction you are compelled to go, because you create synergy, which gives you energy and a little braveness to push you forward. For your own sake, for the sake of OTs, and for all the communities and families and children we serve.
Cory: A hundred per cent. When I first graduated, I went into a job as a subcontractor with no supervision, and it freaked me out, because I had not had any paeds experience, even through uni. I had taught little kids dancing, so I was comfortable with little kids, but in the back of my head I was thinking, how do they know I am doing anything, how am I sure I am actually providing treatment? Because of that feeling, I proactively went and sought mentoring. I contacted Patti Oetter, and I contacted Colleen. Colleen must have thought I was so painful, because I kept trying to get on the phone and chat to her. Of course I paid for mentoring, but it was the best thing I could have done early on, because I really did not know what to do. Having that experience of chatting with people who think and integrate knowledge quite deeply, and who help guide that for me, was so helpful. Once I got to the sensory gym and connected with you, Tracy, I had amazing opportunities to get mentoring from amazing therapists. I find mentoring invaluable. It has changed me as a clinician. I do not think I would be the same clinician I am today if I had not had the experiences of mentoring I have had.
Tracy: Maybe one of our secret goals for this podcast is that paediatric OTs will feel brave enough to ask for mentoring, because the fact is there is so much to know. If you think about the theory base we use, the strategies, tools, techniques, methods and treatment approaches, there is a lot. At university, pretty universally across the world, you learn the real foundations of what occupation is, which is so rich in itself, and you learn the science and methodology, but you do not learn all the particular treatment approaches across the ages and stages of practice. So when you land in paediatric OT, at first it can be really overwhelming. The framework we will talk about in this series is focused on an integrated paediatric approach, grounded in interpersonal neurobiology and the relational qualities we bring, and deeply informed by Ayres Sensory Integration theory, because that is a foundational framework we all know and have studied, and one of the neuroscience frameworks we need for this work. You do not really learn all of that at university. You acquire these skills in practice and in continuing education, but where you cement that knowledge, and bring it into yourself so that you bring it to the intervention, is in mentoring. Mentoring is a relationship. The best mentoring is where you pick somebody you feel you can learn from and trust, and you can deepen your conversation and be vulnerable enough to say, gosh, I do not know what to do here, what would you do? You start to build that trust. So mentoring is a process of deepening your professional skills, and it is something we should embrace and be proud of, because in every discipline in the world we learn and advance ourselves through mentoring relationships. In many of the OT associations around the world, mentoring is regarded as central to advancing practice, although in some cultures and places it is more forefront than others. One of the special things happening in paediatric OT in Australia is a growing culture of mentoring, and it is beautiful to watch. Maybe Camp Jabiru has helped with that, because every year, except the COVID year, we have a practicum where therapists who are already practising want to advance their practice. We dive into different topics, but we are also seeing kids at camp, and it is this culture of discussion and clinical reasoning that is so compelling. Clinical reasoning is what we are going to focus on, because that is how we elevate practice. If you can engage yourself in the clinical reasoning process, it is such a gift, and a bidirectional one. For me as a mentor, I love these conversations, and watching you grow and flourish is a whole different way of having an impact in the world. Equipping you to step into being mentors for other people is also very cool. It is a growing swell of really advancing practice, and that is what we hope the podcast helps to promote.
Michelle: Find those mentors.
Tracy: And collaborate.
Michelle: That synergy of working together collaboratively just has a power to it.
Cory: It does. When you talk to somebody about something you are struggling with in your sessions, or a kiddo you are feeling frustrated by, it is often more that you just do not understand how to shift the behaviour, or how to help them create a change. You go and talk to somebody outside the situation, and they can see, and they help you pull the pieces together. Then you try it in session and it is such a different feeling, a significantly different experience of the same child. You see it, the child feels it, the parents see it, and you are all thinking, what is happening here, this is amazing, how is this coming together? Because you tried to integrate some knowledge in a different way, and you had support in doing it. It keeps you coming back for more. If it was not meaningful or creating some sort of impact, I would not come back, I would go and do something else.
