82: Treatment Planning Using the ConTiGO Approach™
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[00:00:00] 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 a hundred percent real. You'll hear it all on this podcast. Dr. 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.
Hello friends. This is my [00:01:00] first time. Behind the microphone to record a podcast episode in quite a while, I was really ahead of. Recording. And we were a few weeks ahead. And then if you are on my email list, you know this, but I went to California for a week. And then right when I was going to come home, I found out that my dad was being taken off of his breathing tube in the hospital.
He has had a neuro degenerative illness for. Many years, but really for the last, the past year has been a very swift progression from. Him being pretty functional to completely incapacitated and he had been hospitalized in the ER and then was there for a week on a breathing tube for about 10 days
they took him off. I flew to St. Louis straight from California. And, stayed with some friends there and they took him off the breathing tube on Tuesday, and we thought he was going to pass away [00:02:00] within like two hours. And he lived for another five-six days until Saturday morning when he finally passed away.
And it was just a very.
Crazy week stressful. If your not on my email list, I already shared this on the email list. I'm surprised if you listened to the podcast, if you're not on the email list, if you want to be on the email list, I email every Monday. And just share. Nature-based practice and business stuff with y'all.
If you've gotten any of my opt-ins like my nature-based therapy treatment list or anything like that, you probably are on my email list, but if you're not, and you want to be on the list, you can go to therapyinthegreatoutdoors.com/list. And you will get the free 120 nature-based therapy treatment.
Ideas are 110. I can't remember. I can't remember how many are on the list right now? But you will then be on the list to get my weekly emails, as well as, you know, [00:03:00] The podcast and all the other things I do. So. Okay. Anyway. I said on that email that I sent out that I really didn't have a relationship with my dad for the last 24, 5 years or so.
He left my family right when I was done with college and he married a woman that he had an affair on my mom with. And then she became his life. And so he really didn't talk to his kids very much at all. Like my own children. Have seen him maybe twice in their whole lives. And it's just a very. Interesting thing. to. Have a parent pass away, but to not feel the deep, deep sadness that. One should feel if they had a parent that was involved in their life.
Right. So I've been feeling melancholy and kind of [00:04:00] sad, but not in the way that a lot of people would expect. When you lose a parent and that's been an interesting process for me, I've talked with a lot of friends and. And a lot of people who have lost, loved ones. And. It's interesting how the grief process is just different for, for everyone, depending on the relationship.
Right. But, I still have to go to his. Service that they're going to do in a few weeks. And I'm, I'm just, yeah, it's, it's kind of like I'm, looking forward to seeing my cousins and my extended family. But not so much looking to the actual service itself because it's just hard. It's just hard to. Try to show up and be supportive and be loving towards someone who I felt like did not.
Care about me for the last 25 years.
And it's weird cause he was an okay. Dad growing up, but not [00:05:00] very emotionally attuned. Like he provided for us. We, we had a home and food to eat I do have a few positive memories with him from when I was young. I'm trying to remember those.
But also it has made me want to be a better parent and a better friend and a better wife and a better neighbor. It has made me think a lot about the quality of the relationships that we have in our lives and how we can serve other people and be people who People will actually be sad when we die, that we had meaningful relationships with them and especially your children, especially my children.
I feel like my clarity around the importance of spending time with my children and really accepting them and loving them has [00:06:00] become so clear for me in the last, few weeks So, okay, that was a lot on my personal life. So here I am recording again. I have been back in town for a week and today I'm trying to record three episodes of the podcast right in a row.
We're trying to get ahead on the schedule because. My son and I are going on an epic trip to Nepal and Indonesia in November, and we're going to be gone for almost a month. So I'm hoping to have weekly episodes for you during the time that I'm gone, but I might also just take a break for a little bit. I have a friend who The lovely backpacking trip that I went on right before I had to go to St.
