Social Work in the Great Outdoors with Tammy Thielman
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Laura: Welcome to Therapy in the Great Outdoors, the podcast where we explore the business and practice of nature based pediatric therapy of all kinds. If you're an outdoor loving pediatric practitioner in the fields of occupational, physical, or speech therapy, social work, or mental health, this podcast will help you start and grow a successful nature based practice or program.
I am the ever honest, always 100 percent real, you'll hear it all on this podcast, Dr. Laura Park. My name is Laura Park Figueroa. I'm a pediatric OT with over 20 years of experience and I run a thriving nature based practice with profitable locations in two different states and multi six figures in revenue.
I also host the free online community at therapyinthegreatoutdoors. com to help you pursue your nature based therapy dreams too. Are you ready to take action on those dreams? Let's jump in.
Welcome, everyone. Back to another episode of therapy in the great outdoors.
I'm very excited today to have the first social worker that I have ever had come on the podcast, we're going to learn all about social work with children in the great outdoors. Tammy Thielman is here and she is a social worker. Like I said, she's also certified in EMDR and in equine therapy, which I think could be whole episodes probably unto themselves.
So we probably won't dive into that very much, but she is from Canada, salmon arm, British Columbia, Canada, and she runs a practice called town and country counseling. I'm going to let you describe how you started Town and Country Counseling and just say welcome. Thanks for being here.
Thank you so much for having me.
I really appreciate it. I find, I feel like I found a community. Within other allied health professionals who work outside, especially with children. I started, I come from years of experience working in the government, public health care and mental health systems. So I worked in hospital a lot, in two different hospitals that are about an hour, half an hour away from me.
I live in a rural area. And then I also worked in community and residential care. And I really wanted something different. I was very excited when I started working in the public system in many different roles. And then as time went on, I really started wanting something different. I felt like my scope of practice was very restricted working in the public system.
And I wanted to go from, I worked a lot of emergency response where you might see a person, once or twice, or just very few times. It was very like brief intervention. I wanted to do some more work. That was longer term and more preventative versus reactive.
Yeah. And that is what led you then to start your own practice?
TAMMY: Definitely. Our healthcare system is in, many areas, very challenged with short staffing and many different issues that can make some of the environments very challenging to work in. So I really wanted to do something where I felt like I was working more fully to my scope of practice, working more in a proactive, preventative really client centered model versus doing really what's quite quick response.
So that really inspired me to move into private practice.
Laura: Yeah. So you have in the information that you sent me on my little form that people fill out before they join the podcast or come on the podcast, you wrote, I have a beautiful purpose built office slash cabin that is very nonclinical surrounded by horse corrals, trees, nature trails, and you live on a small mountain.
That's a renowned Nordic skiing area. So it's peaceful and children really soak up nature here. So did you build. The office or cabin for your practice was that kind of, or was it already there? Oh, you did. So tell it.
TAMMY: No, it was built specifically for my practice. Okay. My husband built it and my, our son helped with the construction a little bit and it was built for me to work in.
And that's where I see children, families, adults. And it's very, like I said, very non clinical. It's a very welcoming space. I have all of my therapeutic materials and, supports in there. A lot of people sit in it and just go like a big breath out. They can just really decompress and we're outside most of the time.
Yeah. So a very kind of really a very short amount of time is spent in the cabin. Yeah. Do you even in winter up in Canada, do you spend a lot of time out in winter? I'd assume you maybe use the indoor space a little more in winter, but for people that might not want to a little bit more. But I'm, I really try to prepare families, parents, guardians to really bundle up their children that they're bringing.
And we can also go in and out of the cabin too. We're in, to me, it's quite a moderate area it might be minus five at times, which, is very manageable. Yeah, and we can, so we can step inside and be, there's a wood stove, like a pellet stove, it's very cozy. We can be inside, we can go back outside and come and go as we need to, which is also a really wonderful way of working with, I'm going to refer mainly to children here, with state change.
