The Thinking Practitioner Podcast:
Episode 78: More Carrots? or More Sticks? The Continuing Education Conundrum

Til Luchau:

When I was looking for a publisher for a book I wanted to write, I was fortunate enough, ended up with two offers. One from a large international media conglomerate and the other from Handspring, which was a small publisher in Scotland run by just four people with a love for great books and for our field. To this day, I'm glad I chose to go with them, with Handspring, because not only did they help me write the books I wanted to share with you, the Advanced Myofascial Techniques series, but their catalog has emerged as one of the leading collections of professional level books written especially for body workers, movement teachers and all professionals who use movement or touch to help patients achieve wellness.

Whitney Lowe:

And Handspring was recently joined with Jessica Kingsley Publishers Integrative Health Singing Dragon imprint, where their amazing impact continues. So head on over to their website at Handspringpublishing.com to check their list of titles and be sure to use the code TTP at checkout. Thanks again, Handspring, for sponsoring The Thinking Practitioner Podcast, and welcome everyone to another episode of The Thinking Practitioner. Welcome, Mr. Luchau. Good to have you back here this week.

Til Luchau:

Good to be back. Thanks for taking over last time.

Whitney Lowe:

All right. All right. Good to see you again behind the microphone. And you've been out on the road traveling a little bit and getting around doing some things, right?

Til Luchau:

I was floating down a river, truth be told. This was a river trip in Utah where we put in one spot and floated down a canyon and took out at another many days later, it was fantastic.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah, you were, five or six? How many days were you on the river out of?

Til Luchau:

I think it was six or seven, something like that.

Whitney Lowe:

Out of touch with the world. That must be very nice to get out and away from everything like that.

Til Luchau:

Out of touch with the everyday world. Very in touch with that world right there. It was really great.

Whitney Lowe:

That's right. Yes.

Til Luchau:

But it's great to be back, and I'm been looking forward to this and having our conversation. You had a topic you wanted to talk about. What is it? What are we going to talk about today?

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah, well actually, this is kind of a follow on up to some of the issues that we brought up in the previous episode of the interview that I'd had with Sandy Fritz. But there was a blog post that came out just a couple of days ago. Julia Onofrio had posted this post, this blog post called the Continuing CE Conundrum in the massage profession. CE, of course, we're talking about continuing education, and I thought that with you and I both as CE educators and providers for many years, this would be a good opportunity for us to talk a little bit about some of the issues that were brought up in that blog post.

She brought up some really interesting things to look at, and I wanted to hear some of your perspective too on this as we look through the lens at the world of continuing education, continuing professional development in our fields from the lens of the educators. So I thought, I'd be a good thing for us to chat about a bit.

Til Luchau:

No, that is an area that well affects me directly. In full disclosure, yeah, you and I are both providers, but I know it's also an area you've care a lot about and you've put time in over the years. So I look forward to hearing what you think and what you had to say there. So what's the deal? What is the problem? If there is one? She says a conundrum, but what do you see?

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah, I think there's a number of different problems, but one of the things that I wanted to highlight, and this doesn't get talked about a great deal. There's a lot of questions that people come up with when all these questions get asked about why do we need to do it? What's the purpose of continuing education? And in most other health professions, continuing education, which is frequently referred to as continuing professional development or CPD in a lot of other fields. But the idea in general is that we're trying to continue the professional development of practitioners and keep them up to date with recent findings, current research, that sort of thing. There's a lot of questions brought up about, well, a lot of the CE courses aren't really very current in terms of staying current with a lot of that stuff. So why are people being forced to take these courses if they're not staying current with it themselves? And I think that's a very good question, but yeah.

Til Luchau:

Let me see if I get it so far. You're saying that the ostensible purpose of CE is to keep people up to date, but we don't have, as you're saying it, mechanisms for keeping the content up to date-

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah, you know-

Til Luchau:

Achieving that purpose. Is that it?

Whitney Lowe:

The CE educators, quite honestly aren't held to any accountable standard for making sure their course content is up to date, valid, reasonable. Basically, it's a pretty wild west sort of thing out there. Anybody can go teach anything they want to and say anything that they want to, and then-

Til Luchau:

I didn't know that, by the way. I would've been saying a lot more stuff if I knew that, by the way.

Whitney Lowe:

Well, you got free rein-

Til Luchau:

I'm joking. Okay, thank you.

Whitney Lowe:

I give you permission.

Til Luchau:

Yeah, no, I agree with you in that there's very little input in the approval process on the content itself is my experience. Is that what you're talking about?

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah, yeah. So basically saying that we're requiring people to get continued education so that they can keep current and keep up to date, but there's no requirement that any of the education that they get is current or up to date. It's a little bit of a disconnect for sure.

Til Luchau:

Okay. Interesting.

Whitney Lowe:

Another thing I wanted to- Go ahead. Did you have another question?

Til Luchau:

No, I was just going to ask you, was there more?

