033 – Thoughts on how OT’s can talk about OT

Podcast: Embed

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It’s OT Month in the states and I’ve seen a TONNE of social media posts promoting the profession and saying how amazing we are and outlining the wide variety of things we can do. What I haven’t seen is a large swell of people promoting the profession outside of the profession. I’m all for giving each other a pat on the back when we’ve done something awesome, 100% but don’t expect that pat on the back to be anything other then what it is. If we really want people outside the profession to understand what we do then we need to promote to them. 

So why now?

This all started after a conversation with Gail Whiteford. Sitting on my couch the other day I had the thought that I would put out my “elevator speech” to see if it was similar to other peoples. I also wanted to share with my networks (most of which are non-OT’s) with the hope that it might trigger the conversation where I could explain fully about our amazing profession. What I didn’t expect was the reaction these three little pictures would get. To date they have reached over 70 thousand people after over 1400 of you shared them with your own networks. To me, these numbers are INCREDIBLE! So I decided to put together a little episode to explore this and why I think it’s important. 

I am most definitely not saying that OT Month/Week/Day activities that are about highlighting our professional strengths are a bad thing. Quite the opposite, in fact, I feel like they do serve an important place. What I am saying is it’s important that we continue to try and push the understanding of occupation and occupational therapy outside the profession if we expect to grow and be respected as a health profession. 

Keep occupied

Brock
brock.cook@me.com
@brockcookOT