Yeah, so they'll come in the cabin and go, Oh, it's so wonderful to be inside where it's warm and flop in a chair and grab a toy or we'll read a story or have a snack or all of those things. But then we may go back outside again, too. And it's also a wonderful way to orient to a safe and calm place all the time.
And also really be. In a space where we can titrate intensity for, so for children that I talk with a bit more directly about things therapeutically, sometimes I'll say, we just talked about a lot. Do you just want to go outside again and let's go move around or grab a horse or hold the bunny and they're like, yeah, let's go.
We can come and go as we need to.
Laura: Yeah, that's great. Tell I know before we hit record, we talked a little bit about exploring. I want to, I'm just interested. I'm curious. And I want to know more about so many questions, but What types of, yeah, I'm just, they're all in my brain what types of kids do you see?
What are the goals? What are the, how do you structure the sessions?
TAMMY: I could add something, if that's okay. Oh, sure. Yeah. And it might answer your question a bit more. You asked me, I think, like, how did I really start this? Yeah. And, I spent a lot of time working in the hospitals.
I worked a lot of shift work. I didn't work graveyard shift, but I worked a lot of weekends, holidays, evenings. And I worked in a lot of kind of little dirty walk in closet offices, they're not very nice, they're really gray and they have chipped paint and maybe no windows and it was like, ugh, after a while it's this is not a great therapeutic environment, right?
No, OTs are very familiar with this, like in school settings and stuff we get like the janitor closet, the corner in the janitor closet is where so yes, we know, I can relate here, many years in public school. An old elevator shaft. Yes! Under the stairs. Yes, or the stairwell, like under the stairwell.
Yes, exactly. These are the offices. Yeah
yeah, I was tired of that. And often you don't even have your own space. It's all shared or just a little corner of some area you can grab. And it was actually two, two lovely colleagues of mine. One of them said, I just want to come to your place and sit by your woodstove.
And I went, wouldn't that be cool, right? And then another colleague of mine said, I just want to come up to your place and sit in your kitchen and look out at the trees. And that made me think again, I'm like, and that's what it came from. I'm like, I could have a cabin, right?
We can do that. And I could have a therapeutic space. Yeah. Where I can offer this to people. Yeah. And that's really what started it. So I credit my colleagues and I had a lot of encouragement from other people that I worked with, especially saying, you'll have a wait list. Yeah. That's a brilliant idea.
You should go for it. And it was just, everybody was so encouraging.
Laura: Yeah. So what resources for you, I want to get into more what your practice looks like, but I'm thinking about that very beginning stage. I'm wondering what resources were helpful to you. Like how did you even go about. We've talked some about like how nature based therapy or we agree on this, cause I know you wrote it and I've said it, but nature based therapy practice for any clinician is really an expertise.
It's an area that you grow and learn in what resources were really helpful to you at the beginning as you were thinking about taking your work with kids outdoors.
I
TAMMY: think for me, when I got my equine facilitated wellness certification, I worked on that over a four year period as I was working the program I went with through professional pro EFW Canada, but they also, I believe, do international work.
We're very, like my mentor, there is a, also a very experienced counselor. And she said, you don't have to rush this. Take your time, really soak in the training. And I did. It took me four years to complete it. It was a lot of work, a lot of hours as well as paying for it. Yeah. It was all private pay.
And that was really key. in, they're very thorough about safety programs, preparation really knowing your scope of practice. It's a lot more than just having an animal in person together. Totally. It really is. As well as, and I've learned a lot of this from your podcast, is having nature itself as part of, and a constant factor in therapy and in the therapeutic relationship.
So I'm a big believer that. If we're offering something, we should be trained in it or certified in it or, have something to show that we have studied and learned in that area specifically. Yeah, I agree. So to me, it was really important to be credentialed in offering equine and animal assisted work.