Whitney Lowe:

There's more, yeah. So I wanted to continue on this a lot because there's a couple things that I don't hear talked about very often that I think are an important part of the view of continuing education in our field in particular, and I'm going to speak most specifically about massage therapy as a whole, but I'm speaking to soft tissue manual therapists in some other spectrums as well, but in particular in our field.

When you go through ... Well first let me backtrack just a moment and speak about practitioners who work in this field. A lot of times you don't realize this or think about this much, but they can be direct access healthcare providers in a matter of less than a year. So let's say a massage therapy school training program is nine months long, maybe 600 hours or something like that. You can have a 19 year old high school graduate go through that massage school training program and nine months later, they come out and they are a direct access healthcare provider, which means anybody can walk in off the street, call you up and make an appointment and come see you with any kind of medical condition around.

And in my opinion, most of the people who come out of just that basic level of massage training program aren't trained to act in that capacity as a full scale healthcare provider for a lot of the different complex things that people come up with. When you go through your massage school training program, in most programs, it's a pretty intensive level program and most students are just struggling to keep their heads above the water. Basically, to be able to make it through to their licensing tests. So they're trying to just make it through to the licensing test to be able to get the grades that they need to get through and get their license.

With that type of education, you don't really get to go into depth about what you're going to remember out of all that blistering amount of content that you studied when you got started. And so continuing education is also playing the role of reinforcing and reinvigorating a lot of what you learned in school, even if you learned it in school, a lot of people will forget a tremendous amount of what they studied because they only studied it to be able to pass the test. And so that's a major factor there.

Til Luchau:

So you're saying there might be, and as you see it, shortcomings in the preparation process. People aren't adequately prepared, you say, to be direct access healthcare providers, but then continuing education could conceivably fill that role in theory.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah.

Til Luchau:

Okay. So you're saying that not only is there maybe a shortcoming in our entry level education process where we're putting people out as direct access healthcare providers, you say, without necessarily qualifying them for that. But that continuing education could play that role of helping people learn more about the real world and about the conditions their clients are coming in with if only it was being implemented well? Is that what you're saying?

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah, and that's a point that I really like to emphasize a great deal because the thing that a lot of people don't really think about is the piece that since the massage school, the basic massage school training doesn't really prepare you to be dealing with a lot of the more complexities of things that you encounter working with people who have compromised health conditions. The continuing education courses end up filling that role.

And so the thing that's challenging is there is no set curriculum for what gets covered in continuing education courses. So now it's the individual's choice of what they decide to take with their continuing education courses to determine what they're getting prepared for, to be fulfilling some of these roles. So for me, that's again, a bit of a disconnect because we're not really giving organizational structure for what we're saying people really need to know.

Til Luchau:

Okay, well what's the downside of individual choice?

Whitney Lowe:

The downside of individual choices is if there are things that people would need to know to work in certain types of environments, they may not choose those things. The upside of personal choice is it really helps your education a great deal to be choosing things that you're interested in. And that's a good thing. I think there's a lot of great benefits to that. The challenge is some people may not know what they don't know and where their weak areas are and things that they might need to be getting a little bit more polished on.

Til Luchau:

This is really interesting. I have a confession to make. I went to an experimental elementary school. That might explain a lot of my quirks. I was an experiment. Back in the '70s where the ideal was, and this was of some educational stuff that had been going on for a while, but it's just like kids need to learn what they're interested in, so let's just let them go. And basically our classrooms were ... we didn't have class times, we didn't have set subjects, we had all the resources and teachers there to help us, but we were encouraged and invited to explore the things we're interested in.

And it was the '70s and it was freeform and it was chaos. Now this was the debate back then. This is why it's coming back to me. Is it okay to let learners just follow their interests or do they miss things? Of course, the argument was, will these kids ever learn to read? And I did. A lot of kids did. But that's the intrinsic kind of tension that's probably still existing in the educational space is what's the role of following someone's interests, the freedom of choice as opposed to standards, requirements, consistency, that kind of thing.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah, and it's a double edged sword I think because I'm a big advocate of personally directed learning and I feel like a lot of my higher education has been that way. I have two unfinished Master's degrees and I have never stopped learning since early, early on. So I'm very much motivated as an individual learner. And yet I also understand and recognize that there's a reason for curriculum structure in certain instances. Because when people don't know what they don't know, you can't necessarily say, "Well, I'm going to go study this," because you don't know that you need to know this kind of thing. So it's a double edged sword for sure.

Til Luchau:

Is that the basic beef though with the continuing education setup that you have? Is there's not the structure there that helps people know what they don't know? If we solve that, would it be good?

Whitney Lowe:

It would be better. I don't know that it would be good. As Julie pointed out in this blog post, there is a plethora of potential challenges and problems here, running from the effect of who's approving some of these courses? What are they approving? They're approving courses that have very little to do with things that are really professional development and people feel like there're students that come in just to meet those requirements. And they're not really paying attention, they're just clicking boxes to go through and get things done. But to be honest, that also happens with entry level education and things in other fields and other professions as well. So it's not solely to us for sure.

Til Luchau:

Yes. And maybe as a way to try to structure our conversation here, rather than just let it go freeform into that big list of dissatisfactions a lot of us have with the CE setup. Let's maybe stay with this one for a second. How would you see us bringing in some more of that structure or clarity into what is required? What do you think would help there?

