EPISODE 001 | Kicking Things Off with My Story of Going Rogue

Like the title says, this is our first official episode where I kick off this latest project and join the podcasting world! Today I’m sharing a little more about who I am, where I came from, what I do and who I serve. If you’re curious about what this show is all about, tune into this episode and let’s connect! 

In this episode you’ll hear stories about:

• The rocky start to my OT training
• My history and background as a therapist
• When I started going rogue -- and why
• My transition from a pediatric therapist to a women's health entrepreneur
• Why I’m so passionate about a brain-based approach to family wellness
• How I became a heart-led entrepreneur amidst the chaos
• What motivated me to start this podcast

If you resonate with anything in this episode and it inspires you in some way, I’d love to hear about it! Take a screenshot of you listening on your device, post it to your Instagram Stories, share your biggest takeaway and tag us, @goingroguewithmlp.

And if you haven’t left us a review yet, please do so as it makes the world of difference in the podcasting world.  All you have to do is go to the main show page, scroll down, and click "Write a Review"... You can keep it short and simple. Your efforts are very much appreciated!

Transcript

EPISODE 001 | Kicking Things Off With My Story of Going Rogue

Melissa LaPointe  0:02  
Welcome to the OTs Gone Rogue podcast where we share real stories about real OTs who are choosing to think outside the box and do things differently. I'm your host Melissa LaPointe. 

Melissa LaPointe  0:14  
Over the years, I've had the pleasure of connecting with the most remarkable therapists who are finding their way as thought leaders, changemakers and heartled entrepreneurs. They've helped to inspire me to think big and dig deep in my own healing journey. And it's now time to bring these conversations to a bigger stage. Together, we're going to share stories about overcoming adversity, finding our people and taking the road less traveled, even when it feels messy and uncomfortable. Okay, are you ready to join us? This is the OTs Gone Rogue podcast. 

Melissa LaPointe  0:47  
Hey everyone, Melissa LaPointe here and welcome to the OTs Gone Rogue podcast. So this is our first inaugural episode where I'm going to be sharing all about who I am, what I'm about and why I am so intimately connected to the concept of OTs Gone Rogue. 

Melissa LaPointe  1:06  
To kick things off, let's start at the beginning. So I was born and raised in a very small town, not even in a small town, I lied. I was born and raised on a road connecting two small towns in Prince Edward Island, Canada. So for those of you who are not Canadian, or perhaps do not know North American geography, Prince Edward Island is the smallest province in Canada, and it's nestled in on the east coast. So I grew up, I graduated from high school, and I completed my first degree. So I did a bio psych degree at the University of New Brunswick. And I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up... The pressure I would feel when people would ask me that. So even when I started my first university degree, I actually went into forest engineering. Why? Because I didn't know what I wanted to do. And my guidance counselor literally leaned over his shoulder, pulled out a pamphlet and said, "You're smart. What about engineering?" I knew I wanted to go to the University of New Brunswick. And they had a strong engineering program. My older sister was an engineer. I liked climbing trees. Sure, why not? So I gave it a shot. 

Melissa LaPointe  2:19  
I quickly learned the first year that forest engineering was not for me. And then I tested out the waters and a few different areas. So there was a period where I was doing a psych minor. I also had a linguistics minor. I loved psychology, but I did not love the arts. And at that point, you couldn't do a psychology major unless you had a bachelor of arts and I did not want to go down that path. 

Melissa LaPointe  2:43  
I really loved sciences. So I was doing a science degree with a biology major. I had a psych minor, I had a linguistics minor. And my final year of school, it was a new program. You could do a bachelor of science with a psych major. So I was able to combine my psychology and my biology and graduate that year. I still didn't know what I wanted to do. So that year after graduation, I took some time off school. I had always been working in peds. So I was a special needs worker. I was working in daycares and preschools. I was looking into child psychology, I was looking into speech language pathology. And then I decided to travel and just before I left, I ended up applying for occupational therapy. So I submitted my application to OT and packed my bags and took off to New Zealand, had an amazing five months backpacking around New Zealand, racked up a lot of debt and returned in May. 

