Transforming Workplace Safety: Insights from Terry Wong

Welcome back to the Successful EP, the podcast where we taught leading exercise physiologists and health professionals, building about building successful, impactful careers, running thriving businesses and advancing the profession. I'm your host, Lenny Hazelwood. On this show, we dive into stories, strategies and lessons from EPs and health professionals doing exceptional work and spark conversations that we should often be having but often art. Today's guests brings a powerful perspective from corporate safety and performance world. Here's the general manager of Move For Life and a keynote speaker focused on helping organizations reduce manual handling injuries and rethink how safety is approached in the workplace. Across two decades working in safety and risk programs, he has first hand seen the gap between traditional compliance-based training and real-world behavior change. And now works with leadership and frontline teams to shift organisations towards performance-driven safety. Move For Life has supported more than 10,000 workers with some organisations supporting injury reductions of up to 50%. And perhaps more importantly, engagement levels that translate into sustained behavior change. Today, we explore what exercise professionals can learn from workplace safety leadership, implementation at scale, and the role communication and influence play in driving meaningful outcomes. If you want EP wanting to expand beyond your impact on the clinic, strengthen your communication skills, or better understand how to work with leadership teams, this conversation will give you practical insight and a border lens on what's possible. Terry, one, welcome to the podcast. Thank you very much, Lenny. Glad to be here. The first question off the bat is what prompted you to get into workplace safety in the first place? And what prompted you to join Move For Life? Yeah, I think just off the bat, I feel like a bit of a fraud being on the podcast because theoretically, I'm not an EP, right? So that being said, I have been around EP's in my entire career, every business I've worked in has employed EP's. So I think I'm relatively well versed in, I guess, the EP world. So my journey was probably not just like many others, I left school, I wanted to become a physio, didn't quite get the marks, and then ended up doing a bachelor's science at the University of Sydney. Did that for a year, and then they tapped all of us on the shoulder and said, "Hey, we've got these medical science degrees that we're about to start. Would you like to transition over?" So I thought, "Oh, that's a little bit close to the physio." So I went and did that? End of doing an honours year in nutritional biochemistry of all things. So we were testing human subjects on the impact of M/E3s on cardiovascular heart disease. And I think the one thing I learned out of that episode, like many sort of career choices in life, that is definitely one thing that I didn't want to do. So at least I struck that off the list and so I moved on to the next thing. I really part the physio, I got into physio and because at the time, this is almost 30 years ago in our clinic, the physio degrees were a little bit different. There was only an undergrade degree, there wasn't any sort of NASA's sort of program. So I was enrolled in a four-year undergrade degree with lots of prerequisite learning already done. So I wasn't at uni a huge amount. So which allowed me to work. So when I worked at Work in gyms, I worked, I ended up working for an organisation that worked in Workers' Coal, and I was providing exercise rehab programs, I suppose, in gyms for people who had sort of suffered work injuries. And that was my first real significant exposure to exercise in that sort of space. Physio worked part-time as a in private practice, but also part-time as an assessing physio in that same business. Working with EPs, and we were a significant employer of EPs in that sort of at that time. And did that and worked for that business for about eight years in total. And during that years, I sort of shifted away from the, I guess, the workers comp stuff and more into the injury prevention. I think that was more my jam. I think it was, you know, it was better, much more wide around the prevention is better than Cuba sort of philosophy, if you like. Did that for a few years, ended up running that business. And then for whatever reason, I guess I got burnt out and sort of there, I needed, I need to take a bit of a year off. And I took a year off just doing some consulting, which was refreshing, but that's when I got introduced and moved for life. So loop for life has been around since 2005. I got introduced to them in 2008 through a mutual customer. Like we were actually doing work with Colgag Palmyl, both of us for different, different parts of the business. And the person in the middle that our contact I suppose said, "Hey, you guys talk similar language, you've got similar values, philosophies, why don't you sort of have a conversation and hook up?" And I guess that was the blind date that started. Everything and I've been at loop for life now for 18 years. So it's been a hell of a journey. What is the main role that you do within loop for life? So I guess as general manager, I look after the day-to-day operations of the business. So that takes anything to account from in terms of running a small business. But I guess my primary role is to interact with customers to make sure that they get the most out of the services that we provide. We're probably best known for a movement based training program. Commonly that's, guess, slotted into the manual handling space. It's a lot more than that I think, but that's typically where it gets used. And I guess I'm responsible for working with probably medium to large national sort of businesses to make sure they extract the most and out of value out of what we have to offer. And obviously trying to prevent those injuries from happening in the workplace in the first place. So with working with some of those medium to large-scale national companies, what surprises you about some of their current levels of organization or national safety? Oh, look, I think you come across a wide variety of maturity when it comes down to organizational safety. Look, we have businesses who are really struggling with workplace injuries. Don't have the systems in place. Culture's not fantastic. The work is tough. I think that's the other thing. A lot of the organisations we work with either do repetitive or strenuous sort of work, if you like. So we work from anything from that end in the spectrum or the way to organisations that have great foundations, have