The Importance of Autonomy in Preventing Burnout and Enhancing Job Satisfaction

Dr. Jeff Moore // #LeadershipThursday // www.ptonice.com

In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, ICE Chief Executive Office Jeff Moore discusses how the pursuit & achievement of clinical excellence solves many problems. Individuals who produce high-level outcomes in the clinic tend to be the ones who get paid more, work less, dictate their schedule, and overall feel a significant return on the time investment they spend in the clinic.

Take a listen to the podcast episode or read the full transcription below.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

INTRODUCTION Hey everyone, this is Alan. Chief Operating Officer here at ICE. Before we get started with today's episode, I want to talk to you about VersaLifts. Today's episode is brought to you by VersaLifts. Best known for their heel lift shoe inserts, VersaLifts has been a leading innovator in bringing simple but highly effective rehab tools to the market. If you have clients with stiff ankles, Achilles tendinopathy, or basic skeletal structure limitations keeping them from squatting with proper form and good depth, a little heel lift can make a huge difference. VersaLifts heel lifts are available in three different sizes and all of them add an additional half inch of h drop to any training shoe, helping athletes squat deeper with better form. Visit www.vlifts.com/icephysio or click the link in today's show notes to get your VersaLifts today.

JEFF MOORE All right, team, what's up? Welcome back to the PT on ICE Daily Show. It is Thursday. I am Dr. Jeff Moore, currently serving as the CEO of Ice, and always thrilled to be here on Leadership Thursdays, which are always Gut Check Thursdays. Let's get it out of the way. Let's talk about the workout, and it's a banger. We've got three sets of the following rep schemes and movements. We've got 21 burpees to target, followed by 15 devil's press, Okay, it's gonna be with 35s or 20s. Okay, so going into that deficit push-up, pop into a squat, weights above the head, and then back down. 15 of those, nine burpee into a chest-to-bar pull-up. Then, however long that took you, you're gonna rest one-to-one. So if that took… Let's see, maybe three-ish minutes, right? You're now going to rest for that same amount of time, and then you're gonna fire back up set number two. The workout is three sets with that one-to-one work-rest ratio for time. That, I'm looking at that, I'm gonna need to settle into about 20 minutes or somewhere on that workout. That is going to be rough. Okay, as far as upcoming courses, one thing I wanna mention is that Pelvic Live, I'm sorry, Pelvic L1 Online only has four seats left. I also wanna say a lot of the courses in January are looking that way. Remember, our prices go up January 1st. It's only 45 bucks. It's from, all the 650 courses go to 695, but if you're gonna grab a Q1 course, they're already all on the schedule. Make sure to jump in and grab that course before January 1st, because right now you can buy them all for the $650 price. So if you have any courses you're looking at in 2024, you know you're going to take anyways, just jump on there and grab them before that price jumps up to $695. on January 1st. So you've got a couple weeks, that being said, a lot of them are selling out. So try and scoop up those tickets over at PTOnIce.com as early as you can to save yourself a few bucks going into the new year. So that is my course announcement. EXCELLENCE SOLVES EVERYTHING Let's talk about excellence. So the topic of today is excellence solves everything. And what I mean by that is, There is a threshold of excellence at which no barrier survives to your success. This is where the idea of becoming undeniable feeds in really well. Now, we're going to chat PT, but you can think about this anywhere. Think about that musician who doesn't have a major record label. Think about that busy restaurant in a horrible building or a terrible part of town or bad location, what have you. Think about the individual player with a mediocre teammate who still wins the championship. There is a level of excellence at which once achieved, nothing else matters. That being said, that's very, very high level from a success perspective. Now I want to drill down and talk about a specific thing that possessing that excellence gives you or benefits you or arms you with because it is so relevant to today's practicing professionals. EXCELLENCE DRIVES AUTONOMY Possessing excellence, certainly at a level like we discussed before, allows you to always be deciding. And as I look at why that's so important, it's because autonomy is, from my vantage point, the most modifiable and important burnout variable or job satisfaction variable. Autonomy is the most modifiable. Burnout or job satisfaction variable. I was talking with Adam Fritsch down at South College I work with Adam over at South and that he and his colleagues over at Bellin published a paper I think it was in March of this year titled feeling exhausted how outpatient physical therapists perceive and manage job stressors and in that paper All the things you would expect kind of fell out of solution, right? Like if the workload was unmanageable or perceived to be unmanageable, that was stressful. If cultural differences were present, that's stressful. But what pops out at me in that paper, because it's so directly modifiable, is the lack of control or this idea of not having autonomy. Namely that if people did not perceive themselves to have control, they felt more burned out. Everybody I talk to making their way up the professional ranks, that constantly jumps out at me. Now, let me talk about why excellence takes care of that problem. That is because it allows you to always be deciding and that's what autonomy is. When you achieve a certain level of excellence, You get to always be deciding. You get to always have control. And I think the data shakes out to say that will prevent burnout and maximize job satisfaction. Let me give you some really specific examples of where you get to always be deciding that other folks might not that are going to lead to you perceiving that feeling of control that avoids burnout increases satisfaction. Number one, which insurance is to take? When you hit a certain level of excellence, you're deciding that. You can say to the insurances, look, your customer's gonna come to me either way. They're just gonna be furious that you're not covering it. But they're not gonna make a decision to not come. They're gonna come and then be mad at you. At a