Melissa LaPointe  3:43  
And then I was planning on working that summer, had been put on the waitlist for OT so I actually didn't get accepted right off the bat. And again, still didn't know what I was going to be doing when I grew up. So I started to study for my LSATs, law school was up there, and I was working as a waitress. And then one day I got a phone call. I had been accepted into OT school. This was on a Thursday, school started on Tuesday, it was a different province was about four hours away. So I had four sleeps to figure it out, to pack up my stuff, to move to figure out if I could get a student loan or not. I was just starting to get myself together from my escapades in New Zealand, and I remember phoning my mom and crying. I didn't know what to do. There was no way, it was an $8,000 tuition fee and I could barely pay rent that month. What was I going to do? And I remember my mom, so she was a nurse at the time and I phoned her at the hospital on her shift. And she said do you want to go and I said I think I do. And she's like, "Okay, we'll make it happen". 

Melissa LaPointe  4:50  
So off I went to OT school. The first year of OT school, I definitely felt like I was in the right place. It was feeling really good. With that being said financial stress, there was definitely a certain amount of burden there. And I started working part time. By my second year, I was working sometimes 30 hours a week. Again, a lot of financial stress, I also was experiencing a lot of back pain. I was partying on the weekends. So I had reconnected with my old university friends from UNB. And we had a great time. And definitely chasing some ghosts. So my time in OT school, in a lot of ways, it was very, very challenging. I was very disconnected with my body, I was very disconnected with my peers. I really struggled with the high demands of school, not academically. And I think that's for me, someone should have had an intervention with me at some point. During my OT schooling, I was really in a dark place in many ways, different things had been going on. And I was coping a lot through drugs and alcohol, and again, working a lot of hours. But no one ever thought to have an intervention with me because I was doing just fine in school, I had a 3.9 GPA and school came easily to me. Now with that being said, I also have ADD, and sitting through class where I wasn't being challenged, or I wasn't involved was very challenging for me, combined with my 30 hours of work that I was trying to sneak in to be able to pay rent. And that's when I definitely started to distance myself from any classes that were not mandatory attendance, which for a health professional school, this was very frowned upon. But if it was a class that was not deemed mandatory attendance, I would often skip class, I would skip class to go to the library to teach it myself because I was more efficient. And usually what I would learn in a two-hour class, I could easily learn in 45 minutes in the library on my own. Now, I didn't do this with all of my classes. But I did do this with a few. And there was definitely a lot of guilt and shame around that because I knew it was frowned upon. But at this point I was just trying to get by my last few months at ot school were I don't remember them very well. Again, there were some different things going on. And I could not wait to escape that situation. I passed in my final assignment and within hours had packed up my apartment and two days later, I flew across Canada to British Columbia to start work as a pediatric therapist. 

Melissa LaPointe  7:37  
It was 2005, I started working as a pediatric therapist for an early intervention team in a small town called Williams Lake. So Williams Lake, we're in the interior of BC. So we're about 600 kilometers north of Vancouver. So I was working with a nonprofit organization. And my focus was on early intervention. I did some work in school age as well. And I felt like I had found my place. I really enjoyed the work. I really enjoyed the challenges. I really enjoyed the professional development. My areas of specialty were in sensory processing, early brain development, developmental trauma, mental health, and eventually, addictions and intergenerational trauma. Williams Lake has a very high first nations population, we have a lot of First Nation communities. And 2008 is when I had done more training and cultural sensitivity, it had been included in a lot of our training. But that was an eight week program that I had done and really, really woke me up in terms of ways that I was showing up and ways that I was being perceived as a threat that I couldn't even fathom. But again, through this program, you know, recognizing that I was a white woman working within an institution, university trained, for many First Nation communities, I was a threat based on their history based on what they had gone through. 

Melissa LaPointe  9:11  
I continue down this path working in pediatrics. And 2010 is when I got pregnant with my little guy, so 2010 you know, at that point, I had also been doing a lot of work in terms of my own health and well-being and was really recognizing that the mainstream medical system had not served me well. I had gone through about 10 years of being on antibiotics, starting at the age of 14 for my acne, I was also having problems with my back so I was taking a lot of Advil and Naproxen. At that point. I was having recurring problems with tonsillitis and from a systems standpoint I think I was just a hot mess. 