Laura: Yeah, that's really great. I love that you had that program because that and took the time with it. So much wisdom there and just like taking the time to be an expert in something. And as you were talking, I was like, because I. I have a nature based therapy training called the Contigo Approach, and it stands for Connection and Transformation in the Great Outdoors.
It's a mouthful. But as you were talking, I was like, that's a really good point for me to think about because we give, currently right now, I don't know if this is how we're going to do it forever, but this is currently right now, people pay to do the course and then we give them lifetime access. Like we...
Ongoing mentoring we have a meeting and everybody can come and I think that's like the beauty of that is that it is. a long term process to really become an expert in something. And you need that mentoring. You need a community around you. Nobody builds a business or builds a nature based practice by themselves.
Like when we have a very lonely at times. Yeah, totally. Totally. Okay. So tell me a little bit about like your clients that you see who are the type of let's focus on kids for this podcast. I know you maybe see or families maybe if you do family work too. What types of goals are you working on and what are the challenges that some of the kids or families are facing that come to see you?
TAMMY: I see a number of, like I worked with ages three and up. So for children and youth, I work with, many, not all, but I really work with everyone, but many, I really try to prioritize the little ones who are referred to me often by other allied health professionals. And they're sending them for trauma counseling and healing and recovery.
So they've been, they may have been through foster care or various different complex family situations. They may have been, fostered, then adopted or adopted, or they might come from, trauma. They have experienced abuse. And there's many different forms and they're often interconnected.
Many of the children I work with, some of them, I'm speaking generally, have been through sexual abuse, emotional, physical, just a lot of trauma in their little lives that they really need support for. I do try to, as much as possible, work with parents.
I also try to collaborate with other professionals if they're involved in the child's life as well. Pediatricians and other professions. And I really try to take a whole child, whole family approach. Yeah, really working with strengths and really based on what works best for the child. So a lot of children, they may not want to hang out with the horses so much, but they love holding the bunny, or they're really not interested in the animals, but they love being around them or by them.
Some just can't wait to get in there and brush the horses and do things that are really hands on. Really in terms of diagnoses, it's the whole gamut of, autism, ADHD FASD, the fetal alcohol syndrome can be in there as well. Some global delay, anxiety, depression, very common. Some severe, moderate to really quite severe behavioral disorders to use very kind of medicalized language.
It's often multiple diagnoses. So not just one thing along with the trauma as well. Yeah. So pretty complex Bye bye. I want to say, wonderful little people coming from very sort of complex experiences and backgrounds. Yeah. Heavy. And grief and loss too, that's another big one for children.
Maybe they've lost grandma or grandpa, or there's a parent who's not able to be in their lives. Lots of different sort of complex multi layered situations.
Laura: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And a lot to. A lot to hold to in your work for yourself. Like, how do you hold that? Because I, we've seen a lot of, we've seen an uptick in my practicing kids coming to see us for outdoor OT.
Yes. That I think have, we're seeing more mental health diagnoses on top of the typical autism, ADHD, motor skill challenges that we typically have seen as OTs for many years, right? But I'm seeing an uptick in like the social emotional kind of diagnoses of kids coming to us and I, it can be heavy.
So how do you. How do you take care of yourself? I know you're going to say spend time in nature, but are there tips you would have for therapists when they feel like the work is heavy?
TAMMY: Yeah, definitely. I am a big believer in walking the talk. I work with a lot of adults, parents, families too.
I do a lot of sibling sessions and I really believe that we have to be well in order to help others who are in need. Sometimes in a very high level of need. I feel I've earned, and I have a lot of experience, a lot of different varied work experience, which I'm grateful for. I don't miss working in those environments.
I miss some of the colleagues and patients, of course, but I don't miss the system work that I did. But it gave me very valuable experience, so I feel like I can draw on the skills I need. I take ongoing training, so I feel very well supported in my private work. I can choose to take whatever training I feel I need to draw on.