great systems and are really just looking to push that the culture, I suppose, the safety culture. And they're not just the safety culture, so the wellbeing space as well, which is this place what we like to play in because it allows us to really sort of take advantage of our programme. That being said, our programme is applicable across across the board. So it is a bit of a mixed bag. I'd like to say that some of the large organisations we deal with, you'd think that they would have be a little bit more mature, but quite often they're not, it's just the beast, I suppose. And so what separates companies from being more compliance driven from performance driven? You mentioned before that you prefer to work in a space of companies that already have those strong foundations and it's more towards that wellbeing and performance. You, a scale of all across all different parts of their business or wherever they're at. But what have you primarily seen separates a business from being compliance driven versus performance driven in their safety? Yeah, it's a good point. So a compliance driven organisation is is very much about ticking the box. So there are regular drew requirements that all businesses need to satisfy. So in our space, what that looks like is sticking employees in front of a video TV or a computer playing a video and doing some sort of e-learning module on manual hamming. So as EPs, we know learning those skills is not necessarily, you can't expect someone to learn how to move by through all the smokers and watching a video. So I think organisations like there's plenty of those, but I think the ones that really get it, I think really value the, I guess the value an employee brings to an organisation, not just in terms of getting the work done, but really understanding the value of their contribution, the value of having a great culture. And obviously the performance benefits that sort of come off that and the reduction in injuries and the reduction in absenteeism, all the really cool things about an employee going, I actually really want to work here and I enjoy working here and I enjoy my colleagues and I want to do the best thing by the companies. Those organisations understand that real world behaviour changes about capturing hearts and minds, that providing skills and whatnot that apply to not just their work, life, but also their life outside of work as well. So that 24-hour period sort of period is really important. And they're the ones that are investing in their employees, which I think is the other critical thing, because if they're investing in an organisation like us, then it means that they care about their goals. I think that's a bit of a problem. Why would you say most manual handling programmes that may be currently in place fail, or if not fail, don't do as well as they could? Yeah, it's a topic I guess question in our space because I think if you look at the evidence and look so for Australia being quite outward in pushing this manual handling training and it's in its essence, does not work, right? That's what the evidence would suggest. But my response to that is typically not all programmes are created equally, not all programmes are deployed equally. So it's a little bit like the way I think about it, it's a little bit like an EP working with the client, have one training session, teach them all the exercise and they need to do, and then leaving them to their own devices. So expecting that they'll, they've taught them, they'll do it, right? And we know 100% for a fact that while you might get the 1% that will do that, most people need a bit of extra support and I think that's the failing of a lot of programmes. It's the sustainable Bayer hate behaviour change that needs those strategies to help make those principles, those movements, what those teachings, what it may be, make them stick. And I think that's the failing on a lot of programmes and as a result, manual handling training, coffee, quite often gets a bad rap, not always executed overly well. It's not the sexiest topic in the world either, right? Most people have done it at some point in their life, so they come in, drag in their heels, not overly engaging, not expecting to learn anything new. So it makes it a bit of a tough gig. So that's I think there are a couple of reasons as to why a lot of those programs are. Yeah, you mentioned their behavior change. What misconceptions may those sort of companies have about behavior change? And how can, how does our move for life and yourself help to change their conception on that? Yeah, I think a lot of organisations under estimate the amount of work that's involved to change anyone's behavior. It's a complex thing. There's no doubt about it. We are wide in a particular way for many, many different reasons. And sometimes those that wiring means that people make not great decisions and as a result, people get hurt, right? So I think that, but those who get it, understand sort of what needs to be put in place. For your listeners, I think if you haven't, let me have you read the atomic habit. Yeah, exactly. I think if you have, then I certainly recommend that book. Because I think it gives a really good understanding of the process of habit change, the process of behavior change, and what it takes and how, what things need to be lined up to be able to make it happen. And I think what we do as an organisation and what we try to do and it doesn't always work is to make it as easy as it possibly can for organisations to execute a behaviour change programme for argument sake. I think just reflecting on, I think, for those of your listeners who are involved, particularly in sort of corporate sort of space, there's a good chance that they're involved in the development of deployment of warm-up programmes within corporate Australia, right? And that in itself is a behaviour change programme, right? Because in Australia, warm-up programmes are not the norm, if you like. You go to Japan or Asia, 100%, it is people doing warm-ups, exercises in Unison, singing the company song, and away they go, right? But in Australia, it's still a bit of a foreign concept. So what we see in that space, and sometimes this is the reason why it doesn't stick, is we still see lots of very static stretching programmes designed to prepare people for work. And we know from a physiology perspective, they're just not going to work, right? Many of the programmes, I think I've seen designed extremely comprehensive, which is fantastic, because I know you want to give them the best. But the problem is, is that sometimes they're that comprehensive, and they take that long, so maybe after 10 minutes, that they just fail to stick. They just don't