Melissa LaPointe  10:02  
It was in 2008, that I first started working with a naturopath around detoxing and exploring complementary and alternative medicine. It was an occupational therapist named Kim Barthel, who introduced me to this work. And how she introduced me to this work was very much from a neurobiological perspective. So a brain-based approach to understanding the power of belief and what's happening in terms of our hardwiring. And being raised very strong Catholic, there was a lot of hesitation in terms of alternative medicine, complementary medicine. But coming at it from a brain-based approach, I felt a certain level of safety and security in terms of exploring these areas of health. 

Melissa LaPointe  10:47  
Fast forward to 2010 and I'm pregnant with this very in depth level of brain development of early childhood development. Now I'm a consumer. And what I was recognizing when I was pregnant, was how few services and supports and programs were in place to help women train for delivery, emotionally, physically, spiritually, and mentally, to help women thrive, as they go through that transition into motherhood. And really, to embrace this healing journey. Again, I live in Canada, we are very blessed to have a 50 week so five zero, yes, we got almost a full year off of maternity leave. When I was off on maternity leave, you know, again, it was really highlighted to me all the big gaps in health care, geared towards the fourth trimester. You know, I had had an emergency C section with no rehab, I created my own rehab plan. Four months after I had my baby, my sister had her baby, she had some complications, where she too had to be very proactive with her rehab with her healing. And it just started to eat away at me. In terms of what I was doing on this one year, maternity leave, my son was having sleep challenges. So the first six months, I was expecting the sleep challenges, but they continued on. So I started to venture down the path of the very unregulated sleep industry as a pediatric practitioner -- that was very eye opening. And when my son was about eight months old, I knew in my heart that I could not go back to my nonprofit position, to my nine to five job, you know, burnout had started to sneak in there were things that I didn't necessarily love about working for a nonprofit. And that little voice started to get much louder. So it was when my son was eight months old, we live in a small town, I figured word would get around if I kept talking about these dreams, these ideas that I had about doing my own thing. So I did go in to meet with my boss, I had a PowerPoint with me and I went through a little PowerPoint presentation on why I was so passionate about prenatal postnatal health. But the reality was there were no government funding coming down through the pipelines for nonprofit organizations to really empower them to take this on. So I knew in order to work in prenatal postnatal health, that I would have to let go of my job, I would have to let go of my financial security, of any type of retirement and benefits, I had to let that go. And it was really, really scary. And what we call the golden handcuffs, what society is constantly perpetuating, as you know, this is how we stay safe. This is what we strive for, these nine to five jobs with a lot of stability, but the reality was, I wasn't happy. And I knew that there was more to what I wanted to do. 

Melissa LaPointe  14:00  
My husband and I agreed, you know, okay, I think I can make this work. I was going to open my own private pediatric practice and incorporate prenatal postnatal services. So a holistic approach to family wellness. We had agreed that I would also take some time off before jumping into this. We had planned what I called it a personal sabbatical of sorts. So that year, I started upgrading, and even upgrading was a challenge because most courses most professional development programs were not geared towards occupational therapists. I was being told again and again and again, that OTs don't work in prenatal postnatal health. I was being told this by OTs, I was being told this by other health professionals. You know, it was just this recurring theme that was in part I don't like being told I can't do something especially when it doesn't make sense. You know, our OT training, so much of it is around client-centered care across the lifespan. But yet there's this secret message that its not actually across the lifespan but only until a woman becomes pregnant, and then prenatal postnatal, no, that's not OT. But anytime before, anytime after it is. That doesn't make sense didn't make sense to me. So it again was a lot of advocating, I really had to put myself out there in terms of training. And in terms of figuring out how I wanted to show up in the prenatal postnatal world. I knew I wanted there to be a movement component. I knew that I wanted to empower more new moms to parent using a brain-based approach. So finding ways to get serotonin boosts, finding ways to bring in endorphins and dopamine hits and oxytocin, you know how we can empower women through education and help them understand the mind body connection, help them understand. self regulation, help them to understand important concepts in healing and the body's natural ability to heal.

Melissa LaPointe  16:19  
So often, as a pediatric therapist, I was working with families who, you know, we were seeing red flags when a child was three, four or five, if we were lucky, that would be a win. If we were able to intervene and support these families, the sooner the better. But why aren't we being proactive as a society and implementing so much of what we know about what the brain needs to thrive in these early stages of life? Why aren't we taking this information and being more proactive, and finding ways to connect with women who are in their preconception or conception stage of life, it just baffles my mind. So this is what I had set out to do. 

