ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Free Chapter 1 of Stop Guessing, my clinical reasoning system for getting to root cause on day one:https://performancerehab.co/waitlist-...
This episode is for new grad PTs who are drowning in their first outpatient job, promised mentorship that never materialized, and questioning whether they even want to stay in the profession. Hannah is a two-year PT who cried before work every day, quit her outpatient clinic after nearly a year, and took six months away from the field entirely before finding PRA. After going through the program, she returned to treating via telehealth with a structured framework, real clinical confidence, and no desire to walk away. This is the right episode for any early-career clinician who's wondered if the problem is them — or if the system just never set them up to succeed.
She passed her boards, started her first outpatient job, and within months was crying before work every single day. She quit after nearly a year and walked away from physical therapy for six months. This episode is for any new grad PT who wonders if what they're feeling is normal — and what to do when it isn't.
In this episode you'll see how:
Hannah went from sobbing before work, feeling lost during every evaluation, and nearly quitting the profession permanently to practicing telehealth with confidence and clinical clarity.
Her first job promised structured mentorship and delivered six or seven days of it in an entire year — and how that gap directly caused the downward spiral.
She returned to treating after six months away from PT, now using a clinical reasoning framework that gives her a clear direction from the first question she asks in the subjective.
Her subjective questioning became purposeful instead of scattered, and her assessments narrowed from throwing every special test available to using targeted testing that actually gave her usable information.
She describes what it felt like to get to the end of an eval and still not know what was going on — and how that changed completely.
The decision to invest in herself came down to one question: owe it to yourself to try one more time, or let a bad first job define your career.
