Hand Therapy Exam 2022 | Consolidate your Studying For Better Retention
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[00:00:00] If you're an occupational therapist looking to develop your skills in hand therapy. This podcast is for you, your host, Tron, occupational therapists, and certified hand therapists turned serial entrepreneur with her own therapy clinic in Miami. Hoang is an author and successful coach helping occupational therapists get jobs, develop their skills and become certified hand therapists so they can become experts in their.
[00:00:24] Hoang worked with occupational therapists from across the United States and around the world. She talks about everything from hand therapy, skills, career development, leadership skills, money, mindset, and business. You two can become an expert certified hand therapist, business owner, and have more choices in your career.
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[00:00:43] Its Hoang with hand therapy secrets, and you guys voted and I'm gonna talk about it. I keep picking the stand. So you guys voted and I'm gonna talk about it. And if you are studying to become a certified hand therapist, you're studying to either take the exam this coming November, or you're doing it in may. if you are feeling like you're wasting time studying, like, if you feel like you're you're reading, but you're not quite getting it.
[00:01:14] If you feel like you're reading, but somehow you're not able to remember anything and you wanna know what to do to stop wasting wasting time study. Then this talk is gonna be for you, cuz it's really important. I know [00:01:30] I did it when I studied and when I first started this program, I totally did this.
[00:01:35] Like I would sit there and I would start reading and then I would just daydream into like, What would it be like if I passed the exam, you know, what would I do if I pass the exam? What if I got done studying? And could I go meet my friends and have a drink and stuff like that? So , if that is you and you're, you know, looking at your stuff and you're study, you're reading this chapter and at the end of the chapter, you look at it and you're like, oh my God, I don't think I remembered anything.
[00:02:07] I, I wanna help you save some time and really one of the reasons why it's so important to stop, you know, like feeling like you're a waste of time is, is very discouraging. And when you do something like this exam, when you do something that's critical, challenging you, this is the first time you're doing it, right?
[00:02:27] Cause we only need to pass a certified hand therapy exam. One time we only need to pass it one time. it can be discouraging. And I want you to feel encouraged. I want you to take the necessary steps to essentially, you know, level up and become the expert that you want to become. So, so how do we consolidate your studying and less time with better retention so they can stop wasting time?
[00:02:54] Right. So I have five things that I wrote down. So. You [00:03:00] can take notes. You can come back to this video later. You know how I post up my videos? You can find a lot of my videos here on YouTube, most of the time on Facebook as well, but I can't guarantee the Facebook thing but it's definitely on YouTube and it's definitely on Instagram.
[00:03:19] right. So I'm gonna go into it. And if you guys are having trouble like this, leave me a comment. Let me know what else are you having trouble with? You know, are you like, tell me. Are you studying? Are you reading and not really sure what what you're reading by the time you're done? Let me know, cuz I can, I can definitely help you make sure that you're keeping that momentum to study.
[00:03:41] And that's really, really key. Getting started is one thing, keeping that momentum to finish to get to the finish line is a whole nother strategy as. So, so people often ask me too, like how many hours do I need to study? Do I need to put into studying? And my answer always is that it varies. Now it varies because your study style might be different.
[00:04:05] Like everyone has a different way of studying. Like some people are able to memorize faster. Some people are able to read faster, some able to I don't know. You know, retain a lot of that information faster, but that was never me. So that's why I developed a program like this because it was always really tough for me, challenging for me to study, to [00:04:30] memorize everything.
[00:04:30] I had to work on understanding concepts instead of just memorizing things so that I could so that I could apply it so that I could best answer. Some of the questions on the exam, but not just on the exam answer questions for my patients, really at the end of the day, everything I've done in my career is really to help myself master the art of be being the best certified hand therapist, right.
[00:04:56] To get the results for my patients who are willing to spend their time and their money with me. Right. So, so let's go into. So here are the five ways in which you can stop wasting time. One of the most important things is to look at your schedule and determine when you can study and how many hours you can study.
[00:05:18] And it's not just in the day, but it's in the week, so you can map out and you know, using my iPhone, but take your phone. You can map out what Monday or Tuesday, you know, the whole week. And don't forget you have Saturdays Sunday. So you have literally seven days a week, right? And you wanna map out what that schedule, that study schedule looks like, so that you can be prepared so that you can waste time.
[00:05:47] One strategy that I've gone with my students are, is, you know, you, you schedule out a chunk of time, right? You schedule out your week for like two weeks. Four weeks. And then what you need to do is you need to [00:06:00] evaluate it. You need to evaluate one week in two weeks in to see if the time spots that you're studying actually really works for you or not.