Melissa LaPointe  17:01  
Now for an OT with a background in mental health, there was definitely some impostor syndrome in terms of facilitating movement. I was NDT trained for infants and toddlers. So looking at my neurodevelopmental training, handling skills, movement, of course, but now that I was pivoting and focusing on prenatal, postnatal health, there was a lot of fear, self doubt, insecurities and impostor syndrome. I was questioning do I need yoga certifications? I was looking into Pilates. I was looking into my personal training certification. And this was my first aha moment in terms of recognizing, wait a second, do I need more letters? Do I need more training? Do I need more certifications, and really getting clear on what it was that I was doing? 

Melissa LaPointe  17:54  
In 2013 I started my first business -- notice I said my first business for those of you who are intent on growing a business and feel like you have to get everything right. I didn't tell you that. So my first business was called Strong Beginnings. Strong Beginnings was like my other child in my life. So putting it together, starting from scratch, even creating my intake forms, it was something else. I offered pediatric services. I was working with homeschooling families, I was working in private schools, I had a number of private clients. I also was doing work through the autism funding in our province. And then I had cash based prenatal postnatal services. So I had mom and baby groups. I had a wellness package where I would do couple sessions. So the mom would come in with her birth partner, and we would do a series of sessions in terms of training for delivery, and understanding the science of pain. I had a wellness program where I had paired up with the local yoga studio, so she would do so many sessions, I would do so many group sessions. It was awesome. And so that was the work that I had done. So 2013 is when I started my brick and mortar. And I continued for a number of years and it was in 2015 that boy, was I struggling. I was struggling with getting paid every 6 weeks. So this feast or famine, rhythm of finances, I did not have any venture capital going into this, I actually had quite a bit of debt going into this. And again, not paying myself consistently as a new business, getting paid every six to eight weeks as opposed to getting paid up front. So I would go you know, do the work but then not see the money for quite some time. So that was very challenging. My son still was not sleeping, I was still up multiple times he woke up every two hours until he was six. Yeah, it was there were a lot of trials and tribulations and I also was experiencing some health concerns. 

Melissa LaPointe  20:10  
About three months after I let go of my job with full time, you know, my full time job with benefits, I started experiencing debilitating levels of tailbone pain, where I found it very challenging to sit. Now, if you can imagine how many occupations in our day to day living involves sitting, and I could not sit for very long, it was very uncomfortable. And actually that transitional movement of going sit to stand or stand to sit, triggered immense levels of pain. So this went on for about a year. And again, I had to be very creative, thank goodness, I'm an OT, I had to be very creative in my positioning, in my workstations. And I had to accept the fact that I was very unemployable. I was not able to attend training sessions, there was a business grant that I couldn't apply for because in order to apply for it, I had to sit through three days of training. And that was just out of the question for me. Again, I went much deeper in my own healing journey in understanding that the pain I was experiencing, yes, on a physical level, sure, there was a lot of pain. But there were a lot of layers that I had to peel back and really do a deeper dive in self exploration and into my past, so it opened up a bit of a Pandora's Box, to say the least. 

Melissa LaPointe  21:42  
Fast forward to 2015, things are getting better. And that's when I went down the path of restorative exercise. And so I discovered Katie Bowman's work through my own journey, and it was very eye opening. And this is also when I continued to go further down the path of pelvic health more from a biomechanical perspective. So I was doing a lot in terms of advocating for the OT profession having us more involved. At that point, the OTs and Women's Health Facebook group was thriving. I created my first online course, Bridging OT with Perinatal Health, that really lit a fire under me. To be able to connect with so many OTs around the globe, who thought like me, and you know, who had stories similar to me, it was so awesome and exciting and inspiring. So I continued my restorative exercise training, it was quite a quite an intensive training. And so I became certified. I spent my money traveled to Washington US, got my certification. So I had yet another certification that no one knew what restorative exercise was, you know, here I am an OT, trying to explain that to people and then restorative exercise trying to explain that to people. But in terms of my own movement, practice, you know, it definitely that was the one of the biggest highlights that I got from my restorative exercise training. 