And then really it starts with like I would, support anyone that's looking after your basic needs and a lot more. So really I try to do whatever I need to really make sure that I am well and in a place where I can give and I have more to give, like I'm not depleted or exhausted. Or feeling fatigued myself.
Yeah, oh that advice is... Honoring my needs. Yeah, I say no to a lot of things.
Laura: Oh gosh, say it again for the people in the back. Say it again, Tammy. Say it again
TAMMY: . I say no to a lot. So I can say yes. To things I choose to. Yeah, I think this is a real Boundaries, yes.
Laura: I think this is a real challenge for therapists, though.
Because we want to help people so much. And we tend to be a lot of helper, people. And it can be so hard to say, No, I can't. I actually, one of my most, maybe I should recycle that reel. I did a reel years ago. This was two and a half, three years ago, but I still remember it. So maybe I should recycle it, but I did it.
Meghan Trainor song. My name is no, my sign is no. My number is no. You need to let it go. You need to let it, it's a great song. So my son and I did a little reel that. Like we danced to the song and I basically was like, Hey, you guys need to learn as therapists. I wasn't targeting nature based practice owners.
I was mostly doing business kind of content on my Instagram account at that time. But I was like you as therapists we have to learn how to say no so that we can say yes to the things that are really important. And so that we can protect our own mental health and that's just as valid.
You don't have to have a reason or a conflict for everything you say no to. It can just be like, No, I'm so sorry. I can't do that right now. Absolutely. Yeah. You'll come up with your list of ways that you can say no.
TAMMY: At the end of the day, I have a very busy practice. It's very full, but it's me, like I'm the provider.
I don't have colleagues or associates. Sorry, I do have some wonderful colleagues who have their own private practices that I refer to willingly. If I can't be of help, I will pass along names of people. Whose skill sets and judgment expertise that I trust to refer people to.
So I do have a wonderful community of practice. We have a consultation group where, I can share, there's for those of us in private practice, if it's just us, or maybe we have a few associates, but still there's limits to how much we can do. So I think really listening to yourself and what do you need?
Referring out, referring to other professions I have lots of, say, children, youth I've worked with, or I'm thinking, I don't think they need me right now. They need OT first, or they need OT and SLP speech, or, there's other places they can start, then maybe come to me. When they're I think, at a better stage of readiness to do the therapeutic counseling work.
Yeah, I'm very willing to, we can share. There's lots of work to go around.
Laura: Yeah, that's a great point. So let's talk about that a little bit because I think I think that is something that I had never really thought about. I do know OTs in particular who use a trauma informed approach to therapy.
We all use a trauma informed approach. I'm thankful that it is now much more, most of us have read Body Keeps the Score. There's like the classic book on it. If you haven't, Body Keeps the Score. What's his name? The guy who wrote it. What's his name? I can't remember. I want to say Bessel van der Kolk. Bessel van der Kolk. How do you say his last, how do you spell his last name? It's O L K. K O L K. I'm pretty sure that's him.
Yep. So if you search Body Keeps the Score on Amazon, that's the classic. It is, it takes a while to get through. It's a lot to read, right? But it's definitely can help inform your work. With people who have experienced trauma. So I think the concept of trauma informed care is much more well known, I think, among the general therapy community of allied health professionals, but but I had not thought about.
The idea that sometimes kids need to be in their body a little bit more or they need communication skills that maybe a speech therapist would need to work on in order to benefit from the counseling work that you would do with them. So that's a really cool way to think about it, I think, of what is each person's specialty and who do they need at what time?
At what time, right?
TAMMY: Yeah. And I'm sure you realize as well from your work and experience that, a lot or some of what we do, there can be overlap, but I think it's really important to know when do I refer over, right? And really being aware of, what, I'm not what you need right now.