Tracy: Absolutely. You used the word integration, and I think that came to you not by accident, because so much of what clinical reasoning and clinical discussion does is give us perspective, so that what we are offering is truly integrative. Dr Ayres talked about sensory integration, but integration in and of itself is one of the cornerstones you can come to trust as a therapist: that when you weave the pieces together with the intention of moving toward integration, that is really going to happen. That might sound too mystical, but over the course of this podcast we will be able to think about concepts like integration, where it comes from and how we achieve it. As you integrate a system within a child, they emerge from those opportunities in a way that their capacity is elevated and shifted. As you move their system forward, integration lets them start to put different pieces together, and to harness their skills and strengths and use them in a new way. It really is the essential ingredient of development. In clinical reasoning we deconstruct and reconstruct. We always look at the child as a whole. Our goal is to help the whole child integrate forward so they can thrive in all of their life, and thriving for one child is always different from another. We work with kids who sometimes have significantly reduced capacities in different developmental domains, but that does not mean they will not have a thriving, amazing life. So we deconstruct and then reconstruct. Sometimes I say we zoom in and zoom out. We zoom in to the sticky bits, the things that are hardest for the child, or sometimes the thing that is so remarkably amazing about them, and we enhance that, and then we zoom back out to how it will help them integrate and move down the path. The biggest picture of clinical reasoning is moving into the different domains of development and fine-tuning our thinking around each of them. Our thought for this podcast is that we would do that, jumping into the core areas each paediatric OT might need to deepen their thinking around, spending an episode on each, and doing it through case studies.
Cory: In this podcast we will be going through some of these core areas. Both Michelle and I have done the SPIRIT course of clinical reasoning for paediatric occupational therapists that Tracy runs, and I have found that course so helpful in separating out where to start and how to approach all there is to work with when you are working with a child, a family or even communities. We will not specifically talk about the SPIRIT course in here, but we will talk about the theories and all the parts that go into it. If you want to go and do that training yourself, you can. Is it online now, Tracy?
Tracy: It will be.
Cory: That is so exciting. I will probably go and do it for a third time. That framework has been really helpful in our mentoring, and it is always sitting in the back of my mind now when I am reasoning out what I am doing with a kiddo. We almost asked Tracy to go through the whole SPIRIT course in a podcast, and she said, let us just ease up. So we are structuring it around those core areas in the model, but we will try to keep it accessible and, hopefully, built around a story, because that helps me when it is based around a specific kiddo or an experience that resonates with one of my own.
Michelle: We will do that through a story about a particular child and family. We have all worked in multiple places with a gazillion children, so we will not be bringing one child to discuss each week. We will build a composite case, a collection of presentations from lots of the kiddos we have seen across all sorts of workplaces. We will use that composite case to dive into a specific domain, then into a specific presentation, and then into a specific age and stage, so it really helps embed the theory into a real-life story and the practical implications of that. We will define terminology as we go. Our plan is to start from the very beginning, so we all have the universal language we will use throughout the rest of the podcast. So if this is all brand new to you, and maybe you are not even a paediatric occupational therapist but you are getting excited by this, hopefully there is something for you too. We are hoping to cover eight sessions. Cory, do you want to cover the topics we are going to roll through?
Cory: Under Tracy’s guidance, we have tried to break these domains down into something more accessible to learn about, because, as Tracy said, the amount you have to learn can be overwhelming, and some of these topics are really dense. You could spend ages just learning about sensory modulation, or a very specific part of this big picture. So we decided collaboratively to start with the postural system, because it is quite clear, you can see it in front of you, and you can find obvious examples of how it is working, or not quite working as well as it could be. We will talk about the postural system in relation to the case we have put together, then link from that system to posture and how it influences your regulation, how settled you are and how able you are to connect with others. Then we will go into co-regulation, how you use another person to get settled and organised. After that we will talk about social relationships, because you get yourself organised so you can interact and engage.
Michelle: So regulation is the purpose.
Cory: Exactly, the purpose for interacting. And underneath all of that, like Tracy said, there are our theories about sensory integration and the neurology that supports these functions. So we will then move into things like sensory discrimination, executive functioning, and integrating all of these pieces to come together to support development. We are going to start at the postural system because, hopefully, that will get you hooked in. My experience of Tracy making this information super accessible has helped a lot, so hopefully we can do that here and help you grab hold of some of this stuff that can sometimes be confusing. Whenever possible, we will base it around a story, because that always captures me.