certain level of quality of service delivery, you will hit that reality. Right alongside that, how much to charge. You're the one deciding. The solution to burnout is appropriate return on your time investment, another huge variable. You can't balance an equation with the wrong numbers. You need to be able to drive what you receive for your time delivering services. at a certain level of excellence, you get to decide that. You're not thinking about what might this market handle or what's the, you're thinking, this is what I'm gonna charge because this makes sense for my model. Now, you're gonna combine a few things when you do that. Number one is make sure the equation works, but number two is putting that price point in a spot where you actually get to serve all the folks that you want to serve, that you feel called to serve. So, it's multivariate that coming to that number. but you get to come to that number, right? That's the beautiful thing about it. Number three, when to work. There are few things that decrease stress like having complete control of your schedule. This is the one that hits me the most personal. I have no issue giving you massive volume of work days. I have no issue being up at four, 4.30, getting after it, putting out a lot of production. I have no issue with that as long as Right now I'm holding 4.30 to 5.30 because my kids might text this morning they wanna hit CrossFit. As long as I have the autonomy to hold these parts of my schedule that are non-negotiable, I have no issue with the work output on the other part of the day. It's being able to control when you work that I think is probably a bigger variable or a bigger factor than the amount of work and people just haven't put that together yet. But again, at a certain level of excellence, you control that. Because when you say to that patient, I can only see you at seven a.m., if you're good enough, if they perceive you as valuable enough, they're gonna say, well darn it, that isn't a perfect time for me, but there's no way I'm not taking the appointment. They're only saying that if you've achieved a certain threshold of excellence. So now you're deciding when to work. You're deciding how or even if you want to market. You may choose to not spend any time in that space. I wouldn't advocate that from kind of a business consulting perspective, right? All the best companies market when they're busy. That being said, you could decide that. at a certain level of word of mouth demand, right? But certainly when you do market, it doesn't have to be salesy. At a certain level of excellence, you're simply reminding people that they want to come see you. They've already heard from nine other people they should. They've already been thinking about coming in for a long time. Now your marketing simply becomes creative reminders, which is a much nicer way to go about engaging with your audience than always trying to sell them something. So you get to decide at that certain threshold of excellence how or even if you market. You decide whether you stay at your job. You no longer need to stay at your job because you have to. You stay at your job because you love it. Because the people that have created the environment have done a great job. And you can't get enough of the culture. And you're learning a ton. And you're serving people you care about. You're staying for all the right reasons, but none of the wrong reasons. Because you can walk any day. You think to yourself every morning, need this. The people want to come see me no matter what. I'm choosing to stay here because I love it. That's a lot different professional world. You don't feel stuck. You're driven by choice because you've achieved that level of excellence. Excellence is so unique. because it solves all of those problems. Those are all problems that every business guru is trying to sell you an individual solution for, right? How to navigate the insurance market, how to come up with your pricing, right? How to get more control of your schedule. You could find individual products that would try to solve only one of these, all of them. EXCELLENCE: THE CLEAN SWEEP Excellence is a clean sweep. Once you get good enough, every single one of those problems gets erased at the same time with one thing. But there's one other thing before I sign off that I want you to think about that is so unique about possessing excellence. And that is that it travels with you. I don't think enough people think about this. Excellence travels with you. Relationships, local marketing, et cetera, all of those things, if you change where you're working, if you move or relocate, all of the other business hacks, if you will, that you leverage have to be started back up. But your excellence travels with you. It's gonna meet you there, right? Right from patient one, they're going to perceive the asymmetry and the quality of what you deliver, and all of those problems are gonna vanish without you having to restart any of the other machines. Excellence travels with you wherever you go it meets you there. This is why it is hands down because it solves all the problems at once and wherever you go it meets you there, it travels with you. This is why it is the greatest and most urgent investment. I'm not telling you not to leverage all the business tools. I would totally encourage you to leverage a wide variety of business tools and strategies. I'm just saying for the greatest ROI, Get good first. Get good, then busy. Because excellence is the greatest decider to your overall success and certainly the greatest driver of your individual autonomy. And that's what I think results in incredible levels of job satisfaction and very, very low levels of burnout. Get good. You'll get busy, but you'll also solve every other problem in the process. Team, PTOnIce.com is where everything lives. Thank you all for being here this morning. Have a wonderful Thursday. We'll see you next week.

OUTRO Hey, thanks for tuning in to the PT on Ice daily show. If you enjoyed this content, head on over to iTunes and leave us a review, and be sure to check us out on Facebook and Instagram at the Institute of Clinical Excellence. If you're interested in getting plugged into more ice content on a weekly basis while earning CEUs from home, check out our virtual ice online mentorship program at ptonice.com. While you're there, sign up for our Hump Day Hustling newsletter for a free email every Wednesday morning with our top five research articles and social media posts that we think are worth reading. Head over to ptonice.com and scroll to the bottom of the page to sign up.