What to do When You Don’t Know What to do
I spent several years as a school-based Speech Language Pathologist before working in home health. If you’ve worked in schools, then you know there’s not a lot of interaction with parents. So, when I started in the home health world, I was terrified. I felt less than confident with my skills for treating toddlers and equally terrified of having to talk to parents and explain what I was doing and why I was doing it.
I’d been seeing this one little friend for about 3 months when it happened. We weren’t seeing progress and I was beginning to second-guess my career path. I felt like I was sitting there and getting nothing accomplished. Even Mom was starting to question whether or not I knew what my goal was with this little guy and how to get there.
I was asking too much. As it turned out, I didn’t know what I was doing. But I knew I needed to change some things.
Owning Your Mistakes
Here’s what I learned that day. To get parent involvement, we have to be honest. In that situation, I had to make the changes. Parents want to be able to look at us as the experts, and when they have questions, we need to know the answers, or we need to know where we can go to find the answers.
Friend, it’s better to know your areas of expertise [and limitations] and be honest about it.
