Are you a newly certified osteopath? Well, congratulations! You are now ready to practice your craft and fulfil your mission of helping people get relief from body pains and achieve optimum wellness.
So what to do now? You may have plotted it all in your head when you decided to become an osteopath and took your first steps in osteopathy school. There is no question that you practically know what to do with your career. The thing is, there are accidental possibilities that may come along the way and cause you to get a bit lost. In case you do, there is always the bigger chance of bringing yourself on track again.
After the end of any endeavour and at the beginning of a new one, it is a good thing to orient yourself with these simple tips.
1. Revisit your original plan
Some career counsellors would prefer to say the general advice to “Plan ahead” or “Plan what you want achieve.” However, you may need to remember that you already have an “original plan.” You must take into consideration your primary intent of wanting to be an osteopath in the first place. Why did you persevere to endure the lengthy years of learning your medical modality? What events motivated you to choose osteopathy as your vocation? Are there people who inspired you to craft your future career as an osteopath?
Once you have taken a review of all of those, then you can gain a fresh motivation enabling you to re-craft a plan of where you want to go and what you want to achieve in the field of osteopathy.
2. Focus on your objective
It is no more a question of whether you have goal or not. The assumption is you already do. You are now an osteopath, right? In such a case, the likely way you can get lost along your professional journey is if you do not stick to your objective. Staying focus on your objective means doing some sacrifices and adding more patience to your character.
What you provide to people is a service, and that service directly affects people with regards to their bodily conditions and well-being. Remember that by heart.
3. Adapt and get updated
Life is a journey of continuous learning and adapting. Osteopathy is a medical science, and science always has new things to offer as time progresses. Attend seminars, read literature online and offline, engage with colleagues and more experienced osteopaths, avail of refresher courses, do anything that will allow you to not get rusty in your chosen modality.
Also, you may need to learn some side-skills that can help with your practice. You may want to brush up on how to do marketing, clinic administration, and people management, to name a few. They will be particularly helpful, especially if you intend to establish your own clinic.
4. Acquire a specialisation
You know it is a myth that you can provide treatment to all the numerous aches and pains of the human body. In such a case, there will be certain health conditions and methods of treatments that you will be best known to be good at. Being a jack of all trades is a misnomer in the medical profession, and thus it is best practice to specialise in a field under your medical modality. Osteopathy may already be a field in its own, but under it are sub-fields in which you could lay your interests on, some of which are:
- Sports osteopathy
- Paediatric osteopathy
- Pre-natal and post-natal osteopathy
- Cranial osteopathy
…..among others.
If you think you need help in marketing and boosting your own practice, you may contact us any time at your convenience and we will be there to respond to your call.
Image created and edited from Pixabay photos
Share this article:
