Early Career Program

A Message from Our Founder

Why We Built This Program

Within three years, I went from believing I had found my calling to wondering if I had chosen the wrong profession entirely.

I started my career with all the excitement you'd expect from someone who had spent years working toward that doctorate and that dream. I was finally going to be a physical therapist. I was going to help people, make a difference, and put everything I'd worked so hard to learn into practice.

I knew enough to ask for mentorship at my first job. During the interviewing process, I asked, and they told me it was available so I happily accepted the offer. What I know now, is to ask more questions. At this job, what qualified as mentorship was a two-page packet with a checklist of the job responsibilities that I was supposed to certify someone went over with me.

I found myself in a clinic where leaders avoided difficult conversations, and allowed tension to build rather than addressing the problems that created it. Where evidence was an after thought and productivity seemed to matter more than people. Where the things we all know make a great clinician, meaningful relationships with patients, exceptional outcomes, curiosity, and the continuous pursuit of better care, were rarely if ever, recognized.

I kept trying. I worked harder. I focused just on my patients, and tried as hard as I could to be a part of that team. I questioned myself more than I questioned the environment around me.

Somewhere along the way, the excitement I had felt about becoming a physical therapist started to disappear.

Within three years, I went from believing I had found my calling to wondering if I had chosen the wrong profession entirely.

By the end of that job, I was sitting in my car with tears in my eyes almost every day. I was drowning in documentation, exhausted from trying to do right by my patients, never acknowledged let alone recognized for doing the right things and feeling more like a number than a person. I loved the work of patient care, but I was beginning to wonder if there was even a place for the kind of clinician I wanted to be.

I almost walked away. Not just from that job, but from physical therapy altogether.

Thankfully, that wasn't the end of my story.

I got lucky. Another opportunity came along. I found mentors who challenged me, supported me, and reminded me why I had chosen this profession. I took more courses than I can count. I had to unlearn 3 years of bad habits and rebuild an evidence based understanding. It was hard. It was like being a new grad all over again, all while trying and failing at leading for the first time. But I could see the impact. Patients getting better, faster, and happier. I got to help them achieve more than they even dreamed possible. Over time, the development became the habit. I learned to consistently question what I thought I knew, strengthen my clinical reasoning, navigate difficult conversations, and find confidence in my own decisions.

I discovered that there were people who cared deeply about the same things I did. People who believed we could practice better, lead better, and create environments where both clinicians and patients could thrive.

And slowly, I found my way forward.

Since then, I've had the extraordinary privilege of mentoring hundreds of clinicians in the earliest stages of their careers and gotten to set up the resources to support thousands.

I learned something really important along the way. The early years of clinical practice can be some of the most challenging years of your professional life.

School prepares us to enter practice safely. But becoming a great clinician? That's a different journey.

For me, it was learning a ton of badass clinical skills, how to reason through uncertainty and deal with the discomfort of not knowing, what it really took to build real trust with patients and empower them to achieve things they never thought possible. Navigating difficult conversations, I was awful at it and I needed so much practice. Then came the mighty checklist of skills needed to navigate the healthcare world of 'things school didn't get a chance to teach me', documentation, billing, insurance, advocating for patients and myself, time management, professional standards, etc. The last, most important one as a high-achieving recovering perfectionist: build healthy relationships with employers and my own self.

Too often, we're left to figure it out on our own.

We're surrounded by advertisements, courses, tools, 'the next best thing', conflicting opinions, and clinical biases telling us why they are right. All while trying to determine what actually matters, how to implement it and works for our patients. We're expected to develop confidence while navigating situations we've never encountered before with no feedback and no normalcy that initially, we are going to fumble. It's part of the learning and it is completely normal.

Most clinicians have been achievers their whole lives and may not be used to fumbling which adds so much more stress than we tend to think. The truth is, we were never meant to navigate it alone. We need support through it.

That's why we built this program.

Not because we believe we have all the answers. But because we've lived the questions, learned from extraordinary mentors, made our own mistakes, and helped thousands of clinicians navigate the same challenges.

We wanted to create the kind of experience we wish we'd had when we started: a place to ask questions without judgment, challenge ideas without fear, learn the practical skills that don't always make it into the classroom, and develop the confidence to build a career that is both meaningful and sustainable.

A place where evidence matters. Where people matter. Where growth is encouraged, not expected to happen in isolation.

Because I know what it feels like to question whether you belong in the profession you worked so hard to enter.

And I also know what becomes possible when someone helps you find your way.

You don't have to have it all figured out. You just shouldn't have to figure it all out alone.