Making a difference through continuing education

This is a rare solo episode. No guest interviews, just me sharing my thoughts about the current state of our continuing education industry, and how I am trying to make a difference through my Course Creator's Mastermind group.

The best way I know to make meaningful change in the profession and to deliver better quality care to the public is through our industry's continuing education requirements.

In 2022 I launched the first intake for my Course Creator's group with the goal of creating a supportive community of knowledgeable, passionate and aspiring evidence-based RMT educators.

Members are mentored in a step by step Lego manual approach to learn the necessary skills, strategies and processes to create, market and teach their own course(s).

If you are interested in learning more about this program please visit the link below:

https://ericpurves.lpages.co/mastermind-interest-2023

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Transcript

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Hello and welcome to another episode of Purvis versus this is gonna be a solo episode, a rare episode where I don't have I. A guest and the reason I'm doing this is 'cause I wanted to talk to you today about my course Creator's Mastermind group, which is a group I created last year to help aspiring R M T educators to create launch. And teach their own continuing education course. My motivation for creating this group was because I see a huge opportunity in the continuing education, uh, requirements through our profession to create meaningful change in the profession. That'd be a lot easier than taking on all the stakeholders and trying to get them to change. So if you want to learn more about the program, what it is, What to expect, what it entails. Please keep listening, and if you have any questions, send me a message. The best way that I know how to influence the massage therapy profession in a positive way and to ensure that better quality care is given to the public is through continuing education. This profession desperately needs evidence-based course creators and educators. That can help to elevate this profession from its pseudo-scientific lineage approach to education and move us towards a more respected and viable allied healthcare approach. To better help those who hurt, those who suffer, and those who are struggling with functional tasks and activities. As someone who's been teaching continuing education since 2015, I've become even more aware of the courses that are out there and how so many of them are just copy and pasted information from old, outdated textbooks. The focus on almost every single CE course out there tends to be technique driven, tissue based, or structurally focused path anatomical rationale. There's only so many ways we can push, pull, and twist skin, yet the content that RMTs think they need. And the stuff they want to learn is not well-informed. It's the information that's presented in these courses is not what we would say is evidence-based. It's not biologically plausible yet. This is what people think they need to learn. And it's probably gonna upset a lot of people to hear this, but you know what? That's not what we need to learn. We don't need to learn multiple different ways of teach, uh, treating people. We don't need to learn multiple different ways of how to touch somebody. The key to manual therapy, and this is what's supported in all the research, is, is finding the touch that feels good for the person. And what is the touch that you like to provide? What's the, what's the approach that you like to take and what's the approach that person in front of you needs right here, right now on this day? And that may change from time to time. When we think within these modality empires, or we think within these tissue-based models, what we end up doing is we end up putting blinders on and trying to attribute every single intervention or every single experience within the confines of that explanatory model. Humans are complex. Pain is complex. The suffering that each individual has, their functional outcomes or the functional desires each person has, are way too complicated then to be explained or helped through a specific application of a specific technique in a specific way. Now, some people are probably listening to this and thinking, Eric, you're crazy. I treat people all the time and they get better. Uh, therefore, I know it works. Never once have I said that these things don't work. Never once have I said that these ways of, of treating or touching people are wrong. But it's the understanding and the rationale and the critical thinking that's associated with these techniques. That is the problem. This is why I see a stagnation in the, uh, development of new. High quality continuing education courses, and this is where I see is, is a huge barrier to the, the, uh, forward development and, and, and forward progression of our professional massage therapy when we are stuck in outdated mindsets and unsupported opinions based on, you know, past history rather than good science. It prevents us from taking our rightful seat at the table as a allied healthcare provider when most of what. People are teaching in their continuing education courses is just regurgitation of old, outdated textbooks that are used in school. I think this is a problem. I don't think this is the best way forward for our profession. When someone spends 30,000, $40,000 or more in tuition to go to massage therapy school, they deserve a higher standard of education that is supported by current research and biologically plausible principles. I understand fully why the CE world is rife with incomplete and indefensible. Approaches to to care and to treatment because this is what we are exposed to in school. This is what people think they need to learn, and we know that trying to change this through