Louis for, my dad's end of life, you know, situation. [00:07:00] I had this lovely trip in California with one of my best friends, Laura Joyce Davis, and she is a podcaster and she teaches podcasting at Stanford University in California. And she said something to me while we were backpacking on the trail that just kind of blew my mind.
And she said, there are no emergencies in podcasting. And it just, It just kind of relieved me of the stress I feel of like, I need to put out an episode every week for everyone because people rely on the consistency of the podcast coming out every Monday and, and she just told me like, honestly, If you take a small break and then go back to consistent publishing, it just does not matter.
So I feel grateful for that because it did give me a little bit of freedom, especially because it was right [00:08:00] before all this stuff happened with my dad and would have felt really, really stressed. We did have episodes scheduled to come out. So it was good. We were a little bit ahead, but it also gave me freedom to just say, you know, there are not podcasting emergencies.
So it's something for you guys to think about too, in your businesses, if you're running nature based practices or programs to just really ask yourself, is this really the emergency that I am making this out to be? Because a lot of times, It's not an emergency, but we're so stressed about it and I think it helps to get that, what do they say, like 25, 000 foot view or whatever it is where you're, you can kind of step away and look at things with fresh perspective to say, is this really an emergency?
So, yeah. That is what is going on. I'm trying to record three episodes today. So today, for you all, I'm going to talk about treatment planning using the Contigo approach. So if you've been around here for a while listening to my stuff, you know that I [00:09:00] have a nature based therapy mentoring program and certification called the Contigo approach.
It stands for connection and transformation in the great outdoors. C O N T I G O. And this approach has being taught to therapists since 2019. So, oh my gosh, five years, you guys, I just realized that we're five years old teaching the Contigo approach. That's crazy to me. It feels like yesterday. I'm going to do an episode all about, The Contigo approach and some changes that we are making to the overall program in a few episodes.
So that'll come out a few weeks after you're hearing this one. So I'm not going to go into great detail here about the approach, but what I do want to talk about is some elements of the approach to help you apply the approach. elements in your nature based work, whether you've taken the Contigo program or not, [00:10:00] because when I designed the approach, I really was diving deep into the research.
I started researching this in my master's program in 2015, and I started my nature based practice right after that, and then developed the approach over those first few years in the practice, started teaching the Contigo approach in 2019, and then I did my PhD and dove even more into the research. So the Contigo approach is really meant to be an evidence based way for any pediatric therapist of any kind, not just occupational therapy like me, but any pediatric therapist to take their work outdoors into nature in alignment with current evidence.
So in an evidence based way. I just did an episode on evidence based practice that was, the episode before last, so episode 80, if you want to look that up. Any episode of the podcast, you can always go to therapyandthegreatoutdoors. com and then click on podcast and you can search for anything.
There's [00:11:00] a little search bar on that page and you can search for any number of any episode or you can search for any topic that you may be interested in. Sometimes people will message me on Instagram Do you have an episode on assessment? And I'm like, Literally what I do is I go to the podcast page and I type in assessment in the search bar because I do have a spreadsheet of all the episodes, but for some reason it's just easier to go to the podcast page and look it up.
So y'all have that available to you if you ever want to search for a topic and see if I have talked about it before. And if I haven't talked about it before, please get in touch with me and let me know because I love getting ideas for new episodes from all of you. So you can always DM me on Instagram
or you can email [email protected] with any podcast ideas. Okay. So the Contigo approach, I'm going to tell you four of the elements of the approach that are in the program. Now I'm not going to obviously give away everything [00:12:00] that's in the program in a short podcast episode, but again, I do want to just share a some tips that you can immediately implement in your own nature based sessions as well.
So one of the first things is this idea of child passions, so that is a term that was from the coyote's guide to connecting with nature, which is like A giant book that you can get on Amazon. It goes through the coyote guide to mentoring and nature connection, like their approach. And it was written by very experienced
outdoor educators. It has loads of ideas in it. Many of the ideas are too complex for some of the kids that I was working with in my practice, but definitely a great resource for any nature based pediatric therapist to have. It is huge. It's like a Bible. I mean, it takes a lot. It's not a book that you sit [00:13:00] down and read from cover to cover.
