[Quick Tip] The Time I Was Asked to be on the Real Housewives...
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What happened when a Real Housewives producer called for a speech evaluation?
about 10 years ago my phone rang and i picked it up it was a producer of the real housewives and they said can we bring one of the housewives kids in for an evaluation into their clinic obviously i panicked but let me tell you this story and what the biggest takeaway i had was from this story so
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Okay, so imagine I'm sitting in my office. I'm in my first or second year of private practice. My phone rings. It's a producer of The Real Housewives, a show that obviously I watch because if you guys know me, you know I love my reality TV. And there was a housewife who had a daughter who needed to be evaluated for speech therapy. So obviously I panic, could not decide what to do. And I'll tell you why. Because this was a housewife whose daughter was having trouble with her R sound. Guess who had done zero therapy ever in her life on R? Yes, this girl. Okay, I had literally never done therapy for kids who needed work on R before. And I know because I went to grad school that R is one of the hardest sounds to produce, one of the hardest sounds to teach.
So I freaked out. But then you know what? I'm like, how can I turn down this opportunity, right? So I said yes. And I was like, you know what? I'll just do some Googling. I'll watch some YouTube videos. I'm going to figure it out. Right. Obviously terrified, though. OK, anyway, I wish this story had a cooler ending because what ended up happening was my landlord would not agree.
How did I handle the panic of being asked to treat a child’s R‑sound issue?
to let them film on his property. So we never even got to do it, unfortunately. And that probably saved me a lot of embarrassment, to be honest, because I don't know how I could have prepared for that with actually having zero hands-on experience, right? So that was probably the universe protecting me at that point, okay? But I learned a lesson there, right? which was that I was trying to be great at everything. When I was starting off in my practice, I said yes to every client under the sun from zero to 18. I saw teenagers after brain injury. I saw little ones with genetic issues. conditions. I saw autistic kids, articulation, stuttering, like you name it. That was a kid I saw in my office. And all that led to was me feeling like I was never good enough.
It felt like, okay, this is just too hard. So eventually I made the decision, you know what? we need to specialize, we need to start referring out, we can't possibly see all of these kids. And what I did actually at first is I started separating specialty by therapists. So after I started hiring, I did have therapists who were really, really great at certain specialties and we would direct kids to them. But eventually we just started, you know, as therapists, as all of our therapists do, because there's so many women in the speech field, go on, get married, have babies and move away. We just started limiting the specialties we were doing in our office. So right now we really... have such a narrow scope of what we do in our office.
Some people are surprised because they think we only see autistic kids in our office, which is not true. But I will say that we have very few different types of therapies and approaches that we offer. And I will tell you, there is nothing better for your mental health than deciding you are going to niche down. Because think about how much there is to learn in every single approach therapy approach and type of kid I mean even if you just wanted to specialize in articulation you could find enough trainings that will last you years. Like there's just so much stuff out there. And I think we put so much pressure on ourselves that we have to be good at everything. And in fact, if we could just choose a few things that we really love or one thing, honestly, like you might be someone in private practice and you get to just choose one thing to do.
And that's going to make you feel so much better.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What happened when a Real Housewives producer called for a speech evaluation?
0:00–2:11
2
How did I handle the panic of being asked to treat a child’s R‑sound issue?
2:11–5:21
3
Why did I realize I couldn’t be great at every therapy specialty?
5:21–8:40
4
How did narrowing my practice’s scope improve my mental health?
8:40–11:10
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from The NeuroAffirm Podcast
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Ep. 124 Building Rapport Isn’t Enough...How Therapists Become Part of the Intervention
Ep. 123 Not Seeing Progress in Speech Therapy? Start Here.
Ep. 122 Screen Time Considerations for Autistic Kids
Ep. 121 The Biggest Sensory Mistakes SLPs Make
Ep. 120 Why Anxiety is So Common in Autism (And What Actually Helps)