Whitney Lowe:

Well, what I think would help is something that I've struggled with personally trying to figure out how to do logistically for a long time, which is what would be ideal is if the individuals and or organizations who are approving courses and helping put the rubber stamp of approval on the curriculum for continuing education courses knew something about education or knew something about the field.

And oftentimes it's people that are in bureaucratic positions or offices that look at a check sheet and does this course meet these particular things on a check sheet, but don't really really look at what's going on in terms of what's being presented there in the content of the coursework. Because quite honestly, it's logistically way unfeasible that many courses could be reviewed by without a very, very large team of people to look at things.

Til Luchau:

So maybe before we start narrowing down in solutions, we need to describe some of the barriers to that happening. And you say one of them, it's just the logistics. Yeah, there's one, there's a lack of educational background in the regulation sector. Two, it's logistically challenging, just the quantity of monitoring that would need to happen in that way. Any other barriers to why this isn't already happening?

Whitney Lowe:

Well, there's barriers too in what people think is relevant. I mean, this is one of the big challenges that we have is that the spectrum of soft tissue manual therapy is so incredibly diverse. And there's a lot of people that say, why can't I get continued education credit for this tai chi class that I'm doing? Because I feel like this is helping me learn some things about body mechanics and movement and energy, something like that. I think there's a legitimate argument there for the way that you might be working that could be relevant to helping you continue your psychosomatic learning process. It doesn't fit the model of what is required by state licensure boards oftentimes. So there's logistics of what does fall through and get approved as continuing professional development.

Til Luchau:

You're saying that there's difficulty around getting a consensus around what is essential, the essential pieces.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah.

Til Luchau:

In some cases boards just write it, don't they?

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah.

Til Luchau:

They just pull in a committee or a couple people and write it. I got a personal story there too. Back, this must have been the early '90s when I was teaching at the Rolf Institute. I was part of the committees there that were coming together with different schools to form the NCB and we were writing the quiz, essentially. Each school, each stakeholder submitted different areas they thought were important, different question routes and things like that to basically come up with this standard that we were trying to invent, with the argument then being, let's preempt someone else regulating us. Let's get a decent standard that we all can buy into.

But it was very much an exercise in political collaboration more than educational design. And that was useful. It really opened my eyes quite a bit to the other players in the field and to that kind of process. But the test, and this is so out of date that I'm even reluctant to share this story because it might be really different now. The test was the result of these different stakeholders, the different schools involved saying, "We think this should be tested for someone to be a practitioner out in the world."

So then students would go take the test or practitioners rather would go take the test and go, "What? I got ask all kinds of questions that aren't even relevant to me. Why am I being asked that?" Without understanding that context that in order to get something everybody needed a little bit of representation in the final product.

Whitney Lowe:

And the way that that's generally done in true credentialing processes is with some type of what's called a job analysis survey, which is a survey that will go out to a very large percentage, hopefully, of the profession and ask and get specific competencies of what do you need to know to do this part of your job here? Because it's really difficult to ask people, especially educators, what do people need to know for this particular ... Because we'll start thinking, well, people need to know all this kind of stuff and think we start put all this extra stuff in there.

Til Luchau:

Especially the subjects I teach.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah, right.

Til Luchau:

Put it all in there. So you're saying start at the other end. Start with a finished practitioner and reverse engineer their success and say, what is it they're doing that we need to make sure is represented in education?

Whitney Lowe:

And then ideally that would be the guideline is that that should be reflected in the continuing education programs, those categories or areas of what people really need to know to continue their professional development or continue their education along those areas. But the other flip side of that argument is-

Til Luchau:

Wait, before you get to the flip side. That's exciting because then if we had that list, we could even go through and stage it over time in saying these are appropriate for entry level. These are after you've been out in the world for a while, these might come later. Because honestly, as you and I and everyone else knows, you can't learn every ... you can't pre-load it all. You need to get out there and have some context to even understand to what the next level is going to be.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And another thing that I was going to mention here that it plays into this is that most of the continuing education requirements are set at the state licensure level for what ... I mean there's some that are set. For example, if you are a nationally certified practitioner, your requirements to keep your national certification or set by the National Certification Board. But the ones that most people are focusing on now are the ones for maintaining their licensure. So the state board sets the number of hours required for that.

The state boards oftentimes make these guidelines about continuing education in relation to what they see as the primary things that are impacting licensure. And remember, the purpose of licensure is not to say that you're good, it's to say that you're not going to hurt the public. So licensure is about public safety. And so the majority of complaints that licensure boards get are generally around ethics issues. And so those state licensure boards tend to emphasize the need for ethics training and things like that in continuing professional development. But the thing that I always go back to is saying ... because I'll say, "Well, we don't get ... there's not as many complaints about people getting hurt doing massage. So that's not as much of an issue because not that many people are getting hurt." But the reality is-

Til Luchau:

You're stealing my lines. I was going to bring that up.

Whitney Lowe:

Well yeah, go ahead and bring it up.