I think it's more of this person or this person, or maybe they're at a place where they can work together with OT. Okay. And counseling or speech and OT or, there can be more than one profession in there supporting working together. Everybody's doing their own scope of practice. Yes, there's overlap in some areas, but we're all respecting kind of each other's, area of work and skill set.
Laura: And your professional expertise, because that's really. Something I've been, I feel like we've been talking a lot lately on the podcast about like you are your profession for there's no, yes, there might be certifications out there for, yeah, nature based trainings, right? We offer certification and the contigo approach.
So I'm not going to say there's not certifications, but it's not. A nature based therapist is not a certified profession, right? You're a clinical social worker or you are a OT or a speech therapist or whatever, and you still need to use that clinical reasoning. So tell me, along those lines tell me a little bit about activities that you've found really, I know we're all always looking for great ideas what comes to mind the activities that kids have really loved that you have done with them?
And it can be, like, the simplest thing, whatever And you.
TAMMY: It's the simplest things. And I think, I love to get stuff and enhance my practice. We just like my husband and I, we just built a beautiful bridge together, like an actual physical three foot by nine foot bridge with a railing and it's all painted.
And children love. To go over the bridge and it's really strong. So the horses can go over it too with them. Okay. And that's a more elaborate thing. Obviously it's something I've wanted to do for a few years, but it can be one of the most popular things ever is blowing bubbles. Yeah. I have a big bowl of like bubble stuff and big wands and the kids can just take the wands and spin around and I will do this too with them and we can do like arcs like a rainbow and there's all these bubbles coming out in the sometimes the wind will come through the bubble wands and make the bubbles and it's magical you know sometimes I'll talk about how our feelings are like bubbles they come and go they can be big and mixed together and little and Just there can be a lot of them.
Yeah. So lots of good kind of metaphorical material there. But yeah, I love you pulling that in. Also just letting me see that activity. And the eye movement therapy that I do with children, I'm a certified EMDR therapist. I've taken, and still take, I love learning about EMDR that's play based and for children.
It's based on bilateral movement, which our body, our nervous system can find very calming and it helps bring down our felt level of distress. So waving bubbles back and forth. There's a bilateral play activity. Yeah. So with an adult, say if it was you and I would be doing the hand movements where you track my hand with your eyes.
For a child, boring, right? So we're out there playing.
Laura: Yeah. Tell people, just in case people don't know what EMDR is, I want to be clear. Can you tell them what it is? It's eye movement something.
TAMMY: I can try to. Yeah. So EMDR stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. And it in a nutshell.
It's a form of trauma psychotherapy. So it's really like a gold standard treatment for treating trauma. So for some children, the trauma could be falling off a bike or witnessing a sibling falling off a bike or, adults, it could be, it's often used in reference to like veterans coming back from a war zone.
They might get EMDR treatment for, for PTSD. So a lot of the little ones I work with. Have PTSD, that trauma that we're using, and it's all based on play, being outside, being with the animals, the bilateral piece. That's great. Yeah, I love it. It's a very evidence based from my understanding. I have not trained in it, but my understanding is it's like you said, like gold standard has a lot of evidence behind it that it is very effective, highly effective.
Laura: So cool. It's so interesting. Our brains are just these. It is. It is. It's amazing, crazy, like incredible things, that eye movement can help heal someone from trauma. It is really just mind blowing
TAMMY: piece to it as well. So that's where being out in nature, being with animals, doing the playful activities, whether it's a bubbles or another really fun one is pool noodles.
I'm doing a pool noodle fight, a pool noodle fight. It's very playful, gentle and the children just love it. And again, you can buy pool noodles, lots of colors and variety, a couple bucks. And if they break, it's not a big deal. They can get out a lot of frustration, be very playful with pool noodles.
Yeah. And so I spend a lot of time. And there again, it's bilateral. I love it. So we're moving.
Laura: Yeah, the simplest thing level of distress. Yeah, that is what we need, right? We need them in a calm alert state or maybe not calm everybody. Everybody's all I used to say my tagline in my business used to be, we help kids grow more coordinated, competent, calm, and caring.