quite understand, you need to sort of integrate this into the people's working day. So when we design strategies like that, we use a philosophy that the best exercises, the exercise that's done, right? So, and it's what's done consistently. So rather than design a 10 minute workout, warm up, we have a 60 second routine. And we design it that way, one, so it's easy. Two, so you can, yeah, there's very little excuses on not doing it, because everyone can find 60 seconds. And then we find that it's a lot easier to execute. Well, we call habit linking. So one of the critical things that comes out of that book, the Tomi Kalat challenge is the idea that to create a new habit, is a lot easier if you link it to an existing habit, right? So we link it into pre-start routines and whatnot. If they want, if they can successfully prove that they do it then, then we can build, right? We can go to one, two, four, five minutes, make it a little bit more complex, make it a lot more dynamic, similar to the word that they do. So I think that behavior change, and that happens, that takes time. Like it's not going to happen overnight. You can't just go, hey, everyone, we want you to do warm up programs, see you later. It takes time. It takes having leaders in place to support it and champion. It takes education for the employees' perspective to understand why they're actually doing it. Because quite often we go, hey, do this and not explain why. And I think the why is really important to make it stick. So it is a complex beast. It does take a little bit of work. But I think the effort is in this success. Like the benefits that you see, other things, the reasons is to why you keep on doing what you're doing, I guess. Yeah, that's really interesting. And particularly hearing that a lot of the concepts that may apply in clinical practice or private practice are transferable over to workplace and occupational health as well. Absolutely. I think that, I mean, I just think back on the days when we were doing what was called work hardening at the time. And then it sort of takes us into work, and if you need to do any of the next steps, read every moment. Not. I think our, the epithet we work with, saw a multitude of equals. As a cross-sitioner, the employment population. A lot of these people, people who have on workers can't have work injuries, and not always the simplest cases to deal with. Like I said, a lot of the campaign conditions that keep with both our daily basis. Lots of emotional related stuff, you're dealing with societal issues, movement and health related issues. And I think the skills that you learn working one-on-one with someone is 100% transferable to a group or an organisational city. And I think that foundation on understanding people, how learning how to communicate with people, is going to see them to do things that they wouldn't otherwise do. Because the executive is still set. And exactly the foundations that you need to work on before sort of going out to sort of a bigger population must be. That's interesting and very reassuring to hear. When it comes to the implementation of these programs, you have obviously worked with plenty of companies, nationally. What have you mainly seen from an implementation perspective that is the biggest difference between whether it succeeds, whether it fails? That's a really good question. And if I figured that out, I'd probably be more successful than what we are. Look, I think there's a couple of things that we, we're going to look at back at our business and we do some planning and we sort of go, "Hey, what went wrong in this particular?" Because it doesn't always go right, right? So, one of the most challenging things within, I guess, the corporate world is the relationships you have with the people that are really important in an organisation, particularly at the leadership level. One of the easiest way to end a relationship with an organisation is if you're key person, the person you have built a relationship leads and moves on to another organisation. And there's no structure around it to support it. So, I think that relationship with the leadership person and/or group, I think is really important. So, to have that relationship, you just need to learn to talk their language, right? And I think at the top level, understanding I get some communicating what they're looking for, which largely is a return investment. So, the ROI and why am I engaging your organisation as opposed to anyone else? And what results can you bring to the table for me as a person and as an organisation is a critical thing to understand? And that could vary. Like, it could be cost savings. It could be reduction in injuries. It could be some sort of safety engagement metric. It could be just making them look good. Like, whatever it is, you know, understanding what that is, I think is a really critical piece. And having them champion you in your work, I think is also important, right? Yeah, most of the people, you know, the people, we're lucky because we, you know, we work with, you know, top level executives. And the good thing is, is they do move from organisation to organisation. And that's how you're quiet and your customers, right? So, it's probably our best, plus easiest, the most cost effective business development activity. But they are the ones that get what you do. And they are the ones that go, okay, cool. I understand that the cultural shifts that your programme brings. I understand that the wellbeing sort of slant that you guys have. I understand that, you guys can reduce injuries and that you're going to engage in employees and whatnot. So, I think, you know, leadership at the top, it's about understanding what they're interested in. But I think that one of the greatest tunneling blocks is you might have great support from the top. But if you don't have that, the support of the sort of what we call middle management or the operational leaders, the guys in the middle that are actually making, doing the hard work and making, you know, stuff happen. If you don't get them on board, you, it's really hard to build this sustainable beast that I was sort of talking about before here. And for those guys, it's about, yeah, they've got their own, they've got the day job, right? And, you know, if their boss comes in and says, hey, I've got this new program and this new thing you need to do. Or the sudden they work with people that sometimes. So, understanding how to, you know, great, make their life easy, I think, is a really, another important part to understanding that sort of leadership channels. With having these programs, I imagine you work with companies that and businesses that have all different levels of revenue and a