Melissa LaPointe  23:06  
In 2016. I also started my women's health coaching certification through the integrative Women's Health Institute. Business was continuing to grow slowly but surely. So still working from home, juggling a very demanding child. And you know, my husband works long shifts, and he has swing shifts, so his schedule is never the same. My family predominantly is on the east coast. And again, so often we see what's happening on the outside and we think, wow, that person has it together. I would actually have OTs contact me, "Wow, I wish I could do what you're doing. I wish I could be just like you". Meanwhile, I was on the verge of a total breakdown, thinking like what? You know, how much of my story do I share, because this is BS that people think I have it together. I just felt like I was stumbling and falling all over the place. Literally and figuratively. So I continued to grow my business slowly but surely, was working on my health coaching, was doing more in terms of mentoring other therapists and in 2017, in January 2017, I took on my first coaching clients. So my coaching clients were occupational therapists, I also had a couple of physios. So it was really focusing on therapists. And my online work continued to grow. In June 2017. I was feeling pretty darn tired. And recognizing that a brick and mortar practice wasn't for me. It wasn't lighting me up. I didn't want to have roots that deeply in terms of the community. I love this community that I'm in. But a big part of me knew I have my East Coast ties. I have my family. I have aging parents and to have a brick and mortar in a small community on the other side of the country, I didn't love that. I wanted more freedom in my life, I still wanted to do my own thing. But I didn't know how that would look. 

Melissa LaPointe  25:06  
I hired a business advisor in June 2017 to help me transition to help me go from my brick and mortar slash consulting work over to consulting and coaching full time. So that was in June. In July, I went on a much needed vacation with my family. And that was when the fires in BC broke out. So we had devastating wildfires that year, and I ended up being evacuated for two months with Max, my son, my husband was with us for a while, but then he returned to the community, the smoke, the conditions were still really bad and I did not want to come back with Max. But after I think four weeks, my husband returned to our hometown, and Max and I continued to couch surf and stay away. I was still paying rent, I was still paying, you know, overhead expenses for my brick and mortar, but feeling very detached from it, and at this point was ready to let it go. We ripped that band aid off much sooner than I had anticipated. And that's what happens in natural disasters. 

Melissa LaPointe  26:04  
That summer, I registered as a non practicing OT, I drew a line in the sand. When I returned to Williams Lake in September, I started letting my clients know, I started letting the contractor holders and the schools that I was no longer providing the service and I would work with them to find them another therapist. It was really scary. Yet were very affirming. 

Melissa LaPointe  26:30  
Later that year, my son not later that year, it was actually a few weeks after we got back from evacuation. My son started to experience vertigo. At that point, he was just turning six. He was the picture of health, had never been on antibiotics. He had never seen a doctor other than like our six week checkup. He had never been to the hospital. He had never taken prescription drugs. He was just healthy. He was a really healthy kid who all of a sudden started to get vertigo. So I started to reach out to some pediatric colleagues around this positional vertigo. What it could be, I was doing research, went to see the doctor and got a referral to the pediatrician. I wanted to be referred to a developmental ophthalmologist. But she said no, you have to see the pediatrician first. We had to wait three weeks to see the pediatrician. And that positional vertigo worsened. It started happening more frequently. So he was in an outdoor kindergarten at the time. I started to notice delays in fine motor skills. He started to look at times like he was a little bit drunk. When you would look into his eyes, he would have this silly grin. He started sleeping really well, which for me was a red flag. My son had never slept well. And all of a sudden he was going to bed at quarter to seven and sleeping 12 hours. That was a huge red flag for me. Then he started to develop ataxia. And we're still waiting. We're still waiting. We had had him assessed by physio, he was getting his hearing checked. We were on that path of discovery where no one knew what was going on. But we were seeing him deteriorate in front of our eyes. He started having word finding difficulties. In the month of October 2017, I started to modify my schedule, because it was a safety risk. He was losing his balance. And he was in an outdoor kindergarten. So I started volunteering so that he could get a full day and by the end of October, he was only going half days and I would volunteer to be there. Someone had to hold his hand when we were walking upstairs. And again. We were still waiting. 

