If a traditional career is a ladder - straight, structured, step-by-step - then mine’s been more of a scavenger hunt. I’ve darted sideways as often as I’ve moved forward, collecting unexpected skills, roles and experiences along the way; gradually building what became a multi-hyphenated career.
By 2019, my title had stretched to ‘occupational health physio-business owner-MSK physio-podcast team member-occasional pitchside physio-MSKR deputy director’, which was quite the expansion from my first professional label back in 2009: Band 5 Physiotherapist.
I’ve since contracted it back again to ‘MSK physio-business owner-MSK Mag co-editor’, but the drive underneath it all remains the same: to create a career that fits me.
Here’s how I got there.
I need a job where I can look after my mental health
Firstly, it was probably partly accidental. I love planning and I love control and I ADORE certainty but what sort of millennial, academically achieving, eldest daughter would I be without a sprinkling of self doubt?
I remember doing my Band 5 NHS rotations and being stumped as to which area of physiotherapy to specialise in long term because the ward work was ok but didn’t set me alight and while I loved MSK outpatients, I ‘wasn’t very good at it’. For this, read ‘I found it really challenging’. I should have listened to my high school maths teacher when she recognised I hated stuff I wasn’t immediately great at but who knows anything about themselves at 22…
I cannot recall ever making the singular decision that YES, MSK physio was the way forward but I definitely recall a number of Band 6 and 7 MSK colleagues whose knowledge and skills I wanted to emulate one day. I had pictured myself staying at this West Midlands-based teaching hospital for my whole career but when an in-house Band 6 vacancy rolled around three years into my rotations, my hat wasn’t in the ring.
A former housemate of mine had recently completed her professional registration to work in New Zealand and that paved the way to thinking this might be an option open to me (as opposed to it being ‘too hard’ and subsequently staying in my perceived lane).
The least likely person to book a one-way flight into the unknown booked a one-way flight into the unknown and knuckled down to make all the early career mistakes that are inevitable in the world of MSK healthcare in just about the furthest place I could get from anyone I knew; Wellington, New Zealand.
“You’re better at this than you give yourself credit for” were the words that my manager and first NZ boss said to me, and the ones I repeated to my GP whilst she prescribed me Citalopram, talking to me about my array of self-doubt symptoms which were currently manifesting in an inability to stop crying and a dead certainty that I was a terrible physiotherapist.
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