Til Luchau:

No, I'll bring it up. But what about the fact that at least proportionally speaking, there aren't huge numbers of complaints or evidence of people getting hurt. There is some for sure. And often it is in this realm of ethics and boundary violations and things like that, as well as probably a good number of physical injuries as well, but proportion to other professions, and this is represented in our insurance rates, which are pretty low. There isn't a ton of harm being done. What about that?

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah. Well, I think there isn't a ton of harm being done that rises to the level of people initiating insurance complaints. But I also, I look at this through the lens of a couple different things. Number one, there really isn't a good reporting process for somebody who gets hurt by a massage therapist. I mean, do they really go to the state licensing board or who do they go to make a complaint? And one of the reasons that I say that is that when I was doing a lot more in clinical practice, I'm working a lot with pain and injury complaint. So that was the main focus I was doing. But I had a lot of people come to me saying, yeah, they tried massage before, but their massage therapist hurt them. And so they're really having trepidation about doing anything with massage again. And I asked, "Well, did you do anything about that or report that or anything like that?" And most of them, "No, Uh-huh, I didn't do anything."

Til Luchau:

Of course, it never came up for me as a Rolfer about people getting hurt in Rolf. But it's true that, I mean, when I was at the Rolf Institute teaching there, one of the things I taught was the ethics segment, therapeutic relationship class. And I inherited a curriculum which didn't make much sense to me. So I rewrote it based on my conversations with people, other teachers in the field. And then I went to the ethics board of the Rolf Institute and asked them about their complaints. And it was really an eyeopener for me to have those conversations with them and hear what was coming back.

It was pretty low. There weren't large numbers or anything, but the ones that were coming back really emphasized the need for some training and things like boundaries. It was either personal/sexual boundaries or business practices that the people kept coming back about, and bigger proportion, and that's represented I know in the massage world too, of sexual boundary infractions or violations or offenses in terms of the client getting offended, even if inadvertent on the practitioner's side. So that's really is an area where we need mechanisms, we need training, we need to be monitoring ourself because it's not natural just to understand how somebody else perceives what we're up to. Or it's not natural to see all my own blind spots as a person. Our only hope, there is really some awareness and some clear guidelines and some ongoing review and reporting mechanisms, all those things.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah, I may ruffle some feathers saying something like this, but I think most schools go into teaching ethics issues pretty thoroughly and comprehensively with what they're doing. I mean, some of them don't do it real thoroughly, but a lot of them do. And so the idea that we should be emphasizing ethics in continuing education, the problem is not that people don't know enough about ethics. The problem is we have a lot of people who have ethics issues that should maybe not be in this field.

Til Luchau:

Well, or it's not a question of lack of information. That's right. Really true. Cause part, it wasn't a second career, but it was an occasional job I would get of being called in as a consultant to spas and schools and institutions where there had been some sort of ethical issue come up. Management proactively saying, "Let's give our people some training." And it was never the case that they didn't know, "Oh, don't do that." Yeah. That was never. So it was upon me as a teacher, consultant, whatever, to think about ways to highlight the blind spots and help people look at them.

And yeah, just throwing ethics courses that this situation doesn't always make it better. Because everyone knows the answers. It's more like, how do we live it? How do we wake up to the things we don't usually think about? How to understand the other points of view.

Whitney Lowe:

So I have a question I would like to ask you and from your perspective, you and I have been doing this close to a similar amount of time in terms of teaching on the CE circuit there.

Til Luchau:

I think if we combine the number of years, it would rival a giant Sequoia in age.

Whitney Lowe:

It would of course, yes. And in massive impact as well, right?

Til Luchau:

Yeah. Yeah, I don't know about that. Maybe I'm self-important.

Whitney Lowe:

In the earlier days, and I'm talking now late '80s, early '90s kind of time-

Til Luchau:

Ancient pre-history, yeah.

Whitney Lowe:

When there weren't as many CE requirements and because there weren't as many states that had licensure at that point.

Til Luchau:

Talking about the wild west.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah. My perceptions, at least for the students who were coming into classes at that time, I had a much larger percentage of people who are coming into classes because they really wanted to continue their learning and they wanted to learn more about this kind of stuff. And as more state licensure came on board and more and more people had to get requirements, the percentage of people who were coming to classes because they had to get a CE class. And I happened to be in the neighborhood during the time, which their thing was coming up for renewal, that number was going up. And I'm curious if you saw any similar trends or things like that, or do you get those kinds of folks in your classes?

Til Luchau:

You're talking about the carrot or stick phenomena. Are people coming because what we offer is so interesting, then they're just curious and they naturally want to go move towards it. Or are they coming because a state board, whomever has a stick over them saying you got to do this, it's really interesting teaching around the country and then teaching abroad internationally where going in and out of places where there's different requirements and just getting not a scientific by any means, but an experiential feel for the skill level and motivation level of the practitioners in those different areas.

And I don't tend to sticks. Maybe it's back to my elementary school educational experiment where it was all carrots, there were no sticks. And that was chaotic, but it worked for me. So I think I tend to favor sticks and I like to think that people come to my classes because it's so interesting and cool and fun.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah. Now Mike Paul saying, you said you prefer sticks. Did you mean carrots?