number of employees. How do you scale? How do you create engagement at scale, say, for a 10 person business versus like a 100 person business? Yeah, I think, I think the heart of it, engagement is still a person to person thing, right? So, it is still someone, human being, engaging with someone else. Ideally in person, obviously, you can do stuff over the video these days. But again, it's hard to teach someone how to move better by video. It's not hard. It's definitely more challenging, right? I think it's about having the systems in place to make sure that you're able to communicate sort of more broadly, if you like. You know, provided you've got messaging that is nice and tight and is what we refer to as sticky, that is something that's going to last the course of time, that definitely helps. I think building a champion network, particularly within our large organisations, is also critical. People on the ground, championing what you do. I'm in our model for deploying our training programs. We've got our trainer China sort of model, if you like. So what we do is we work with employees and they could be health professionals and more often than not 95% of the time they're not. And we teach them how to deliver our program. We try to know to a lot of health professionals that a lot of a lot of health professionals were reacting that way and going, what are you talking about? You're telling me you teach non-health professionals a program to teach other people on how to move better. And absolutely that's exactly what we do. And I think we do it really well. And we've done it with we've taught thousands of people. And some of our best trainers have been guys off the shop floor. So being able to have a network of people singing from the same song sheet, delivering your message is really the only way you can deal with SCAR. I think that's where I, that's why I moved from sort of more clinical practice where you're dealing one-on-one with people through to what we do at the moment because we can have impact at SCAR. And that's ultimately sort of what it comes, what it comes down to in the end. Because if you're doing this to have an impact on the human race, then it's very hard to do that if you just want to. Yeah. If you've got lots of people out there banging the drum, then yeah, it just means that everyone gets more of the magic and has a better outcome overall. You mentioned three things there, which was having the rights systems and players, making sure the message sticks and then have a championship team that you've trained up. I think all of those three things are really interesting. I'd like to delve a little bit more into the stickiness of the message if that's okay. Absolutely. What does that, when you say getting a message to stick, firstly, I imagine you'd have to define what the message is very, very well and very, very tightly. What is the message you deliver? So our program is about effectively helping people move better. That's at the heart of it, right? And I think to deliver that, you need to have a very clear value proposition and by value proposition, I think everyone you're dealing with, you need to articulate what value you might bring to those people. So I think that's the first place to start and to get people on board. Because I mean, when anyone deals with anyone either in a small group or on a one-on-one basis or a small group order at MAB, articulating that you can actually help them with the problems that they actually have, I think is critical. And also getting their agreement, right? So we're very adamant at saying, if we're able to reduce back home or help in these last a little bit longer or at MAB, would you be happy with that outcome from after our exchange? And it's really critical that in our training program, that we ask that question in that way because you actually want to get a yes from the people that you're dealing with. And I think that's really important because that sort of opens the door to say, hey, I'm actually here for a reason, give me what you got. So I think that's the first critical piece. And then it's about, then it's about, what are you trying to teach them? Ultimately. And how do you make it sexy and menorable and slightly out of the norm, if you like, that helps it stick, right? So I'm going to give you a good example, right? So we, you know, in our space, a lot of shoulder injuries, for example, occur when people are putting their shoulders, pushing, pulling, lifting, or MAB in compromised positions. And typically that's in an abductured sort of effect, sort of sort of sense, if you like. So you could either come in and say, hey, guys, we want you to prevent you from abducting your arms at 90 degrees at shoulder height, for example, or you can go, you can say, hey, guys, actually, we want you to avoid those chigawings, right? So, and that's, and we explain why and what it is and we're doing experiential thing, but the thing, actually that chigawing sort of phrase is, is a phrase that is synonymous with move for life. And everyone I come across, who even people who have sort of seen the program 10 years ago, talking about exactly that. And the reason why is because it's sticky, you know, it's just some, some things stick, right? Something stick better than others, but just trying to find your little, little sort of sticky factor, I suppose, is I think a really important, important piece of the puzzle. No, that makes sense to me. My other follow-up question to that was, you mentioned, around delivering a value proposition. And whilst the industry remains the same, do you come across any difficulty with delivering that value proposition for, say, a younger workforce versus an older workforce? Yeah, that's an interesting one. So, I think, like anything else, the effectiveness with those two ends of the spectrum come down to another proposition, right? So, with the, with the older workforce, a lot of people, what they'll say is, oh, you can't teach an adult during tricks. What, like, what's the point in trying to teach these people how to move a little bit differently? But what we find is if you can give people, particularly those who, that, that, that part of the demographic, are busted and they've been working in a way that is causing all sorts of extra-no pain. So, if you can give them an option where it doesn't hurt when they bend, lift, push, pull, then there you're great at stuff. So, they're actually the easiest group to, to shift because pain is a really powerful motorbike, right? And if you can reduce pain or eliminate it, then they'll be your friends for life. So, that's that for a path. And then, then you look at the other and in the spectrum, I mean, then you're still young, you