stakeholders, through the regulatory colleges, through the educational institutes, through professional associations is frustrating, time consuming, exhausting. But there needs to be a willingness for 'em to change. The stakeholders need to have a desire to change, to do better, to be different. But at this time, I see very, very little forward movement towards an evidence-based agenda in the massage therapy stakeholders, whether that's the schools, Who want to often blame the regulatory colleges because they are teaching in school what needs to be learned to pass an exam, or whether it's the professional associations that need to provide a certain narrative or certain content or resources in order to, um, attract members. Or whether it's the regulatory colleges that, um, maybe they are stuck with how, um, based on their, their legal requirements to protect the public and their orders they receive from government, maybe government doesn't care and maybe they're like, just keep doing what you're doing. No one's really getting hurt. I would say that people are not being given the best quality care. If a professional association or a regulatory college is to deliver, their mandate is to deliver safe, effective, and ethical care. Yet we are still pumping out students that think they are needing to release specific tissues or correct post imbalances or asymmetry, and they're then going and providing this type of care, this type of narrative to the people that they come see them. Yeah, sure. Some people aren't gonna care. I'm sure some, some clients, patients, people that come to see you are not gonna care and they're just gonna be like, I just wanna feel better. But what about those people that are suffering? And what about those people that this doesn't help? And what about those people who. Feel broken because they think that they're all twisted and they've got excess tone and they've got adhesions or things are stuck here and there. And the only way that they can really, uh, have relief is through coming to see you for massage. These cases, which I know are a minority, but these are the ones that make up a lot of the practices of what we see in any M Ss K healthcare profession. I know those are the type of people that I saw almost every day in, in, in my clinical practice. These are the worried, well, the people that are hurt, that are suffering, but have been told all this crap that's wrong with them by well-meaning healthcare providers. And I think that that's where the harm tends to be, is that we are providing information to people that isn't helpful and in some cases completely wrong. And this is perpetuated by the CE industry.'cause this information keeps getting told again and again and again. And of course the more we hear something, the more we wanna believe it. The, the more, the more truthful it sounds or becomes. We see this in politics. We see this in, uh, in, in, on the internet. We see this all the time where people just keep saying the same thing over and over and over again, and it becomes truth, becomes truth to them. Even though in the greater scheme of things, it's not truth. And because of these massive barriers to change that exists within the stakeholders, this is why I think it is so important for massage therapy to start creating change through continuing education requirements. Now, it doesn't matter what province you live in, in Canada or where you live in the United States, or whether you're, uh, overseas or Australia, New Zealand. Doesn't matter where you are. There's. Some type of quality assurance, professional development, continually continuing education requirements needed for all massage or manual therapists. And, and this is why last year I decided to create the course creators Mastermind. Now, this is a group that my, my motivation to create it was because I needed and felt. Uh, an extreme need for our profession to have more evidence-based educators, more evidence-based clinicians out there teaching high value, good quality content to the profession, so that way they can influence how, how, how the profession is, is, um, how we think, how we act, how we behave, how we treat, how we clinically reason. To make us as better clinicians through evidence-based content. But even more importantly, what we need is we needed to provide better quality care to the public 'cause through a continuing education environment. If we can get more good quality educators out there teaching on relevant topics to the profession, then that information then has a greater likelihood to be transferred to the public. And so the public can start to to seek better or receive better care and hopefully have more consistent, better outcomes. And this is why I'm so passionate about evidence-based practice is because we can easily incorporate this. Science and best practices into our practice, as well as into our continuing education courses, which is consistent with what I've been saying for such a long time. Are the great opportunities to be leaders in the treatment and management of pretty much any M S K condition. We seem to want to do it and we need to understand the barriers that are in place so that way, that way we can address 'em and we can, we can learn to do better. We can learn to be better clinicians, and the biggest way that I see this is to move away from these modality focused empires and move towards population focused learning, because this is what other allied healthcare professions do. Right. They, they focus on, on different populations rather than just different techniques. Now, of course, we need different techniques because different strokes for different folks. You know, people wanna, there's different ways that we wanna interact and touch with people and move them around, and I think there's value in that. But we have to stop thinking about our techniques from manual hands-on stuff and start thinking about the populations