Til Luchau:

Did I say that?

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah.

Til Luchau:

Oh, thank you. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, no, I prefer carrots. Absolutely. And I like to think people are coming because they want the carrot, not because someone's forcing them to. And I bet it's that way for your classes.

Whitney Lowe:

Have you seen more people in your classes because of sticks, do you think? Or has that changed at all?

Til Luchau:

It depends on the location. For sure. I mean, there's nothing like going to a state with a renewal deadline a month or two before that deadline. It's like, "Oh my God, there's more people in this class than I've ever seen before." Everyone needs to get their requirement done. They all have that stick. Some are texting in the back row, sure, but I also taught high school. And so they're all there in high school. They're there because of the stick for goodness' sake. And then it's up to me to have fun with that or not. So I had to figure that one out. And maybe some of those skills still apply.

It's like, "We're going to be locked in this classroom together for the next hour. We might as well enjoy it somehow. Come on." And that's a way to work with that. But no, it's still true that when the requirements are in place, the practitioner engagement is somewhat different. Whitney, honestly maybe I see it more in an inservice job where people are required by their employer to be at a training. Even then we generate some excitement and there's people there that are so into it. But maybe there's a higher percentage of people texting in the back row in those employer mandated trainings than there are in the self paid ones. And that fits with a lot of what we know about, if you put some skin in the game, you're more likely to get something out of it.

But it's also interesting because again, I was thinking to say, me being having this experimental carrot orientation and not stick orientation, I would tend to say, let's just let it go. Colorado here has no continuing education requirements where I live. Oregon has pretty strict ones comparative to the spectrum that exists in the US. I go to Oregon and they're actually, I got to confess, there is a different level of shared language, a familiarity of currency with the material and of general consistency of skill. Because I think standards or not, people are being required to stay engaged in the learning process. I do notice a difference when I go to states where there's no requirements. I just do as a teacher.

Whitney Lowe:

So to ask the question, do you think CE is necessary? Would you fall on one side of that fence or the other based on that?

Til Luchau:

We started the conversation of what's wrong with CE? But maybe this question of is it necessary is really a bigger one that we should answer. Is it necessary? I mean, Colorado's doing great I think for body work. And we don't have continuing education requirements. You have to get registered and then you're done. So is it strictly necessary? No. Is there an advantage? I think so.

Well maybe it's different. Maybe is it necessary and should it be required or different questions too. Because as a somebody who is a teacher and learner just for ... I mean I do puzzles, I read academic articles for frigging entertainment. That's just me. So I'm like into that stuff. I just enjoy learning for its own sake. So of course it would be important, I would think. I'm biased and I work in that field. That's what pays part of my paycheck. But is it necessary? Can you run a state without it? We have some that are doing okay.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah. And I guess the question comes down to when I ask that question of myself and just out of curiosity, I come down on both sides of it at different points. Like you said, yes, you are doing okay in Colorado without it. Then the question is, but could we actually be doing better if we had it? Would that make things better? And when you're comparing different regions, that is a factor to consider. But I've looked at this whole thing with geography about Oregon and the quality and the training that I see in different parts of the country when I travel around like you do. And I don't personally think that it's just about continuing education requirements in the Pacific Northwest. I think a lot of it-

Til Luchau:

You think it's the climate? What do you think it is?

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah, I think it's not the climate, but I think it goes back to entry level training strongly influenced by the laws in Washington. Because this is the most progressive state in terms of promotion of massage therapy into the healthcare arena in the country. And consequently, the training for massage therapists at entry level to get into doing that. I mean, they've been very much on the forefront with insurance reimbursement and the recognition of massage as a healthcare practice and all this kind of stuff that really is much closer to integration into the traditional healthcare system. And as a result, a lot of the entry level training in the schools was oriented toward that. So I think you build a better foundation to begin with. And there's more of that kind of thing present when people get farther on levels with their professional development.

Til Luchau:

So Washington has, you said it's the most progressive state in terms of integration into conventional healthcare of massage. And I know that they have lots of insurance provisions and things like that, that really all allow that to happen in an amazing way. Alaska's another one.

Whitney Lowe:

It's certainly an interesting geographical thing to look at. And I've pondered about this oftentimes because sitting here in Oregon and right in the center of the state actually it's kind of an interesting fence striding thing because down south of us in California, it's kind of a wild west of education and things are all over the map and very loose requirements for many years and in many instances no requirements, because it's California. It's interesting to see the difference in those two kinds of approaches and the way it's impacted the field as a result of that.

Til Luchau:

Yep. Yes. That's an interesting paradox. Interesting quandary or dialectic there between the two points of view. Okay, so let's say CE is valuable, let's say that the practitioners are observably better when they live in a place with good foundation education and or good defined requirements for continuing education. How do we make that happen in a way that doesn't kill the diversity, the creativity? Where we don't kill each other, trying to come to a consensus around what is important? How do we put these things into practice?

