How Do YOU Get from HERE to There? New Years is a GRATE TIME to Roll

Everyone who is reading this is an expert in themselves and perhaps also an expert in human behavior. 

Some are due to an innate ability to study and think and feel their way through things, and others have perhaps studied formally.  If you're REALLY lucky, you come upon someone who has both the ability and the education to be particularly helpful as a guide, teacher, mentor, counselor, therapist, etc. 

In a conversation earlier today with one of my friends who is one of the former at this time (hasn't studied formally and has an innate ability that is remarkable), I mentioned that I was going to write about this today on Lumigrate since it's timely with it being New Years and with my branching back out but in a different way to consult one on one or to groups (including those in the Grate Group reading at Lumigrate) related to MY forte, which is 'the occupation of your health care'.  She found that this year a story board related to her exercise goals was more beneficial for her than anything she'd written with pen and paper so she is going to story board her intentions for the overall year ahead. 

I've recently had a close friend's family members much on my mind, as they are going through their first experience together with a parent having an immediate need for surgery and rehabilitation and finding out there was more going on with the person's health than they were aware.  I keep hearing 'this system #$%%s'.  I keep saying "I know.  I'm sorry.  I am trying to create change in an innovative way to help people, as I saw this happening for so many years as a provider and as a person with complex medical issues'.  You will see that I developed some topics about DME, "Durable Medical Equipment", in the upstart End of Life Issues forum.  You'd normally put something like that right HERE in this O.T. forum, as that's our specialty in a therapy team of PT (physical therapy) and ST (speech therapy), but I opted to build it in that area because truly, if you're needing a toilet riser or a shower chair or a grab bar, it's time to be thinking seriously about who you can appoint to make medical decisions for you if you cannot: we really should all have someone from the day we go from our parent's as their legal underlings.  And too often we continue thinking we're immune to disaster.  And as we get older we pretty much have to accept the inevitable at some point.  So I encourage everyone to put that on their radar for the future and get it taken care of.  Lumigrate is committed to helping with that in 2011 in terms of information and support.  So stay tuned here too!

I'd like to use this as an example of end of life planning to show how one might go about looking ahead a year into the future and seeing that you've completed a task like that.  People operate to different 'drummers' -- some people like fixed 'to do lists' and tick things off, operating on schedules and budgets.  Other people do the best without any structure.  Some people need 'pushing', other's 'accountability and structuring' and others do best when given a lot of space and no 'hounding'.  I do my best when consulting with clients/patients/consumers 1:1 to find out 'how they tick'.  I would ask 15 year old new drivers what they do for fun in high school or what they were best at doing when they were 4.  I'd ask my older patients if they used to 'do exercises' -- if they were the type who got on that bandwagon about calesthenics every day, I knew they'd follow whatever directions I set up for them and they'd want it structured. 

I'm going to be available in 2011 for people to work with me 1:1 or in small groups if they'd like to hire me, as well as putting the information on Lumigrate for people to pick up on their own for no cost (can't beat THAT deal!).  I'll not be charging insurance for my services, which liberates you a great deal in what you can do.  Since insurance wants documentation done in a certain way that's based in allopathic medicine's history, you have to do "Goals" -- Long term and short term, and you have to be documenting every treatment where the patient is at related to those goals.  You operate in codes that keep you pigeonholing people based on 'a diagnosis'... well, what if it's actually more like a nebula of continuums related to every facet of human body, mind, spirit that you're interacting with?  So I am looking forward to having the liberty of being able to blend more from the past and the future as I see it, to be creating beneficial solutions in the present starting in 2011. I'll look forward to working with people who prefer, as my friend does, to storyboard what they want to accomplish with their health and other techniques I know of and those I've not learned of yet.  

But I'll share today the way I personally work best.  I get it in mind what I want to have in the future... I put as much detail into that mental imagining as I can -- when, where, why, how, who.  I then spend some time figuring out what's kept me from doing it up until this point and clear out anything that's in the way of it happening.  I talk with people about it and sometimes write up my thoughts and plan about it.  My next step is to use my paper dayplanner to remind myself to spend some of my time resource working on the visualization aspect of it, which I include in meditation time frequently.  And then I select out what is the best thing to do that day to work towards it along with any or all of my other things I'm working on.  Some days nothing will get done on one thing becasue I focus on others.  Perhaps your process is similar, perhaps different, but I hope that it is beneficial.  If not and you want it to be, I hope you look at what you can do differently to get a different result.  And I believe there is much on Lumigrate and our Grate experts to provide information and assistance in growth in that regard.  This is based on things I started studying and doing about fifteen years ago, and I plan to continue to grow and change as I grow more experienced still as a human and therapist.

In the near future I will bring you the component that I use to help with my BIGGEST problem in making and keeping things 'shored up'.  So I look forward to seeing you on the other side of new years, I believe it is getting close to officially being 2011 based on GMTime and I wanted to have this just on the eve of here at Lumigrate.com. 

Make this the year it is to be!  And if you need someone to talk to, think of me  ~~ Mardy