know, you know, you know, how it is, when you're young, you're six, four, ten-foot tall and bulletproof and nothing's gonna, nothing's gonna injure you, right? And that's the sort of, particularly with apprentices and people just come into the new, into the workforce. But the value proposition for them is different, maybe. Like, it's, it's okay. Well, instead of reducing pain, maybe it's optimizing performance. Yeah. So, you know, we look at, we look, we use a lot of accumulated sort of analogies out of, out of work benefits because obviously the stuff that you take, you choose, relevant at work, but maybe they're more interested these days about, you know, how does this apply to my life? Like, where can I get value in this? So, while the value proposition is different, it is still there, right? It's okay. Cool. I got it. And then if you get, well, suddenly one of the old guys come in and say, "Nate, just listen to this stuff because if I'd learned this 30 years ago, I wouldn't be the way I am." That messaging is, is even more powerful, right? So, I think it still comes down to where, you know, what triggers do I need to pull to make sure that people get value out of this? And it, and a very strong person, and group from group. Yeah, that makes sense. I know you do a lot of public speaking. I've seen some of your presentations and now more recently your videos on LinkedIn, which might I add sound very well articulated to you. Thank you, mate. I really enjoy them. When it comes to influencing behavior versus delivering information, specifically in our public speaking environment, whether that's delivering workshops, seminars, etc. Do you have any frameworks or tips or tricks for EPs if they want to influence someone's behavior at the end of that workshop or presentation versus just deliver some information and the person say, "Okay, that was cool." Yeah, that's a really good point. And then particularly in keynote speaking, when you're talking to thousands of people, your degree of influence is different than if you're working one-on-one or in small groups. Each of those mediums probably has a slightly different benefit. So in keynote speaking, it's about raising curiosity, it's about delivering a concept or a principle or a piece of content for people to start thinking about and go, "I haven't thought about that, right?" At the end of a keynote, particularly a keynote, you ride. I don't think you can just keep people hanging. They need a call to action. And I think a call to action is essential whether you're working one-on-one or working with thousands in a little bit. So giving them and having you to go, "Hey, this is like I'm interested. I want to do more." What does that actually look like? I think is a critical piece to the puzzle. I think, again, it comes down to value, it comes down to having a system for consistency, it comes down to giving people some metrics to measure that they can then go away and go, "Okay, I can do something with this information." Or even simple things like, you know, with a lot of the movement or the health technology that we have at the moment, that people have on their risks and on their fingers and whatnot. I think that's a really good starting point because if you can loop into something that they're already doing or they've already got, then that certainly helps from that perspective. One of the things that I do talk about on stage is the impact of the increasing sedentary nature of everyone, right? So, just a bit, a move for us message is not just about moving better. It's also helping people move more as well. So utilizing the things that are around critical pieces to the puzzle as well. You mentioned their mediums. So, keynote speaking to thousands of people versus a one-on-one versus maybe a group of a hundred. What's, it sounds like the biggest difference between those different mediums is yeah, like the, the amount of influence you can have over that person. How does your speaking or framework change for other than keynote speaking? I'm going to be a bit selfish here and because I have a workshop coming up with 50 people, how would it change to delivering it for 50 people? Okay, so let's workshop this then, Lenny. So, what's your, what's your, what's your 50 people? It's called the science of staying fit and strong for people over 16. Cool. Okay. And what's the format? How long have you got with them? I've got 90 minutes and it's in a stenta and they get morning tea and water throughout as well. That's important. Being fed is important for workshop. And what do you want the outcome to be? I want the outcome to be that they have something that they can take away and start doing in their day-to-day lives or if they're more interested. in making our bigger change in our life, joining up to our group program. Cool, okay, nice. Good business, business slant. So I think from, I think for any workshop without environment, particularly the types of workshops that the piece will deliver, you know, a critical part, and I'm guessing, Lenny, a big part of that 90 minutes will be people experiencing something, right? Doing stuff. And I think that's important because obviously that's what you're saying. And it's linked very tightly to the missing gene that you have. So I think an experiential learning experience is really, really important. I think there's not enough of that, to be honest, like in terms of, particularly in the corporate space, is, yeah, there's a lot of people talking out people. So if you're, you know, delivering a workshop to 50 or 100 or maybe having a kind of aesthetic compiler is critical, I think. It's certainly a critical thing within our space because a lot of the people that we work with, are people who do is, right? They get their hands dirty, they do things. So you can't expect them to sit in front of a PowerPoint presentation and go, "How are you, olds?" or, "This is an awesome training session." I love being talked at and being going stuff on slides, right? Particularly if you were reading from the slide, which is my biggest but, so. So I think that that kind of aesthetic component is really important. Think having your workshop participants articulate what they're going to do after this workshop is also a really important thing because they need to say what their intention is to be. Like, it's fine to think about it and it's fine to be told what it should be. But if they're in front of the group and they're saying, "Yeah, what I want to do with this information is to do this and do this and do this and do this." Then all of a sudden, yet there's so grounds with the people who all want to do the same thing, right? And hopefully we'll then take the next step because they're