Michelle: It will resonate, hopefully, with other people, which is why we are going to use a composite case to make it fairly universally applicable at the start. Through this process we will perhaps move into more complex cases with some comorbidities, but we are going to start in a way that supports discussing the core concepts. Our intention is not to lessen how complex the children we work with are, and we are not trying to simplify that. Lots of our children and families are incredibly complex, and we acknowledge that, but for the purposes of these mentoring sessions at the start we are going to simplify the case as much as we can.
Cory: And pull from many of our experiences, because we want to maintain and respect the families we work with, and complete confidentiality for all of those families we love and support. That is why we will draw from composite cases.
Tracy: It also gives a chance, because we are all therapists doing this work every day, bringing our very best efforts to it. In the work, having questions is not a sign that you do not know what you are doing. Having questions is a reflection of the complexity of the children and of the work we are trying to pull off. Human brains are complicated, and there is nothing more complex or fascinating than the human developmental system. So we are hoping to give you permission to ask the questions. We are going to model the real questions we really have. For most clinicians, whether occupational therapists or other paediatric clinicians, this is going to be your journey too. You have walked this walk, you have had these questions and you have wondered. The promise of mentoring and clinical reasoning is that we advance practice, find our way through those questions, and really maximise outcomes. It is all about taking care of kids the best way we possibly can in this complicated world, and about therapists, too.
Michelle: Therapists, too, Tracy. As I have worked around the traps, I have seen such a high rate of burnout in the helping professions, including among occupational therapists. We are starting this podcast in 2020, so we are in a really complex international state of affairs, and therapists are carrying a load. One of my hopes is that this might help prevent therapist stress and burnout, so we look after ourselves and can thrive in these complex environments where I am lending my nervous system to others, lending my thoughts and feelings, and holding space for children and their families. There is a vulnerability in doing that, and without the support of our incredible team at Seed and people like you, Tracy, it might feel too much to continue. It is a load to bear if you are not supported by people. So our eyes are on the children and their families and the communities they live in, and, as you have done for a long time, we keep an eye on the therapist as well, mindful of the work and the load it can have on us.
Cory: Maybe our podcast can be a little backup for you all, inadvertently.
Tracy: Yeah, absolutely. I love it. What a wonderful, novel way to try to achieve those goals. It is going to be a fun journey.
Cory: And, as we are encouraging people to put up their hand and ask questions, we do have an email you can write to. We have our topics set out for this series, so we will not necessarily be answering questions in this first series, but feel free to send emails or give us feedback. Even, Cory, you speak really funny, that kind of constructive feedback would be awesome.
Michelle: Not because we have an Australian accent.
Cory: We cannot do much about that, sorry. But hopefully it is novel for some people. If you do want to send us an email, you can write to spiritedconversationspodcast@gmail.com. We will start off next time with our case.
Tracy: We will talk about posture and postural control, how we think about it and how we might approach it. We will think about it from a theory perspective and weave in conversation about assessment and treatment. We really want to deepen your commitment to thinking about it. It will be fun for us, and we hope it is fun for you too.
Michelle: I just want to say thank you, Cory and Tracy, for sharing in this process. We are learning more about each other. I have not heard some of these stories about you before, so thank you.
Cory: Thank you to everybody who took the time to listen to us and our stories this week.
Tracy: Thanks, Seed. It is an honour and a pleasure, and it is going to be great.
Cory: Hopefully we will talk to you all soon. See you next time.
And that’s a wrap on today’s episode of Spirited Conversations. We hope this sparks something for you, whether it’s a new clinical idea, a fresh perspective, or just the reminder that you are definitely not alone in this work. If this conversation resonated, we would love for you to share it with anyone on their own learning journey. You can find information about the podcast on our website, and you can join us in the courses and communities the Developmental FX team have put together at developmentalfx.org. And if you’re enjoying listening, please subscribe or leave a review, it genuinely helps more people find us. Until next time, keep the conversations spirited!