You actually need to dip in and out of it over the years to really understand it. And it's more like a reference book, I guess I would say. I maybe should have called it even a dictionary or a thesaurus, something like that, where you're going to go back to it time and time again. Okay. So they have this idea in that book of child passions.
Now, the funny thing was that when I wrote my book of nature based therapy activities, I don't even know if I had The Coyote's Guide to Mentoring to Nature Connection book. When I started my practice, I don't think I did. And I was observing the things that kids really love to do, like universally, what do they love to do?
And the child passions term from the Coyote book really embodies that and kind of matched what I was seeing in my own practice. If you plan your nature based treatment [00:14:00] sessions and you ask yourself, does this activity tap into the things children really love to do? So some of those things might be like, I don't have the book in front of me, or the Contigo approach manual in front of me.
But if I just think about what are, what are things that we see children really love to do? You're going to laugh at the first one that comes to mind for me, and that is destroy things. So, so think about a very young child who builds a really tall block tower, and how fun is it to destroy it? To watch a two year old knock over a block tower.
It is, there's just a light, there's glee, there's anticipation, there's excitement, there's laughter, there's noise. Like, like that is something, like knocking something down or destroying something. Like think about how good It [00:15:00] feels, as an adult even, like if you're demoing a house or something to like, sledgehammer a wall.
I mean, I don't mean this to be violent or anything, but like just, I hope that I'm giving an example where you can see the thought process behind trying to create treatment sessions that are engaging for children, just with the actual essence of the activity that it is. There's something satisfying about the actual activity that you are offering the child and it taps in to the things that children love to do naturally.
And the, the Coyote's Guide to Mentoring book calls those child passions. So some other things are like hunting, you know, like looking for things, scavenger hunts, digging. Kids universally love digging. There's, there's just lots of, lots of them that I, I list a bunch in the Contigo program for people to use to kind of just help them brainstorm when they are treatment planning.
So there's a big [00:16:00] list there, but that is just something that I always consider first of all is what do kids love to do? What are child passions that we can integrate into a treatment session with children? So that's number one. What do kids love to do? Child passions. Think about incorporating child passions into your treatment sessions.
So the second thing when you treatment plan with the Contigo approach is to think about novelty. So stuff that children don't do typically in everyday life anymore. Now I'm almost 50, I'm 48 years old right now, so I was born in 1976, and a lot of these things are things that I feel like I did when I was a young kid, but if you're listening to this and you're 23 years old and you just came out of therapy school, like, I don't know if you maybe yourself have even done some of these things.
So, thinking about things that are really interesting for kids, like using old fashioned tools, like an [00:17:00] apple peeler, or, Using a knife to whittle something with wood or using a saw or a hammer, using real tools, right? Old fashioned games that, that we used to play as children or that maybe our grandparents used to play as children.
So thinking about things that are novel that children maybe have not done in their own life because that naturally elicits children's engagement and attention when something is novel and they've never seen it before. The apple peeler, it's called the Johnny apple peeler. You can get it on Amazon. It is like this really heavy iron hand crank apple peeler.
And it is by far one of the most engaging activities. Like we very rarely have kids in our sessions who don't want a turn using that apple peeler. It's just really fun. Think about those kind of things, making fires, those kind of things that kids don't typically get to do in their everyday lives.
Again, [00:18:00] inside the Contigo program, I have a long list of things, that therapists can choose from when they are treatment planning, again, in order to just make treatment planning easier. All right. The third thing is to allow the activity that you have planned to be child led as much as possible.
Another way to say this is that the activity should be as open-ended as possible. A couple of things to note here.