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah, I think this is a really good question and it gets into some big logistical challenges because are we talking about large scale bureaucratic systems that are going to make more rules and more kind of guidelines and things like that? I don't think anybody's terribly excited about that idea. I, like you, am one that would much rather see people move towards something then get pushed towards it. And I always am looking for those kinds of strategies, especially from an educational perspective that might be more in the direction of leaning on encouraging people to want to do continuing professional development because they see a connection between that and being more successful in the practice and being more well rounded as an individual and all those other kind of things that I think can come out of that. So, I would love to see more of that kind of thing happening.

But again, and not to kind of point fingers or speak differently about different kinds of things, but I do think that there's differences in things that really go back before massage school too, in terms of how is the K-12 education system in these different parts of the country and how does the preparation of people coming into the field, even before they even start their massage education, some of these kind of foundational things playing a role in that. And you see wide diversity of backgrounds and some people really like you experimentally pushing the envelope for your own education and things like that.

Or were they just in an educational system that was just barely meeting the requirements and not doing anything really, so they never really learned how to be learners? I think a lot of those things play into the equations that come up with people. But back to your question of how do you create a system or structure to do something like that. I think if we knew the answer to that, I'd have been working on that a long time ago.

Til Luchau:

Yes. All right. This is good. This is important. It's important to imagine what we want. It's important to name what we're not happy with and to acknowledge the limitations that maybe are perpetuating those things as well.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah, so if we take the flip side of that, we've talked about a lot of the problems with CE. What do you think are some of the big benefits or what happens that really is beneficial with why this is a good thing? I mean, I'd like to think it's a good thing.

Til Luchau:

That CE is a good thing?

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah.

Til Luchau:

Oh yeah. I mean that's one of the most common ... I'm just brainstorming a little bit here, but one of the most common things I hear is that people appreciate coming together with their practitioners. And that's my kind of closet assumption. My working hypothesis is that body workers, individual practitioners come to these continuing education workshops for a sense of community, collegiality, getting around other professionals in their field. And there's nothing like it. There's nothing like sitting around and talking shop about something, or just hanging out and understanding the challenges and solutions that people come up with in their field is just a great experience too. People that do that. And often continuing education is the place, workshops is where that happens.

Now, your blog post said maybe there's other ways to do that. Sure. But this is still something people get in a good continuing education environment is some interaction with a professional.

Whitney Lowe:

I mean you can say, well there's a lot of different ways to network with your professionals and that is true. But when you are in the environment where the purpose of your being in that environment is to grow your skills, to look at different things. And I mean I've been incredibly fortunate, I think for many years of having learned so much from my students in CE workshops of things that I was sharing with people and having people share in the classroom. I've learned so many things from those kind of environments. So I do think it is a very rich environment to continue and just getting out of the room, getting out of the treatment room and being in a socially engaging and mind expansive type of environment is really important. I think that's really valuable.

Til Luchau:

That's right. That's right. And those are good. And then I got one, it is being pushed to do something you wouldn't just come up with on your own. That's what being around other people does. But also being in an educational system, learning something new involves letting go at least a little bit of what already and opening up some space and possibilities for a new way of doing things, which I think is actually a really exciting and agonizing moment in anybody's life when they start to surrender a level of mastery over something and open up to a higher level of understanding and embodiment. Because there's something exciting about that to me. There's so many possibilities and so much agitation all at once that come up for people right there in the classroom or right there at the table in a way when they're being asked to do something just a little bit differently.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah. I would love to see, and this is my personal belief and feeling, I would love to see some other types of things changing in terms of what is emphasized and or required along the continuing education realm to get a little bit away from such an emphasis on techniques being what people need to learn more of. I think there's a lot of value in learning new technique approaches and new things to do and new ways to look at things.

But when it becomes the emphasis of you need to do this kind of thing when a lot of what the missing skills are for people might be more complex thinking, reasoning skills, more different ways to theoretical perspectives and things like that. I'd like to see a greater acceptance of that as valuable, continuing professional development. Not just, I have to go learn a new technique and learn something new to do with my hands kind of thing.

Til Luchau:

Well, you're talking to the guy who has techniques in his modality name.

Whitney Lowe:

But that doesn't mean that that's not valuable. That's not all you're teaching though.

Til Luchau:

No. And the truth be told, the weird techniques and the techniques I offer are the carrots that get people into that conversation where really the hidden agenda is to shift their worldview and help them start to, like you said, clinically reason in a different way, look for things and use the information they're getting in novel ways and connect more deeply with the client and have more effective outcomes with the clients, that kind of thing.

Whitney Lowe:

I think more of what I was trying to get at is, and this gets talking about some of the marketing things where the-

Til Luchau:

Oh yeah, let's talk about that.

Whitney Lowe:

The marketing of use my new technique and this will get all your clients better in two treatments kind of thing. Where nothing but-

Til Luchau:

Yours does that too, by the way?

Whitney Lowe:

What's that?

Til Luchau:

Yours does that too?

Whitney Lowe:

Oh yeah.

Til Luchau:

I thought that was mine.