Melissa LaPointe  28:38  
We finally got into see the pediatrician and the pediatrician, I'm still laughing at how I showed up with my notebook of symptoms, and to say it was written in therapy terminology would be an understatement. That's how I was processing this. So I showed up with Max and she agreed there was something going on and there was reason to be concerned. She had referred us for an MRI. 10 days later, we found out that because he was six and would require a sedated MRI that it was a one year waitlist to go through the Children's Hospital. One year. Again, my healthy six year old was literally deteriorating in front of me. And we were told we had to wait one year. So we started investigating private options. And we had his hearing checked, no, you know everything was fine. And then we went to get his vision checked. So November 21 2017. We got his vision checked. She dilated his pupils and she discovered that he had swelling on his optic nerve. And that swelling on his optic nerve is what bumped us from urgent to emergency. She contacted the pediatrician, the pediatrician contacted the hospital, we were in the next day for a CT scan. And two hours after that CT scan. We were sitting in the pediatricians office hearing what no parent ever wants to hear. She had told us that yes, this was our worst nightmare, and that they had detected a tumor the size of a lime in his cerebellum.

Melissa LaPointe  30:09  
We had a few moments to process that. The next thing out of her mouth was you have to go home. You have to pack bags, you're going to be gone for a very long time. You have two hours to get back here and we are flying you out because they are operating tonight. To get that tumor out. We were in shock. I came home. I remember sweeping the floor, cleaning out the fridge, walking around in a fog putting stuff in a bag. And then we got the phone call that said you need to get here in 10 minutes or you're going to miss this plane. I said "What? Wee have like another hour and a half" -- And they said no things changed. You have to get down here, telling my son we were going to the Children's Hospital. So it's usually a seven hour drive, but they were flying us down. Only my son and I could go in the plane, there was no room for my husband. So we got medivacc'ed down that night. They didn't operate that night. They operated I think it was 36 hours later. We had to listen to all the different things that could go wrong during a suboccipital craniotomy. We had to sign off on a blood transfusion. We had to sign off on all the possible risks. And my son had emergency brain surgery. The surgery was a success. My son woke up cranky at the nurses and we were told about the possibility of cerebellar mutism. So when they operate through that part of the brain, sometimes children are mute, and they do not know why. Sometimes it lasts hours. Sometimes it lasts days sometimes that last weeks, the neurosurgeon warned us that in some cases, it could last months. So we went in to see my son in recovery. And I'll never forget this because he woke up, you know, he woke up saying My head hurts. And then he proceeded to hiss at the nurse and he only wanted his mommy and no one else could touch him but his mommy and my husband and I both started to cry because we knew, you know, okay, our feisty little son, this is him. He's back. 

Melissa LaPointe  32:21  
40 hours after brain surgery, my son started to refuse all medication. That was it, no Tylenol, no Advil he was done, and we couldn't force it on him. And this, they said that's fine. You know, let him listen to his body. 

Melissa LaPointe  32:33  
Ten days after that surgery, at this point, we had found out the results the tumor was benign. The surgery was a success. 10 days after that surgery, my son was back in kindergarten full time. He did take a day off later in the week, the second week because we thought maybe we were pushing it but he was adamant that he was going back. His recovery was nothing short of remarkable. My husband and I struggled immensely with survivor guilt. There were little things so my son had regressed in terms of sleep again. He had regressed in a few other areas, you know, as really picky eater things that he had previously liked. He was no longer eating. And we had a lot of shifts in our home life at that point. So my husband was now a stay at home dad because life happened and his we actually had had a fire, his workplace of 18 years had burned down when this was all going on. So he was now a stay at home dad and I was working full time, I was contracting. So again, I had already said I wasn't doing any pediatric services. But that was a gray area. So I did re-register later that year. And I did tie up some contracts and was doing more mentoring. 

