“Take Only What You Need From It”
“Take Only What You Need From It” – MGMT. After attending the American Physical Therapy Association’s Combined Sections Meeting or APTA CSM, I came to a realization. I don’t think I was doing conferences correctly. My former method of going to conferences, back in my student and younger clinician days, was to get there early, attend all the programming, grab dinner and go home early to reflect. Well, at least I was reflecting right? But nobody told me “How to Conference”. And its not like there is a right or wrong answer to that, it just comes down to your goals and objectives. I never set goals or objectives for conferences before, and the last few I have attended, I have set goals and I have gotten so much more out of them.
How To Conference
This year I got out of the conference center in New Orleans, and I hung out with some amazing folks. Jerry Durham, Patrick Berner, Sandy Hilton, Greg Todd, Alex Engar, Sarah Haag, Karen Litzy, Jared Aguilar, Aaron Lebauer and a ton more. I missed a few sessions. But I got out in the community, saw what they had going on in real life experiences and health concerns, and I networked…hard!
ONE THING I LEARNED TODAY:
Conferences are great. They are like an annual family reunion with friends and family within your profession. But if all we do is sit and talk about how to get out in the community and help, are we really doing enough to seize the opportunity? We have 17,000+ PTs in one city at one time. We are health and movement experts and we aren’t even going out in the city and telling people we’re here and we can help…seems like a huge missed opportunity. So I would go to the conference, and attend sessions, but use the MGMT quote, “Take only what you need from it”…then get out and interact and connect.