not aligned. Because it's so easy just to go back to the norm, back to what we call their "autopart," which is their lives as they were. I think you need to create an opportunity for them to take action and verbalise that. So I think they're the sort of things and you get to do that when you're working with 50 people or 100 because you can do that either to the entire group or you can break them up and do it. They can have that to do that exercise in smaller groups. So there's, you can use the same sort of philosophy, but just in a slightly different format, depending on how many people you have. So when you say a man about verbalising their future actions and sort of putting it out to the world, what their next intent is, do you prompt that to say the audience or do you sort of get them lucky just mentioned to break up into smaller groups and deliver it to the person in their group? Look, I think you can do it both ways. I like the idea of small groups conversation. Because it's safe, right? It's a little bit more comfortable and then bring it back to the group, right? And then have either a spokesperson or you just ask for people who say who want to go, okay, can someone give me a summary of what the conversations you have within your group? And verily within the group, there's a spokesperson or someone who doesn't mind sort of speaking up. And so you sort of get, best of both words, you get individuals sharing within our own small group and then you get the summary I suppose of that group's sort of to the entire group. And I think that's where you get the grounds for the movement. - Yeah, that's great. For EPs that maybe haven't done any sort of public speaking before, what sort of advice would you give them if they're willing to get more into public speaking and promote more awareness at a broader scale? - Yeah, it's a good question. I think firstly, if EPs are going, I don't think I've got the skill set, what can I assure you that if you've been working one-on-one with clients, then you have the foundations of a great skill set from a communication perspective, right? So I think that's from the outset. And then it's just about ramping it up from one person to small groups, they 10 or 12 to 50 to 100 to 1,000 and then just building from there, depending on where you want to go with it, right? I know a lot of, oh no, there was a saying, although a lot of EPs, and it's actually to be honest, not just EPs, but people in general have this inherent fear of public speaking. It is, there are people who would prefer to die before actually having to get up in front of people and talk sort of publicly, if you like. In actual fact, I think people feel like they're dying when they do it. So I get the fear, right? But it's like anything else, it's bad exposure 'cause most people have this massive sort of fight-of-flight response when they're standing in front of people, but like anything, like any fight-of-flight response, it tends to be dulled, the more repetition you get exposed to it. So any opportunity you get to speak in front of people, I would take it, even if it's hard. And that could happen in a work setting and it could be as simple as talking up in a meeting a little bit more than you would otherwise. It could be being asked to say a speech at a friend's birthday party or wedding or whatever it may be. Even those opportunities are really valuable learning experiences. I would also recommend anyone or it, he piece of become a student of the process. So the process of communicating to large volumes of people, right? I think he's also a really critical thing. If he's wanna check out a communication guy, check out a guy by the name of Vin Giang. So it's V-I-N-H, certainly it's Giang, which is G-I-A-N-G. Yes. And he's cool. He's got some really, really cool stuff. He runs programs obviously as a business, but he's got lots of really cool free content. And I think a lot of that information will certainly resonate. But I think it's, you know, it's practice, it's like anything else, it's just practice the next pose that I think. I'm probably testing really that because I think at school, one thing I hated was public speaking or debating. I would phone sickness if I had something like that at school. And if you go from that sort of meat-mild, inverted to a kidney, to understanding what I do now, you'd go, "What the hell happened to this life?" Right? And that's what happened a lot of my friends. But that just comes through repetition. I remember the first time I spoke to a group. It was a group of council workers in the inner-western Sydney, and they were a Ruffa's gut. They were a tough crowd. They were, you know, they'd done this menu, hailing training for G-Four. Yes. I knew what they were thinking. What's this young Asian kid got to teach us about how to do our job? But as tough as that was, and as good now, I came at the end. It was the repetition of the exposure or just taking the chance to get out there and put yourself out there and have a go was they've been effectively to what I did today. Which I think is really good. I love it. With the sort of on that note as well, I'm a big sucker for fame works when it and principles when it comes to learning any new skill. So much a sucker when it comes like find a strict rigid structure. I think there's always the variety of spice and having, I think more tools in the toolbox that you can just implement as you need to adapt it to the situation. At least for me, has been more beneficial than trying to fly like an strict protocol. One of the books I'm reading at the moment is the official guide to public speaking, the Ted Talk official guide to public speaking actually. I haven't read that one. Yep. I only like a few, I don't think one chapter in, but that was really interesting. Do you have any resources like that that you may have watched or listened to and you mentioned that, what was his name, Vin Chang? Yeah. Look, I think my evolution to a keynote speaking has taken 15 years effectively. And I think what my approach is, while your approach is very much sort of frame-work-based, my approach has always been just grabbing stuff along the way. Right. And that's essentially what I've done. I've seen speakings and went, "Oh, that's really cool." I think let's, how do we sort of incorporate that? Try that. That didn't really go quite well. Then let's rework it or do this. So I'm a student. So I think being a student of the game, I think is important. So I'll look at, say for example, I'll watch a stand-up coming and go, "Okay, cool. How does he structured his joke, so I suppose, to get the laugh at the end?" And then how does he come back to that later on in his gig and then sort of loop that