Fall in Love With the Work

My daughter just started kindergarten, which also means all the activities are starting back up. Dance class starts back up next week, and we just enrolled her in voice lessons because she's pretty set on being a famous singer. I'm all for it, as long as she gives me backstage passes to her concerts.

All of this has me thinking a lot about how I respond when she tries something new, especially when it gets hard. Not because I'm trying to give a five-year-old a TED Talk every time she gets frustrated, but because those little moments are chances to help shape how she thinks about all the inevitable moments when something doesn't come easy and she has to decide whether to push through and be okay with making mistakes, or just give up.

That's what keeps bringing me back to Carol Dweck's book Mindset, which makes the case that the most successful people are those who find motivation in the process of getting better rather than just chasing outcomes or external validation. I'm trying to implement that in how I talk to her after a challenging situation at school, or after dance or voice lessons. Instead of just saying “great job”, I've been asking what she learned, what was hard, and what she wants to practice. I want her to find joy in the challenge itself, not just in the applause at the end.

I don't always get it right. And I'll be honest, it's nice when someone tells you that you did a good job. I'm not trying to discount that. But if the only thing driving her is external approval, she becomes scared to try hard things, make mistakes, or potentially fail at something, because that approval is only conditional on the outcome, not the process. The people who get really good at something are usually the ones who genuinely enjoy the work of getting better.

Would you not agree that this same principle applies to the rehab process? Especially with our limb loss patients, because of the uncertainty of the whole situation.

We spend a lot of time talking about goals and outcomes: being able to walk again, getting back to work, and returning to the activities you love. Those goals are necessary, but they can also be a moving target. When a patient says they want to walk again, that can mean fifty feet across a room with a walker or two miles through the community without a gait deviation. They're both walking, but they're very different things. The endpoint is going to keep shifting and can be arbitrary, which means if that's the only thing motivating them, the work in between can feel like an obstacle rather than the point.

There's also a communication challenge worth thinking about. When we tell patients that reaching their goal is going to take hard work, we mean it as honesty and preparation. But sometimes that framing primes them to dread the process before it even starts. What if instead we helped them see the work itself as the reward? Showing up to the sessions, putting in the reps, the small wins, all the unexpected challenges and frustrations. That's where the real progress lives anyway.

The patients who tend to do best aren't always the ones with the most favorable prognosis. They're the ones who get invested in the process. They show up, they try things, they ask questions, they practice between sessions. They find something motivating about getting incrementally better, not just about crossing a finish line. Because most times, that finish line isn’t as concrete as we initially thought.

If we can help our patients fall in love with the work, the outcomes tend to take care of themselves.