Melissa LaPointe  33:53  
And then by by August 2018. That was it. I had officially wrapped it up and I registered again as nonpracticing. So 2018 I let go of the OT title. It was a bit of an identity crisis. And I hadn't totally detached from the OT profession. Because my coaching my consulting, I was targeting OTs, so I was targeting OTs and they were my ideal client avatar. That's what I was working with. So I still felt very much connected to the OT profession, but I was no longer using that title myself. I also was still processing a lot of my own experience through the health care system. And in terms of the mainstream medical model in so many ways how it hadn't served us very well. So I was really opening my eyes to other ways of health and wellbeing. As I continued with my online entrepreneurship journey, a podcast was always something that I wanted to do. I have been hosting virtual coffee dates, special guest interviews, I've done on a number of guest podcasts. And people were asking, "When are you going to launch your podcast?"-- and I knew it would happen. But it was when, when is it going to happen because a podcast, if you are not a podcaster is a lot of bloody work. It is not just recording the episodes, I can tell you that. And I wanted to be careful that I wasn't taking on too much. When I first thought of starting up the podcast, we were going to call it "Leaning into the Difficult Conversations". And I really wanted to highlight challenging situations in healthcare, I really wanted to talk about substance abuse and burnout, and trauma recovery, and post traumatic growth, as experienced by the healthcare professionals themselves. So not in how we're connecting to our clients, not in their resources and how we can grow clinically terms of our practice, but really going deep and how we're applying this work to ourselves. So really looking at personal development as a therapist, which in my experience can be a little messy. So the Leaning In podcast wasn't quite the right time. I've continued doing this work, I've continued to grow my business. So it's been you know, we're doing some really cool things, we have OTs, from nine different countries in our programs. At this point, we have managed to grow this coaching consulting business to a six figure business. And we are supporting OTS who are thinking outside the box, who are persevering, who are you know, some of them are letting go of their OT license, but a lot of them aren't. And especially with all that's been going on in 2020. As we are waking up, we are recognizing the power of technology in terms of connection in terms of therapeutic relationships in terms of service delivery. But we're also bumping into limitations in place from our organizations and our institutions and our associations. So I work with a lot of OTs who are scared of the "OT police". I work with a lot of OTs who are confused by this gray area in terms of what we can do in the online space and what we cannot. I work with so many trailblazers, and thought leaders and visionaries in their own right. I work with six figure entrepreneurs. So OTs who've been doing this for a little while now. I work with a lot of OTs who are accidental entrepreneurs, they stumbled onto this entrepreneurial path. And there's no looking back. I also work with some OTS who this is their passion project. They may be doing this on the side. But again, there is no shortage in terms of OTs who are doing things differently, who are going against the grain who are thinking outside the box. And who in their own right are OTs gone rogue. 

Melissa LaPointe  38:10  
It was August this year that I did re-license as an occupational therapist, I'm still not practicing clinically. And I'm not sure what the future holds for me as an OT. Right now, I am continuing to build my community. We are working on building a bigger platform through our Facebook group and our podcast. And we are continuing to lift our OT clients and customers up on our shoulders, supporting them to shine their lights brightly. To do things differently. The ripple effect that we are seeing from the programs and services being put out to the world has been nothing short of eye opening and awesome and inspiring. And boy am I ever motivated every single day to lean in and do the hard things to find a way to show up and to continue helping so many OTs blaze their own trail and not burn out in the process, to do this in a way that is sustainable, that is in alignment with their core values. 

Melissa LaPointe  39:23  
So that's a little bit more about me. Yes, I'm licensed as an OT. Yes, I proudly wear the title of coach and consultant. But I'm so much more than that. And I'm really careful to not put myself in that box. I am Melissa LaPointe. I am a storyteller. I am a therapist. I am a friend. I'm a consultant. I am a heart lead entrepreneur. I am a coach. I am a community leader. I am a mentor. I am a problem solver. I am a visionary thinker. And I am a trailblazer. I love to highlight the work of those around me. And I'm so excited that you've decided to join us on this journey. Be warned, there will be some episodes where we are using very strong language. And we are talking about sensitive topics. This podcast is geared towards a more mature audience. And I will be sure to actually have that warning at the beginning of any of our episodes where you may need to wear headphones. Or you may need to preview the episode before you let any little ones listen in. So I certainly can relate to multitasking and having little ones underfoot all the time. 

Melissa LaPointe  40:54  
All right, so that's a little bit more about me a little bit more about who I am, what I'm all about, how I have been going rogue on my OT journey, and how I continue to plan on going rogue. There are a lot of stories that we plan on highlighting and sharing and more importantly, inviting you in with us. So that through these stories, through these experiences with other OTs, hopefully you're able to see yourself in some of these situations. And it is my hope that we can find ways to inspire you, educate you and empower you to think outside the box, do things differently, and discover your best OT self. 

Melissa LaPointe  41:44  
Thank you so much for tuning in to this week's episode of the OTs Gone Rogue podcast, where we're all about making deeper connections by leaning in to the difficult conversations. Make sure you're subscribed if you haven't already, because we've got some more awesome episodes coming your way. Take care, and we'll see you next week.