in? And I think that's a really cool skill. I think it's grabbing something that happens at the start, build it into the, I think that's it. I think I'd do that reasonably well. But that's been learned from studying stand-up comics. I've learned a lot from, I've gone to the occasional live show, takings of TV shows and whatnot, like seeing contests and all that sort of stuff. And while they're interesting, the warm-up guy is really important. The understanding how the warm-up guy, that gets the crowd to a bit of a frenzy, understanding his art and how to do that, I think that's fascinating. So I think just little things like that, I've grabbed the law the way. To put a finger on exactly what it is, it's really hard, right? Because it's, you grab little things you tried, and experiment and whatnot. But I think it's just copying, or is the greatest form of fluidity. And I think in the end, you still need to say authentic and truly yourself. So you don't want to be a copy of someone or something. But if you're an evolution of lots of different things, then I think that's the, that's sort of how you evolve, I suppose, as a keynote speaker. Love it. And now for a sec, and going more broadly back to EP. rather than specifically public speaking and keynote speaking. For any EP listening to this, I imagine there may be some in the corporate setting. For your experience, and I know you're background is physiotherapy, but regardless, I think there's definitely a lot of translatable skills and behaviors over. What key capabilities do you think EP's need to have in the corporate environments? That could be things like skill sets that might be things like values, it might be how they display themselves. Yeah, I think I'm going to scrape that EP's, you know, you see more and more EP's in that corporate space. So for those EP's you haven't explored it, there's lots of EP's in insurance lane, particularly workers call, and in others, in other forms of insurance as well. There's lots of EP's in, in rehab provider land as well, increasingly more in training and consultancy businesses like Move for Life. So obviously there's that's the natural, that's a simple transition, because you're still using your skill set, but maybe just in a slightly different way, right? Increasingly, there's also EP's in non-clinical sort of roles, so we're being at sales or marketing or sort of more operational roles. So I think the benefit to that is if you're working on front of an organisation that has EP related services, and you're performing a non-clinical role, you know, the greatest advantage is you can talk to talk with me, and then what's actually happening on the ground, but you've got this completely different question, right? So I think, you know, it's a nice evolution. Like so if you get EP's who have done the clinical piece and want to sort of be stretched or challenge a little bit more, then certainly those opportunities exist within corporate space. So I think it's definitely a good space to explore. I think you'll find that you'll have to start, most EP's will have to start from the ground up to your time and then sort of work up from there, but if you find an organisation that is willing to promote and give people opportunities, then that's, I think that's really important. From a skillset perspective, look, we've talked a lot about communication, I think that's a critical piece to the puzzle, as to whether you will succeed in a corporate environment, being understanding how to work within a team is also important. If you feel like you're working with yourself or as a sole trader or maybe, you know, working with an larger group of people, obviously, is really important. But even within that, that sort of team network, understand, you know, working autonomously and with initiative, I think is critical. And whenever we have an EP working with us, if they're able to suggest ideas or challenge the status quo or look at things a little bit differently because they're aware of new technology that we're not aware of, then we love that sort of stuff because it helps us evolve, right? Because remember, I'm decades out of clinical. So understanding new things is definitely something that you can bring to it, so any business. And look, obviously, they're understanding non-clinical skills and developing those sort of skills is important, as increasingly, believe that the need to understand how to work technology, including AI, I think is a really valuable sort of skillset because it's a massive field. Most people don't have a grapple on it. Most businesses don't have a good handle on it. So if you can add some value in that space, that's gold, right? That's definitely gold. Yeah, that's an interesting gold, and I got the. I guess the other end of the spectrum rather than the benefits of value they can add, where do you see most, even just EP's, but health professionals and general struggle in the organizational settings? I think one of the things that, whenever we've introduced EP's into our business, until a certain degree, you have to understand the way the philosophy of the way move for life sort of works. So we're big on facilitating someone's learning, so they figure out the answers for themselves. And by that, I mean, we use a lot of what we call "secretary questioning," which is, can we ask you a series of questions? So you figure out the answer to yourself as opposed to me telling you what you should be doing. That shift is what most health professionals, not EP's alone, it's all health professionals struggle with. And it's not anyone's fault, it's partly the system, right? The system is you go to someone and expert for argument sake, be it an EP or physio or doctor, and what the system says is that, as the expert, you should tell me what's going on, right? If we've got this sort of autopilot to someone who asks a question, then you just give them the answer. - Yeah. - So what we have to unpack at a lot is don't just give people the answer, ask them get curious and get used to asking lots of questions. And if you can get them to figure out the answer for themselves, then that's a lot more sustainable and a lot more long-term lifelong learning as opposed to you just telling them something and it goes in one year and out the other. So I think that skill set is definitely one that needs to be worked on. And that will help not just see it in your clinical setting, but also operating within a sort of corporate environment as well. So I think that is probably one of the greatest shifts that we find with a lot of health professionals. - Yeah, no, I think that's very valuable, actually. This has been one of a philosophical question. Do you think that more and more