that we serve. Who is it that comes in to see you? Are they athletic in chronic pain? Uh, female women's health, postpartum, you know, uh, postviral, ence, encephalopathies. Are they oncology? Do they have things like LERs downloads or e d s? Like these are the populations. Those are just a few examples of, of the type of things that we should be focusing on and, and learning on about. And then when we understand those populations, those groups, those pathologies, We can then try to figure out how to use our massage therapy training through our hands-on, uh, interventions to try to, how to best serve that group because we can't just throw spaghetti at the wall and hope that something will stick. We have to understand the group that's in front of us, that person that's in front of us, the individual, their own specific needs, wants, desires for treatment. And if we understand the pathology or the population that they, um, That they are come from then we can, helps us to, uh, clinically reason to make better decisions that hopefully will be more important and more impactful, uh, for them and their outcomes. That's just a long kind of interlude into, uh, some of the problems I see with the CE industry and my solution for some of these problems is the course creators Mastermind. And to get more into this discussion, which the focus of today was about the Course Creators Mastermind, this is what I do inside the Mastermind group, is we take a small cohort of 12 individuals only and we focus on population-based learning and evidence-based learning. So, Each member will, will choose a, a topic or a population of interest to them, and they will, uh, develop a course. And what we do with this, this in this program is it's, it's a nine month program. Uh, we start in September and go in and through until May. And we, we, we take what I call the, the, the Lego Manual Building Block Approach of starting small and building up content so that by the time you are finished the program, you will have a. Full course, or at the very least, you'll have a, uh, outline of, of how to build a full course. Now, inside this group, right, we, it is consists of, uh, 15, uh, webinars. So 15 live Zoom meetings. They are recorded, so if you can't attend live, they're shown, they're uploaded to a private core site for you to watch, uh, on your own. Uh, but they're also, the meetings focus a lot on accountability and, and peer-to-peer mentoring. Um, peer-to-peer support on top of my guidance and support of that I, and to try and help you to, uh, realize your goals, uh, the focus of the content, you know, and where it comes from. It comes from my, you know, eight plus years of experience as a, as a CE provider. Uh, as well as my experience as a clinician and educator and my academic experience trying to put it all together into a package. That will save you time and save you money so you can launch a course, teach a course, and start making a difference sooner than if you just decided to go and do this all on your own. I like to think of it as, you know, my trial and error and my experience, my learnings gets turned into a package for you as the aspiring R M T educator to make a difference in the world, to try to be different, to try to provide better quality care and to. Uh, learn what works and what doesn't work in kind of the course creation, the marketing and the messaging. Because you can have the greatest course in the world, but if you don't have effective messaging or you don't know how to, uh, create eyes on you to get people to talk about you, to get people to. Um, want to learn from you, then no one's gonna take your course. And that's a really important thing, and I see this all the time in the CE industries. I see there's, there's, you know, I, I know I'm been kind of dismissing a bunch of the other, uh, content and, and stuff that's out there, but there is good courses out there. But one of the biggest barriers I see with the good courses is, is the messaging is why are people not taking that course? Why is, why is nobody registering for that course? And it usually has to do with the messaging because people need to learn how to communicate the importance of what it is that they're doing. And why they should learn from you. So that becomes a big, uh, a big, uh, thing that we focus on in the Mastermind as well. Obviously, you need to have good quality content. You need to have evidence-based support, but you also need to be able to learn how to, uh, message appropriately and market yourself as a leader or as a educator that has an area of expertise or advanced knowledge in that specific topic. So what we do in the Mastermind is we go through 90 day action plans. So each thing that we do is about three months, and then you have three months to hopefully, Come up, uh, reach your, your a successful outcome that's, uh, you outlined on day one. So the first thing that we're gonna do is we're gonna work on creating a 45 minute presentation. This is like a, like a, something you'd present to a small group or something you'd present at a conference. And this is basically like a teaser trailer of your overall package of like, what is it that you're teaching, what, what is it that, that, uh, you offer, and why should people learn from you? Right. So we're gonna focus on identifying your population of interest. You know, uh, we're gonna look at, at how do we communicate or think about, uh, what problem are, are we looking to solve. Uh, we're gonna use, uh, go through a process of finding and interpreting and applying research evidence into your content. What can you find and what can you use that supports what you're, you're educating about, but also more importantly, what can you find that refutes your topic? What other things out there? What's the opposing arguments? Because you, that makes a stronger presentation when you've got competing narratives, so it's not just one