And then I saw all this stuff online. This has been for like eight years. It's been that we just changed it recently, but I saw a lot of stuff online about how calm the word calm is. Is not maybe the best word to use because kids, especially in particular, particularly people who are neurodivergent, they don't necessarily have to have a calm body in order to be attentive or listening or learning.
And so I was like, Oh, yeah, they need to move. And so I was like, I don't like that. We use what I meant in that statement for parents was like, An alert state, essentially, an available and engaged state for learning is what I meant by the word calm.
TAMMY: You're safe and social, if we think of the ventral vagal sort of ladder, right?
Laura: Yeah, that's a good way. Safe and social, I love it.
TAMMY: Vigilant, you're not in shutdown, you're in the middle, safe and social. And I find that there can be confusion between being calm or presenting as calm. I'm thinking back to, my days in health care, right? And busy, highly pressured systems, emergency response, where, a person can present as very calm, but are we actually in a shutdown state?
Interesting. And that can be confusing to know the difference there. Are we trying to draw on really empty because we're shut down or are we actually in that safe and social, we're able to respond, not react mode. So that's some of the more nuanced work I'm trying to do with the children, especially ones who they've been to shut down.
It's one of their go to places.
Laura: And they can look very, this is reminding me last week, we just started a second group here in Madison and we had a little cutie. It's the younger kids group and I just love, I love like the four to six year old age range. It's probably my favorite age range to work with as an OT.
Yeah, they can be so joyful. Yeah, they're just, they just are not jaded yet. They just are like, they're like sweet. And I don't know. I just love, I love that age, but we had a kid who came to the group and I am not the OT for the group. I have a employee, so I'm training and with her as she starts, but I think I'm probably just going to keep going all year because I love being there.
But But it's good for me to be in the woods with kids and remember how great the work is. But but anyway, so I had not, I had screened the forms for the kids to, to form the group, but I hadn't done the consult calls with parents and written the goals and all of that.
So I was coming to the group as like an OT, but assisting. And so this child showed up and. I actually during the group was like thinking, does he have a diagnosis of selective mutism because he was not speaking like not a word, the whole group like even just to say his name when we were in it was three kids and there were four of us adults, they're a little overwhelming with four adults and three children, but he really you.
He's a good example of a child who has so much anxiety that he appears calm, right? But he's, but on the inside, he's not actually calm. And I could tell he wasn't calm, but it's a good example of our, of, thinking about is the child just presenting as calm, but really inside not feeling safe and social how you.
how you define that. And he, at the end, it was this amazing, because he had not spoken, he was participating and great. He was doing, but verbally was unable to just he would like gently nod if we asked him a question or shake his head. No, it was, he was expressing yes or no.
And he was participating, it was pouring rain and very cold. But at the very end of the group, when we did our little, we have this routine where we have one of the children find a special item to them in nature. So this kid found this leaf that looked like a zebra kind of, with like stripes on it and he brings it back and then we pass that around as like the talking stick or object while we share our favorite part of the day was.
That's like our closing routine for the group. And. We were passing the leaf around and I thought for sure this little guy when it got to him, I thought for sure he was just going to shake his head no and hand it to someone else. But he said, I liked the hike best. And we were like, Oh my gosh, it was such a, such an amazing moment that for him to be able to feel safe and social, where he's able to say, He could speak.
Yeah, he could speak. And so It's a good story. That story just came to mind when you said that safe and social thing because he looked calm the whole group, but he wasn't feeling safe and social until the end, until we had spent 90 minutes together and he really knew people and he knew we were safe and he knew we were positive.