businesses and workplaces and maybe society as a whole are transitioning to more of that socratic questioning and autonomous learning? Like, yeah, I'm not sure whether you've seen much of that or whether it's predominantly been inside your own organization. - Yeah, no, I think it is happening and it stems from education system to be honest. So in the good old days when I went to school, it was all a very what we call didactic, which is teacher, tell, student listen, right learning, right? Having had young kids, mind you, their teenagers and adults now, even with their schooling, the process of learning, they're getting taught how to learn, not what to learn necessarily, is changing. So that's happening. So we see young adults entering the workforce with that sort of background, that certainly helps. But we're also working within a health system that is centri-resolved and has lots of, you know, sometimes ineffective sort of habits, if you like. So it's a bit of a challenge. So there's this sort of almost like this, this meeting of sort of the two different approaches. It doesn't always go well. But over time, it'll definitely change. - Yeah. - If you were designing education for EPs, we talked a bit about learning so far, which is really cool. If you were designing education for EPs entering the corporate space, what would be essential in those sort of modules or courses? - That's a good question. There are smarter people than me that probably design these sort of programs. Look, I think understanding the way an organization works. So the different roles and the dynamics, 'cause I think that's one of the challenges when you work with corporates. And it's the bureaucracy, it's the structure, it's all those sort of things that make an organization work and sometimes not work. Understanding that sort of ecosystem, I think it will be a pretty cool thing. And sometimes you could probably explain it in frameworks and theory and it's not really until you jump into an organization that you really see in action. That being said, every organization is all for people. So I think it's, but I think, I'm aware of that I think is important. I think talking to the language of corporates, I think is important. Just understanding what metrics, what things are pretty cool to organizations in terms of the total investment and financials and all those sort of things. I think we as health professionals, we tend to put a few ourselves into this social space of helping human beings. But sometimes when we walk into the corporate space, understanding how the world works and how money's made and all that sort of stuff is, is a bit of a rude awakening. So I think giving people any heads up about that sort of space is important. And I think to be honest, the best way to understand the proper world is to dip your toe in, right? And experience it. So if you get the opportunity to apply to a general or work experience and what are up in the day with an organization that has an exposure to it, I think that's really good. Even if it's within an organization from wide services to corporates, I think we'll give people, I'm a move, I've had students within our business and it just sort of opens their eyes in terms of the way in which organizations work, understanding the bathroom conversations and we don't do this or we behave in this particular way or where it may be. I think having that exposure certainly at least gives you an idea as to whether you want to do it as a career or you struck that one off the list, right? I think they have the sort of things that will be important from their. From a program perspective. Yeah, I guess you could do all the learning in the world, but until you immerse yourself in it, you don't really know. Yeah, and don't be afraid to give it a go, right? So I think be bold in taking the leap and trying something. And again, like me at the start, at worst you figure out what you don't want to do and that way you're a little bit closer to knowing exactly what you want to do. And I think in the end that's only going to benefit you. - Terry, it's been amazing, I'm just a conversation. We have a tradition on this podcast, which is just wrapping up with the final question. It's a little bit vague, but yeah, take your time to answer it. What's one topic or issue you think EP should be talking about more openly with each other? - Well, that's a good question. I think that look EP's are a little bit similar to physios in a sense than that they're relatively siloed. So I think work hard at finding your tribe. So be it in the corporate squares, be it in the clinical setting, be it in even specific conditions if you like, I think creating [BLANK_AUDIO] work is going to be a lifelong benefit. Now I've got a daughter who's studying exercise and sports science at the moment and even the way uni runs these days, given the relatively lack of contact time that you have with your peers as opposed to, I guess, back in the day when I went to uni, you were hanging around with them all the time and building that network. So I think the opportunities are not as great. So when you get those opportunities, when you find someone who has a similar interest to you, latch onto them, don't let them go and sort of continue to build that that tribe, if you like. Everyone's in the zephyr the same boat. Everyone's got the same questions. They've got the same challenges. I think if you find groups of people who you can have a conversation with and bounce ideas off and share frustrations and vent and all that sort of stuff that comes with being an APN in today's world, I think in the end that will give you a huge amount of value. To not just them, but also yourself as well. So I reckon find your tribe. That's fantastic. And that leads really well into one thing that I mentioned here is we do also have a Facebook community page that has now 1300 EPs in it. So like Terry just mentioned, if you are looking to connect with people like mehred in a similar space and share those frustrations or issues, it is called exercise physiologists Australia. Fantastic. Definitely encourage people to join that. Bit of great tap. No, of course. I'll tell you if people want to be chatted or connect with you or have any further questions, where can they find you? Look, I've probably spent most of my space on LinkedIn. So you just search Terry one on LinkedIn. You'll generally find me there's there's a couple of us, but I think you'll find the one that you're looking for. Happy to field any questions. I've post reasonably regularly. So there's lots of content up there as well. So there's probably easiest way to you can find me. Perfect. Thanks Terry. Excellent. Thank you Lenny. Thanks for having me on.