Whitney Lowe:

One treatment actually, that's why it's better.

Til Luchau:

Oh dang. I better double down on my marketing at least.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah, no one treatment is all it takes, half a treatment. Actually I get results halfway through the first treatment session. Perfect and permanent results.

Til Luchau:

I get results when people book.

Whitney Lowe:

That's great, yeah.

Til Luchau:

Okay, so you're talking about marketing.

Whitney Lowe:

I get results when people just think about coming to class, and that's why nobody is coming to class anymore.

Til Luchau:

Oh, man you got me. Oh, okay. That's it. All I gotta do is think about it. Marketing, the spin on that aspect of results at first, what were you going to say about it before I rudely interrupted you?

Whitney Lowe:

No, just that becomes the drive for so many of these classes in terms of the way that they're promoted. I've got this particular thing that's going to make everybody better and I'm all about people learning new techniques and methods and things to do. I love going to technique classes as well. It's more about the way in which some of that is sometimes framed that gets under my skin a little bit more.

Til Luchau:

Yeah, you know I'm with you on that. And I think we're talking about another one of those philosophical dialectics and essential tension that exists between competing forces that keep life so rich. One is yeah, as an educator, and I was a very dedicated educator for at least a couple decades, maybe more, where I really ... my thinking went this, I really see what people are lacking and it isn't what they want to learn. It really is this structured system of X, Y, or Z. And if people only had that, they would deepen their skill tremendously. That's the educator talking. Then I went off on my own and did my own enterprise and would offer these things and guess what? Almost nobody would come except unless it named a technique or named a condition. And so that was sort the carrots. And so then it was like, okay, geez, now how do I redraw my Venn diagram so that the set of things that I think people need and the set of things they're willing to come and pay for can overlap a little bit?

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah, and that's an excellent point that you bring up that I'm thinking a great deal of value in terms of having things framed in that certain direction. Because sometimes there needs to be a hook of inspiration for why should I go do this? And that's where we talk about learn these techniques and you will get better and you will be more successful in your practice and you'll have better client outcomes than all those kinds of things.

And secretly, I'm not going to mention to you, but we're going to teach you a lot of really great things about how to think, how to view, how to look at this from a philosophical perspective. And that's going to really help you a lot. But I'm not going to talk about that because that's not going to sell the course.

Til Luchau:

That's so great. I still remember a student coming up to me during a break early on, she was looking at me askance, out the side of her eyes, she says, "I see what you're doing. You're teaching us these techniques, but you're asking us to work really differently. I get it." I was like, "Busted, you got me."

Whitney Lowe:

Don't tell the rest of the class.

Til Luchau:

Exactly. But I think as an entrepreneur, as somebody who has an enterprise, I think I've had to shift. I've had to say, what does the market respond to? And then it's how do I not just sell my soul to meet that? How do I do something that's still meaningful and I believe it and excites me? And yet the market gets excited about too? And fortunately there is an overlapping set of those things. It's not always what I'm most interested in at the moment. I might float a trial balloon and again, nobody comes, but I I float a bunch of balloons and three of them go. And then I put more energy into those. And over the years that's been really satisfying.

Whitney Lowe:

And I think that's a really good point. It's kind of similar, to some degree it's like click bait on social media. You got to have a compelling title to make something want to click on, say somebody to want to click on something to look into it. So the key is that make that interesting, but also make it deeper when they click onto something or they decide to sign up or whatever, they're going to get a rich educational experience. It's going to be actually a lot more than what you just said it was going to be.

Til Luchau:

So we've just described a political dialectic here too, or one that gets played out in politics. That is the tension between let's design a society, a regulatory structure that ensures that good things happen and bad things don't happen on one hand. And on the other hand, let's trust the wisdom of the marketplace and the rightness of what is selling in a sense to reflect some sort of realness and organic demand and need in the culture.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah, so there's always that fight and that balance from the individuals that say, well let's let the market decide. Well, I don't have a great deal of faith in the market's decision to make good choices anymore, I think

Til Luchau:

I can't argue that I do. I can't argue that I do. And yet there is something about being able to ... let's say evolution, the way that the marketplace evolves different offerings into a more refined and precise and interesting state for better or worse. I mean that's essentially what algorithms have speeded up, this evolutionary process of getting more interesting. And we can see that that goes to absurd levels because what people respond to isn't always what makes for a great life or culture, but there needs to be enough of a carrot there, needs to be enough of that spontaneous interest for people to even invest the time and energy and money.

I remember, maybe I've told you this story, Whitney, but I remember sitting on a train, it was probably 1993 or 1994 next to a guy, Ben Dean, who was running us an early prototype of an online education system where he was teaching classes by teleconference. I had a t-shirt on that said Rolfing, something about Rolfing. And he goes, "Rolfing, I know about that. Tell me about that." So I told him I was a Rolfer and that I taught at the Rolf Institute and he goes, "You know, could do that on a teleconference." I'm like, "What? What are you talking about?"

