The legendary, Grammy Award-winning singer, Kenny Rogers, died on March 21, 2020. You may or may not be a fan of his music, but several of his songs have been playing a loop in my head since the news of his death, especially “The Gambler”. Perhaps the most famous lines in that song are from the chorus, “You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em, Know when to fold ‘em . . .” But the lines I’ve been thinking about are these:
Every gambler knows
that the secret to survivin’
is knowin’ what to throw away
and knowin’ what to keep . . .
Possibly, this is a secret for every person, not just the gambler. And maybe it is more than a way of surviving . . . it may be a key to thriving professionally. Over the years of my career, I have been at this decision point a number of times, choosing what to keep, when to go, where to go and what to leave behind. Last year, I came to one of those key decision moments again.
If you are reading this, you have found your way to NeuroPro Education. Here’s how I found my way here.
In 1999, I met my future partner at NeuroPro, Jason Knox, during a course I was instructing. Over the next ten years, I began to develop my own style of instruction and began innovating a static curriculum. I gave myself permission to teach in the same way that I actually thought about examining and treating patients. By 2009, Jason had become an instructor and I invited him to teach with me. By our second teaching engagement together, I knew that our thinking about clinical practice in stroke rehabilitation was aligned and I felt a teaching synergy emerging. “. . . knowin’ what to keep . . .”
As we both continued our clinical practice and teaching, we continued to innovate together. It seemed like we thought each other’s thoughts and could finish each other’s sentences. We were having fun in our new found freedom in teaching and we started seeing students not just improving their practice but being truly inspired by their own ability to change a patient’s life. We changed the content of what we taught, we changed the focus of how we taught, we changed the style and use of the classroom, and we changed our presentation methods. “ . . . knowin’ what to throw away . . .”
Last year, we began to realize that all our innovations and experimentations and pushing the limits of the old curriculum we had taught for another organization, were leading us somewhere else. We knew it was time to go and we knew where to go. We had to make our own way in our own endeavor. I guess you could say NeuroPro Education had always been in the making . . . every shift in thinking, every change in practice, every classroom transformation. “ . . . the secret to survivin’ . . .”
So, welcome to our new home, NeuroPro Education. We are bringing you the best courses that we are capable of teaching, the culmination of our collective knowledge and experience. And we promise to keep innovating. Yes, Kenny Rogers, the secret to surviving (and thriving) is knowing what to throw away and what to keep.