In my opinion, nature-based therapy treatment sessions should not. Be for the sole purpose of educating children about nature. The purpose of a therapy session is to help the child make developmental gains on the specific therapy goals that you have established prior to the treatment session.
So this is where nature based therapy differs from [00:19:00] outdoor education programs because many of those programs, while they may have the intended effect of helping children with their overall holistic development, right, and their development as humans. Many outdoor education programs or environmental education is intended to help children learn about nature, right?
And that's great if you do some of that in your therapy sessions. I'm not saying we can't do that. But as therapists, it's really important to remember that's not ultimately the goal of our sessions. The goal of our sessions is to help the child with the areas that we have been hired by the family or by the payer to help the child with.
If you are planning a treatment session in alignment with the Contigo approach, it's not going to be teachy or preachy. It's not going to be like, here's the, five kinds of birds that we can find in our neighborhood or whatever. I don't know. That's just the first thing that came to my mind that might actually be fun for kids.
I [00:20:00] don't know, but the primary intention of your therapy session is not going to be to teach or preach to children about nature or about something they have to learn about the outdoors. Right. And then the other thing to consider is that it is not primarily for producing some sort of end product, okay.
So for example, you will see a lot of preschools do activities where it's like trace your arm and hand on a piece of paper and it looks like a tree and we're going to put like googly eyes on it and like decorate the tree like it has eyes and it's a tree or whatever. And that to me is not in alignment with the contigo approach because it is asking the child to reproduce something That was shown to them in the exact same way that it was shown to them.
And there is value in that in some [00:21:00] situations, right? Like we need children to be able to imitate because we need them to be able to learn. Most kids need to learn how to write, right? For example. So they need to learn how to imitate a horizontal line or imitate a vertical line. There's value in teaching kids how to imitate.
In the Contigo approach, those types of activities are not really in alignment with the approach because we're wanting children to learn through open ended play, open ended creative play. For example, instead of doing something like that tree and handcraft like I just described, you might do something where you give children the inspiration or you invite them to do something has some room for creativity.
So one of the things I love to do when the weather is wet is make mud men. So you [00:22:00] take mud and you mold it into kind of a shape and then you put little eyes or use leaves to make hair or whatever. And so the kids can all make their own different rendition of a mud man or mud woman, whatever you want.
And, That activity actually allows them to learn visual spatial skills, right, and practice those skills. Motor control skills, fine motor control skills, directions, all of those things that maybe we have goals for the kids for. But it also has this wide range of creativity.
You're not asking a child to make it exactly like the one that you made. So I hope that makes sense as an example feel free to comment on this post in the Tigo community. I always make a post for the podcast, so you can always ask questions on anything that I mentioned in a podcast on the posts there, and I will reply.
So the last thing to consider when treatment planning in alignment with the Contigo [00:23:00] approach is the concept of sustainability. And I think this is really important because a lot of times I see nature based programs or outdoor education programs or nature based therapists online doing things that when I look at them I feel like that is not.
very good for the environment. So, you have to take this with a grain of salt, I guess, is the saying. You have to be as sustainable as possible. And also I'm not someone who is like ridiculous. Like never use a plastic item. My whole house is full of metal and wood and glass.
I'm not like that. I would love it if I could be like that, but man in the world today, it just feels like there's so much plastic, right? So it's hard to live without plastic and to live in a sustainable way. But what I want you to think about when you're planning a treatment [00:24:00] session is that you can use easily replace plastic items with things that are metal or cotton or wood or, you know, there's ways to like change treatment activities in order to use more natural materials.
So that is the thing that I would encourage y'all to do is try to think about the waste that you are producing in your treatment planning and try to minimize it as much as possible. So maybe rather than using plastic plates, you use metal plates, or maybe you use, even to me, even using some sort of compostable paper plate, if you need to do that, if you have like a large group of kids or something, that to me is more sustainable than, using plastic I just feel like there's so much plastic in our world and we should, as nature based therapists, be concerned about that and be trying to minimize our use of plastic as much as possible in our sessions.