But he did, he proceeded to lay out a way to take parts of that educational experience out and do it by lecture at that point on teleconferences. And it was the prototype for really built my online learning stuff too. But anyway, I brought him up because his whole premise was people need a way to rationalize their educational choices to their pocketbook. It's going to have to make money to them or have to make money for them or to make ... They have to be able to rationalize that it's a good investment for the money, but mostly they need to enjoy it or needs to excite and inspire them. That's what's going to get them to actually pull the wallet out. They have to rationalize it to their wallet. It has also has to be interesting enough.

Whitney Lowe:

And I think too many people rely on way-exaggerated marketing claims to try to get people excited to pull the wallet out there. And then they're trying to sell a bigger piece of pie than really is available there. So that's when we see things that could be better, I think in the way that continuing education is positioned and talked about for the future.

Til Luchau:

Do we need a Federal trade Commission of continuing education advertising? Truth in advertising?

Whitney Lowe:

Oh man, do we need more bureaucracy? Yeah. And I'm saying now that we have described and solved all the potential problems for continuing education, we've also come up with all these great solutions. Now we just need to create an organization that will implement and enforce all these things to happen. That's the answer.

Til Luchau:

There is so much work that's been done on this quandary over the years. So many. And you included have put in so many hundreds and thousands of hours into trying to advance the profession in these directions. And you're acutely aware of the difficulties that are there. But I just want to thank you for all the time you've put in and you and your colleagues to getting us to where we are for the advantages we have because it's so different than it was when you and I started.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah, well thank you for that acknowledgement. That is a labor of love. I mean, I love education and I do really want to try to see how can we make things better. And like anything, it's certainly got its problems, but there's a tremendous amount of, I think excitement and enthusiasm about what we can do in the teaching process with continuing professional develop to make people better, make people better practitioners. And my overall goal behind all the things that I'm doing in the big picture is to help find ways to decrease pain in the world. And that's, we'll do our little piece to get there at least.

Til Luchau:

Is there an action that you would like people to take if there's listeners out there going, "Okay, this is all interesting, but what can I do?"

Whitney Lowe:

You should come to our courses. That's the best action.

Til Luchau:

This was a long infomercial. You didn't realize, you didn't see it coming, but here it is. Here's the rub.

Whitney Lowe:

Wow. I don't know, maybe speak up, get vocal. I always want to hear from the real professionals out there. What do you like learning about? What do you want to learn more about? What would juice you? What would really get you excited to want to spend your money, to want to open your wallet up and pursue and advance your professional development further?

Til Luchau:

What carrots would you be willing to actually go for?

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah, if we could talk about doing things more from the carrot perspective and less from the stick perspective, what would people really go for? I'd always love to hear more of that kind of thing. So yeah.

Til Luchau:

Anything else you want to?

Whitney Lowe:

I think that's probably enough damage on that topic for the day, but it's again, something that I think we all have to kind of grapple with, or not all, but most of us who have requirements that are made to us who are thinking about, "Should I do this course? Shouldn't I do this course? What kind of things will help me really in my career?" And my sort of clarion call to of the other educators out there is let's try to continue raising the bar to make education more enticing and less about a stick, more carrots. Maybe that's the title of this episode. More carrots, less sticks, or something like that.

Til Luchau:

Perfect. You got it. I'm into it.

Whitney Lowe:

Well on that note.

Til Luchau:

Should we thank our sponsors?

Whitney Lowe:

We will. So our sponsor here, our closing sponsor today is Books of Discovery. Books of Discovery has been a part of massage therapy education for over 20 years and thousands of schools around the world teach with their textbooks, eTextbooks, and digital resources. In these trying times this beloved publisher is dedicated to helping educators with online friendly digital resources that make instruction easier, more effective in the classroom or virtually.

Til Luchau:

Books of Discovery likes to say, learning adventures start here. They see that same spirit here on The Thinking Practitioner Podcast and they're proud to support our work knowing we shared the mission to bring the massage and body work community enlivening content that advances our profession. Check out their collection of eTextbooks and digital learning resources for pathology, kinesiology, anatomy and physiology at BooksofDiscovery.com. Where Thinking practitioner listeners, that's you, can save 15% by entering Thinking at checkout.

Whitney Lowe:

We would like to say thank you to all of our sponsors and also especially to you the listeners. Thanks for hanging out with us and hope we've expanded the space between your ears a little bit today. You can stop by our sites for show notes, transcripts and extras. You can find that over on my site at AcademyofClinicalMassage.com. Til, where can people find that for you?

Til Luchau:

advanced-trainings.com. If there are questions, guests, topics, or things you want to hear us talk about, we'd love to hear from you. Just email us at info@TheThinkingPractitioner.com or look for us on social media under our names. My name is Til Luchau. What's your name?

Whitney Lowe:

Today, my name is Whitney Lowe. You can find me over there on social media that way. If you will, take a moment out to rate us on Apple Podcasts. It does help other people find the show. We appreciate you letting us know how we're doing here. And you can hear us on Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcast, or wherever else you happen to listen. So please do share the word, tell a friend and we'll look forward to another great conversation here again in two weeks.

Til Luchau:

See you then.

Whitney Lowe:

All right, we'll see you then. Take care.