And we'd given him a lot of just quiet encouragement, like that felt sense of safety. So huge. Yeah, so it was just a really miraculous
TAMMY: , I find doing the nature based work, and I love this so much about it, especially coming from, pretty rigid system work in different areas is that there are things that happen all the time that you can't plan, I find wow, I never could have planned that.
really special moment or interaction or the little squirrel or chipmunk that runs out at just the right moment or, there are things that you just, you can't plan and they happen and can just be so meaningful. And maybe it's just a quick few seconds or it's a few moments or, especially now, like right now in the fall, it's so beautiful out with all these beautiful colors in the trees and there's whole sessions that are just really amazing.
And it happens, differently in every season, whether it's, a winter wonderland with snow banks and I lit up some lights in the winter or, there's just so many things that we can I really am passionate about creating a beautiful, really peaceful kind of area for support and healing that feels or invites, a felt sense of safety.
But I find all the time there's things that happen that are, just really pretty cool interactions because the animals are there and nature all the time.
Laura: Yeah. Tammy. I want to wrap us up, but I want to say thank you so much. This has just been like, thank you truly. I feel safe and social right now like you're clearly, and I mean that as a huge compliment to you because it even comes across through zoom, right?
Like that you clearly are very skilled at counseling and very skilled at creating that safe and social space for the kids and families and clients that you work with.
TAMMY: And it's my goal. Really? Yeah. Right from my heart to offer, as much safety and the invitation to process and heal at one's own pace.
Yeah. That's absolutely my intent is to make a really magical space for people with nature animals. Yeah. Feeling welcomed.
Laura: Yeah, that's great. Can you tell people where can they find you? I know you're in the therapy in the great outdoors community, which is how we connected, which is so exciting to me that there are social workers like in our community now.
I want this community to be a multidisciplinary space and I hope in coming years it will grow to be like. Lots of different professionals there that work with kids. So I know people can find you there but are you online? Are you share your website and all the things where people could connect with you?
TAMMY: Probably the form I use the most right now, just because it's so easy and quick to update is Instagram. So I'm at town and country counseling. Okay. Online it's town and country counseling. com and then on Facebook as well. Yeah. You can just Google me.
Laura: Great. Thank you, Tammy. This was just a delight, and I feel like I want to relisten to this episode because I feel like I learned a lot, too, of things I can take away and put into my practice as well with kids.
So I appreciate you.
TAMMY: Yeah, and that's what I get from the podcast..
Laura: Good. I'm so glad. I just... And now you're sharing. You're giving back. You're sharing with everyone.
TAMMY: Try to. Yeah. I just have a lot of respect. I work year round, snow, rain, whatever it is. I think I own every possible garment you need for working outside.
The gear, yes. Every type of boot or shoe. Yeah, just to all the therapists and... Counselors, clinicians out there, day after day, sometimes it's a grind to put on your big parka and insulated coveralls and go out in snow boots. But I think what we do is so important. It really is.
It makes a difference for children and families.
Laura: Yep. And we always feel better once we get out there, even when you don't feel like going. This is true. Even when you're like, it's really cold and windy. I don't feel like going. And it might be hard, but you feel great after you go. Even if it was a hard day, it's like good for us to move our bodies outdoors and be with kids.
TAMMY: It is. I absolutely agree with you. It is worth it. It is. Put on that parka. Get out the umbrella. Whatever you need.
Laura: That's the takeaway from this episode. Just put on the gear, put on the gear out. You go. Yeah. Thanks, Tammy. I appreciate you.
TAMMY: Thank you. Bye.
Thanks for joining me today for therapy in the great outdoors. If you want valuable advice, as you start or grow your nature based pediatric practice, get my free ebook, the nature based practice roadmap. It is a guide to help you focus and avoid. Mistakes as you start or grow your outdoor work with children in it.
I share the four stages of nature-based practice, what you need to focus on and common mistakes to avoid in each stage. Plus a checklist of specific action steps for you to take at each stage in the process. Get it at Therapy in the great outdoors.com/. roadmap. So until next time, get outside, connect, reflect, and enjoy therapy in the great outdoors.
