Mindset
“The willingness to revisit our thinking may be one of the most valuable skills we develop.”
-Scott Livingston
There is a particular kind of progress that can quietly keep a practitioner stuck. The client feels a little better. Exercising is a little easier. We get enough change to feel encouraged, and enough reassurance to keep doing what we have been doing. A few visits later, we are still having essentially the same conversation. There has been movement, but how much closer are we to the life, activity, or performance this person came to reclaim?
About a year ago, Jaime and I developed Reconditioning Plus+, a community for practitioners who have completed our coursework and are applying a Reconditioning approach in their own environments. These are seasoned professionals with plenty of professional life miles under their belts. They bring curiosity and critical thinking to the conversation, qualities that likely attracted them to our work in the first place.
We meet twice a month, and this week’s meeting explored when to change direction. We began by talking about when to circle back: when to revisit the history, expand an assessment, or explore something we had set aside at the beginning. As the conversation unfolded, it became clear that the challenge was also about our willingness to question the explanation we had become comfortable with.
After nearly forty years in this work, I still have to ask myself that question. Am I continuing because the plan is serving the person, or because I have become accustomed to the plan?
Every practitioner works within constraints. We have appointment lengths, organizational expectations, clients who want answers, and people whose immediate circumstances limit what we can assess. A client arrives with a painful shoulder and reasonably expects us to pay attention to that shoulder. Someone arrives in considerable distress, and our first responsibility may be to help them settle enough to participate. We make decisions with the information and opportunities available.
I understand that reality because I live it. My current work continues to remind me that a beautiful process on paper has to function in an environment where time, resources, and expectations are real. The difficulty comes when those first decisions quietly become permanent. Something we postponed becomes something we forget. An explanation that helped us begin becomes the explanation we stop questioning.
One member of our group recognized this in his own practice. When a client arrived in an acute crisis, he would appropriately narrow his focus. On subsequent visits, he sometimes remained in that same lane, even when there was now an opportunity to look more broadly. He could see that changing direction felt harder once he had already established a way of working with the person.
This became painfully clear during my first three months in my new role with Cirque du Soleil, where I was taking over cases already underway. In some instances, I was the third or fourth practitioner an artist had seen for the same issue. Changing direction meant understanding the work that had come before me, earning the artist’s trust, and explaining why I wanted to explore something different. An established plan carries momentum, and redirecting it takes care.
Language and cultural differences have added another layer of complexity. For a number of the artists I work with, English is not their first language. Understanding their experience and explaining my reasoning can take more time and care. We may also bring different assumptions about workload, rest, and the relationship between life circumstances and pain. I have had to pay closer attention to what we each mean, rather than assume we understand one another.
It hasn’t always been easy to establish a shared understanding of the problem or the next step. This experience has reinforced the importance of asking better questions and remaining willing to challenge my own explanation. Even when I am getting some improvement, I still need to ask whether the plan is taking the artist toward the demands they need to meet.
I suspect many of us recognize ourselves in that experience. We want to be consistent. We want clients to trust us. We may wonder how they will respond if we begin asking different questions or looking somewhere beyond the area they came to discuss. Yet a clear explanation can make that change of direction understandable: here is what we expected, here is what we are seeing, and here is what I would like to investigate next. That is part of being accountable for our reasoning.
During the meeting, I spoke about using the first few sessions as an early checkpoint. In my own practice, two or three visits will often prompt me to review whether we are seeing the response I anticipated. The timing depends on the condition, the goals, and what we are trying to change. Tissue recovery and longer-term adaptations have their own timelines. The question is whether the response makes sense in the context of the plan.
We also have to establish whether progress has actually stalled. A person may say they feel the same today while being able to do something they could not do two weeks ago. We need to revisit the starting point, ask about the work between sessions, and look at meaningful changes in function. Once we have done that honestly, we can ask the question that matters: what might I be missing?
Sometimes we need more of the history. Sometimes we need to observe a task we have not yet seen. Sometimes we need to understand more about the person’s sleep, workload, or life circumstances. Sometimes we need another professional involved. The point is to let the findings influence the next decision.
Another member offered a particularly useful reflection. He described how he had previously tried to be “a lawyer for my system,” defending what he saw through the approach he already used. He was now trying to be a scientist: testing his initial hypothesis, looking for information that might prove it wrong, and becoming more willing to revise his thinking. That shift, he said, was giving him greater confidence.
There is something valuable in that. We often associate confidence with having the answer. Experience has taught me to place considerable value on being able to revise one. A working hypothesis gives us direction. We then need to pay attention to the information that challenges it as carefully as we attend to the information that supports it.
That applies to the process Jaime and I teach, too. A framework should help a practitioner make decisions within their own environment. It should leave room for judgment, timing, and new information. If someone feels they must perform every assessment in a fixed order, regardless of the person in front of them, then we need to help them understand the intention more clearly. We are teaching a way to think and plan with intention.
The other thread running through our meeting was what we do when an intervention produces a useful change. It is easy to get excited when a drill changes a test or a movement feels easier. But we still have to connect that response to something the person needs to do. If walking is the goal, we need to observe walking. If stairs are the challenge, we need to examine and practise that task. If performance is the destination, we need to build toward its demands.
An immediate response gives us information and may create an opportunity. We then need to use that opportunity to develop the coordination, strength, capacity, and confidence required for the activity. We also need to see what carries over between sessions and what holds up as demands increase.
I shared a case in which I had been making progress with local work and strengthening, but the performer was still struggling as training demands increased. Revisiting the history and broadening the assessment helped me reconsider the plan. What stays with me is that I, too, had become invested in a direction that was producing some improvement. The wider rehabilitation process involved several interventions and a team. The lesson I take from it is the value of returning to the questions when the response no longer matches the expectation.
This is one reason I value these conversations with our community. Experienced people can bring their uncertainties into the room, examine their decisions, and help each other see something they might have passed by. I learn from that process as much as I contribute to it.
A little better can be meaningful. We should recognize it. We should also remain curious about whether it is taking the person where they want to go.
For me, that remains a responsibility of practice: stay attentive to the response, be willing to revisit the explanation, and keep the person’s goal at the centre of the next decision.
Are you willing to challenge your own conventions?