thing. Totally biased, right? We focus on creating learning objectives, outcomes, learning goals. Teaching plans, we, we learn on how to address, you know, different preferred learning styles or different types of, um, cognitive or psychomotor abilities or different, um, what are different ways we want to go and, and teach the content and, and how we're gonna get learners to maximize the educational, uh, goals that, that you have for them. And the second part of the, of the program, we, we go and, and, and focus on creating like a mini course or an outline for maybe a one day course or a a few hour webinar or maybe some short online self-directed program. We're gonna talk about essential technology. So what platform software sites do we only use and avoid, right? We're gonna focus on, on creating leads and getting people into your, your program. And I talked about that before, using messaging, right? How do we create demand for our course and how do we let people know that we are somebody, that we are trusted, that we could, uh, people should learn from us. Uh, we we're gonna go through different ways of kind of like launching your course. So different strategies on how and processes on how best to, uh, create demand, and, um, You know, everyone's gonna be different with what they want, but we, we discuss that and the kinda the final part of the, of the mastermind program is really to, uh, it's, uh, an outline or creation of a full course. And that could be a two day, three day, four day, week long course. That could be a, you know, self-directed online course. It could be a series of webinars, whatever that is. Is unique to each individual, and we're going to, uh, look at, uh, basically marketing funnels, uh, time management strategies. Um, and we're gonna look at how to basically think about your CE course as a business and how do we do this as, as an add-on or as something completely on its own from our clinical practice. The whole goal for what I want people to get from this program is, like I said before, is to say is they're paying to save time. So you're, you're investing in something that is gonna hopefully provide you an impact on the profession in, in how the public is, is treated, and more importantly, delivering better quality care and outcomes for the public. And obviously there's gonna be a financial benefit too, right? There's a lot of, there's a lot of opportunities out there in the CE world. If we think about it, there's about 40,000 RMTs in Canada, probably about 400,000, or at least in the United States. Plus we've got all the rest of the world. There's tens and tens and tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of, probably hundreds of thousands of massage therapists that are out there. Manual therapists, movement therapists, you know, the, the opportunities, uh, to create and influence change is infinite. And what I want people to do when they leave this program is to have all the processes, the strategies, as well as the content delivered. So when they go out there and start teaching, they can go and and, and know that they have all the tools and abilities available to them to have a successful CE course and a CE business, if that is what they so choose members get. Unlimited one-on-one support from me as well as the, the, the, the, the peer group that's there. Once you're into the, the community you are in for life, if you choose. Um, it's, uh, my goal is to create this supportive community of evidence-based educators that can go out there and support each other and build courses together, market for each other, support each other, have accountability for each other. So we can make a difference and we can start to change how the current CE industry is and start to create demand for higher quality population-based continuing education requirements. So if this is something that sounds like it's interesting to you and you want to learn more about it, uh, in the show notes, there is a link to express interest, uh, or you can always just send me an email, which is hello@ericpurvis.com and I can answer any of your questions. This, uh, application or process will go until roughly around the end of July. Uh, once the spaces are filled, they're filled. As of recording this today, we are at seven spaces filled out of 12. Um, and if this is something that interests you, please, like I said, um, send me a message. If you, if this isn't something you can commit to this year, then maybe mark it on your calendar and, uh, I will, uh, Keep going, keep this going every year because of all the projects that I'm involved with, I think this is the one that, uh, I love the most. It provides me such great satisfaction, uh, to see the things that people are creating and to be somebody that can help and support RMTs, realize, uh, their potential as well as realize their, their goals, um, as, as educators. So, So thank you for listening to this episode. I hope to hear from you, uh, as many of you as possible, uh, about the Mastermind. Uh, the more people that apply, the more interest there is. The more change that we can make, uh, future episodes will be coming out, uh, probably sometime in August. I'll probably do one or two in August. And the next theme that we're gonna be working on is going to be focusing on new RMTs and their. Experiences, uh, going through massage school and entering into the workforce. So we've got a bunch of episodes with some great people across Canada, uh, scheduled for that. Uh, so stay tuned and I hope you enjoy those too. Thank you for listening. Please subscribe so you can be notified of future episodes Purvis versus is available on all major podcast directories. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it on all your social media platforms. If you'd like to connect with me, I can be reached to my website, eric purvis.com or send me a DMM through either Facebook and Instagram at Eric Purvis r m t.