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Thursday, January 7, 2016

Resolutions for the Professional and the Profession

This time of year is always exciting for me.  Not only because the holidays typically bring some amount of time for rest and recovery, although this is certainly a nice perk, but because as the year came to a close there was a time of reflection and looking forward to the future.  Now that the new year has arrived, so have the new year resolutions! The ever famous, I’m going to get into shape this year, lose some weight, by the way I’ve never done well with that one.  The other day however, I had a thought, this year I will make resolutions that will help me professionally and personally.  

As I began to think about this more, I came up with many different ways that I can put this plan to work for me.  Ultimately I want to make resolutions that will help me to improve as a professional and hopefully advance the profession as a whole.  Communication is an area that I feel I am pretty good at, but at the same time, this is an area that I feel can always be better.  Communication is important in so many different ways.  It is important to communicate with co-workers, patients, parents, coaches, other ATs, regardless of your work setting the list can go on and on.  I personally want to improve communication with my co-worker in the athletic training room.  I feel that this can be a huge step toward improving communication across the spectrum.  We already communicate well, but how can we improve on that? For others, maybe it is communication with coaches that could improve, or maybe it is communication with parents.  Regardless, something that I think could be extremely helpful is communicating with seasoned athletic trainers, previous mentors or those who work around you.  There is a great deal to be learned from the past.  Often times we get so caught up in the way things are that we lose sight of where we came from.  Not that change is bad or that new ways of doing things don’t work, but maybe some advice from a colleague who has experienced what you are dealing with could be helpful.

Another area that I thought of is promoting ATs and the profession as a whole.  We all benefit from these efforts, whether it is on the local, state, district or national level.  Something as simple as providing a talk over health and safety to a local little league program, hosting a session on workplace safety, or going to Washington DC for Capitol Hill Day these efforts advance the profession and the professional.  As I was going over this it came to mind that this year I have to renew my application to be recognized as a Safe Sports School.  For those of you who received this recognition the first year, don’t forget to renew in 2016.  This is something that everyone in the secondary school setting can do and the best part is, it promotes you and what you do to ensure the safety of your student-athletes, it promotes your school and the support they provide to you, and it promotes the profession and ATs as leaders in the field of athletic health care.  To find out more about how your campus can become a Safe Sports School, click here.

What better way to give back to the profession of athletic training in this new year than to resolve to make yourself and the profession as a whole better? Regardless of your work setting, resolve to become the best you can be.  It all starts with you, you are the face of athletic training in your community, make us proud.  

Do have some resolutions that you think could impact the profession as whole or you as a professional? Leave them in the comments below.

Josh Woodall; M.Ed., ATC, LAT
SWATA President


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