Top 5 Reasons to Become a Travel PT:
#4 – Personal Development
In this mini-series we will go into the Top 5 reasons to become a travel PT. Over the next few days we will dive into both the obvious and the unspoken reasons for becoming a travel therapist.
Check out the other Top 5 Reasons:
Coming in fourth in our Top 5 Reasons to Become a Travel PT is the less often discussed, Personal Development as a travel PT.
#4 – Personal Development
Travel therapy is not just a challenging career choice, but a challenging lifestyle choice as well.
Moving from state to state brings a set of challenges along with it that we had never anticipated before. Regional dialects, cultural nuances, inherent biases (ours and theirs) all mix together in new and unusual ways with each contract we take. Navigating the social and cultural waters at each location has slowly stretched us over time. As we experience more of the world we are able to adapt more easily. Friends and family are shocked that two upper-middle class kids from Ohio are traipsing around the country, from the streets of Oakland, CA to the untouched mountains of Alaska, to the backwoods of rural Kentucky, all with two dogs and now a baby in tow. Sure, we didn’t start out this way. We couldn’t IMAGINE the challenge it would bring if we did. Logistically. Culturally. Professionally. But over the years we have grown, just as you will, and what was a challenge before is now no-big-deal.
There is a push in our society to round the edges off of life. To “nerf” the world around us by controlling as many aspects as we can. As if being uncomfortable is a bad thing. We all know objectively that the body only adapts to the demands imposed upon it, so why wouldn’t the brain and the psyche?
Many of you reading this right now, are super stressed out over the unknowns that are inherently part of the fabric that makes up the travel physical therapy world. I urge you not to be. Sure, you can scour our site and all of our friends and fellow bloggers sites for every tiny bit of info you can grasp. But in the end, when you choose to take a step out that door and onto the road, you too, will be changed.
Printed on the back of our wedding program:
“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you – beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.” – Edward Abbey – Benedicto
Here are some of our thoughts on how travel physical therapy has changed our entire world view.
Written by: Stephen Stockhausen