Again, it's probably not possible to totally do this, but I just think that's something that [00:25:00] communicates our values to families if we are intentionally making decisions about the materials we use in our sessions. And it is a reminder to families that it is important for us all to be concerned about the health of the earth in the work that we do.
So those are the four things, child passions, what do kids love to do, novelty, child led and open ended as much as possible, and considering sustainability in your treatment planning. There are lots more things that. The Contigo approach involves, and I share those inside of the program, but I just thought it would be interesting for y'all to kind of think about some of these things as you're treatment planning for your nature based sessions.
My therapist can, in my practice, can, and some people, some people that have taken Contigo actually have, have said this to me before, like they'll say things like, that's not Contigo or that's so Contigo. It's really funny because when you understand it, when you [00:26:00] understand the approach, you can immediately look at something and understand.
if it is or is not aligned with the contigo approach. So when you live it and breathe it and practice it, it becomes sort of like who you are and you can kind of use that language of like, that's not contigo or that's so contigo. It's just, I love it. It's so funny. It like warms my heart and makes me happy when, when I hear people say those things, because it means that it's becoming an understood approach among therapists more generally.
So it's kind of cool. So Contigo is going to be open at the end of this month for an October cohort. I am furiously working right now behind the scenes to get all of the revamp of the certification program done. I have made significant edits to the website so you can look at them. I'm hesitating to say this because there might be more edits being made after I publish this episode next week, but You can look at the website at contigoapproach.
com, and that is where you can join the [00:27:00] waitlist if you are interested in the certification program that we have. Some edits have been made to the website. And as I said, more may be being made this week.
With the new certification process, we have actually changed the name of the whole program instead of the Contigo approach, we are now calling the entire program become a certified nature based pediatric therapist or therapist assistant in the Contigo approach or with the Contigo approach. I can't remember what the site says, but basically, The reasoning for that is to communicate that this is a program that will certify you and make you an expert in nature based pediatric therapy, either as a therapist or as an assistant.
I am so excited. We've revamped the whole thing. We have a whole new certification process. We have more mentoring opportunities, more learning experiences for people to complete and to [00:28:00] really go deep with the material. And we have new badges that are so cute. That is on the website already and you can see those there.
I made different badges for different climates. So there's one with mountains, there's one with kind of desert cacti, there's one with palm trees, and there's one with trees. And so you can pick the badge to put on your own website. If you do the certification, you can pick the badge that most closely kind of represents your climate or the area in which you provide nature based therapy.
And I just, that was so fun to create those. So I'm super proud of them. I'm excited to be giving them to people who do the new certification. And the other thing I want to say really quick is that we. Kept the price the same. We did debate raising the price because the new certification process does require us to do more admin on the backend.
And we decided to keep the price the same. [00:29:00] And also people who had access to the program before still have access to the program. That is something that I love offering this lifetime, meaning like as long as we offer the online program, because someday I may want to stop doing it. I don't know, but we don't have plans of that soon, but I just say lifetime access, meaning not the, person's lifetime access, but the lifetime access is given for as long as we offer the online program.
So, we are keeping that everybody in before has access to all of the new stuff that we're putting in. And I'm always thinking of previous clients. Anytime I make changes to any program, I hope you've heard me say that before, if you've been around a while. Always, I'm always thinking of my current clients and serving them well, and I will never, ever, ever lower my prices.
I never do that. So the price only goes up for my things that I offer. It never goes down. I want people to know that if they buy something from me at [00:30:00] a given date, they're not going to suddenly be like, Oh man, she offered a sale right after that and I could have got it cheaper. I just don't do that.
I hate it when that happens to me. And so I don't do that. I basically have my programs for what they are and the price only goes up. That is my philosophy. So that's how I run my business. So I think that is it. And yeah, join the wait list at contigoapproach.com and I will see you next week.
