I’m Bringing this Conversation to CSHA!

If you prefer to watch or listen rather than read, click here! (2min, 59 seconds at 1x speed)

This week, I’m speaking at the sold-out Colorado Speech-Language-Hearing Association conference about Sustainable Clinical Practice: Rethinking Burnout in SLPs.

Which feels particularly special because, as you know, before starting BoredLess, I was an SLP. I spent years working in schools, hospitals, and home health, so I get to bring a lot of the work I’ve been doing around play, playfulness, motivation, and making work work better for actual human brains back to my own professional roots.

And I know, I knowwwwww. Another presentation about burnout. 😂

But I WON’T be there standing in front of a room full of SLPs and telling them to manage their stress better, set better boundaries, practice more self-care, or become more resilient so they can tolerate increasingly ridiculous working conditions.

Burnout doesn’t always look the same, and the things making our work harder don’t all live inside of us. Sometimes it IS overload. There are too many people to see, too much documentation, too many competing demands, and simply not enough time to do all of it.

But sometimes we’re bored or under-challenged. Sometimes we feel unsupported or ineffective. And sometimes the work itself isn’t even the only thing wearing us down. It’s all the OTHER cognitive work surrounding it: trying to remember seventeen things at once, getting interrupted constantly, switching tasks all day, making approximately 9 million tiny decisions before we even get to the decisions that actually require our expertise.

So at CSHA, we’re going to look at what our work is asking of our brains all day long, where some of that strain is coming from, what we might actually be able to change, and what can help us navigate the demands that remain. And YES, eventually we’re going to talk about play and playfulness, because they have a much bigger role in sustainable work than “having fun.”

There will also be scribbling. Obviously.

As I’ve been building this session, though, I keep thinking about how much of this conversation applies beyond SLPs.

Because this isn’t just an SLP problem.

Schools are full of people doing cognitively and emotionally demanding work inside systems that often make that work harder than it needs to be. And I think the adults doing that work deserve professional development that actually acknowledges THAT instead of handing them another list of things they should personally do better.

Which brings me to something I realized I haven’t actually told you yet:

Your school, department, or district can bring me in to do this kind of work with your people.

I do workshops and professional development around Playful Work Design, sustainable work, motivation, psychological safety, creativity, and how we can use what we know about play and the brain to make work work a little better for HUMANS.

And no, I will not walk in and immediately make everyone find a partner. 😉

So if you’re reading this and thinking, ohhhhh, our people need this conversation, hit reply. You absolutely do not need to be the person who controls the PD budget or even know exactly who does. We can figure that part out.

And if you’re going to be at CSHA, COME SAY HI! I would LOVE to meet some of you in actual real life.

Keep playing!