[00:06:08] Cause you might wanna study at night, but you busy, you're tired. You're not retaining anything. And so how is studying a night really beneficial for you? Right now you might have to change around your schedule a little bit, right? So that you can study. Some people do well in the morning. I'm a morning person.
[00:06:29] Never thought I'd be a morning person, but I'm a morning person. So, I would study, you know, I study better in the morning. And if you study better in the morning, then schedule yourself in the morning. Now some people can do 30, you know, minute chunks, but most people need a little bit more time than that to like really dive in.
[00:06:49] Right? So that's gonna be number two is the time yourself and your attention, you know, take a look at the energy level and the ability to retain. So if you find yourself and this is key to stop wasting time. Is to time yourself. Right. And do it every single time if I'm sitting down and I've got, you know, and I'm a big person on, you know, paper and pen, paper and pen.
[00:07:16] Right. And, oh, I'm going to digress you some minutes and share with you that I got this remarkable. and it feels like paper when you write it's so amazing. It [00:07:30] feels like paper. So I'm gonna start reading and taking notes on here. And that way I can like turn all of my handwritten documents into PDFs. Because right now they're all handwritten documents and if you see how I lecture, I literally lecture with a no.
[00:07:46] and I, I read the chapters, I write my notes and I consolidate the information in a way that helps me be able to lecture better. And because I've been able to do it over and over it just helps me retain this information. Right. So if you're studying for the exam, for sure, I'm a big fan of writing.
[00:08:07] There's writing and there's editing . So, I've been, I've been talking to people about editing this with my whole staff. Like, dude, sometimes you just gotta edit things out. I've spoken to therapists about it. Sometimes you have to edit things out. You have to declutter, but I digres. I digress. So number two was like, time yourself.
[00:08:27] There is this poral method and basically. It's just about chunking your time. So you, what they do is they say, you know, put your timer on your phone for 25 minutes. So you're studying for 25 minutes and taking a five minute break studying for 25 minutes and taking a five minute break. And what you wanna do is you wanna time yourself.
[00:08:52] And one thing that you can do is that once you start feeling distracted, just own your distraction. [00:09:00] Pause that timer look at how long it took before you got distracted. I've done this for myself before, when I was doing this. And when I first saw it, it was like literally 10 minutes. We are so distractable.
[00:09:13] We have our phone, we have people calling us. We have, you know, just like when, when. When something is difficult or challenging or new, your brain doesn't wanna do it. Your brain is totally here to protect your wellbeing and it does not want you to suffer. So it will start getting distracted. So if you start timing yourself, you'll actually see how long you can last.
[00:09:42] And that should might only be 10 minutes. you got this timer set up for. 25 minutes and you know, 10 minutes in you're like, well, you know, all over the place, so own it, and then chunk it even smaller until you until you get yourself to 25 minutes, right. Chunk yourself, 15 minutes, say, I, I will get to 50 minutes.
[00:10:07] I will get to 50 minutes and then chunk your information. So it is 15 minutes and then add to it. Right. And then add to. But a lot of times what we wanna try to do is. we wanna lie to ourselves and say that, oh no, we're actually really setting, but we're really not. So as soon as you recognize it, own up to it and just, you know, stop and, and [00:10:30] regroup.
[00:10:30] Right. And that is one of the biggest things that can help you to save your time, your time and your energy, cuz really when you waste time, you waste. Energy. Right. And if you don't have the time or the energy, you're not learning, you have no ability to retain information at all. Right? And then once you start going on this downward slope, it's gonna really, you know, kick you in the butt.
[00:10:54] And this is one of the reasons why inside the hand exam prep program, we have videos are chunked out. . I mean, some videos are a little bit longer than others because the kind of like the layout of the, the lecture is a certain way, but it's, you know, I talk heavily about chunky information, chunky time.
[00:11:14] There's no different. In that. So number two, definitely plan and schedule yourself out. Number two, time yourself. Right? And then the third one, I always say like plan to plan your study study needs by analyzing your work experience. Now that's gonna save you heartache more than time. I think and it's.
[00:11:39] here's the thing. If you have a lot of hand therapy experience, you're able to tie a lot of what you're doing into you're, you're able to tie your experience. You're folding your experience into the mundane details of the exam, right? The mundane details of [00:12:00] anatomy or the, the language, the surgeries, the tests, all that good.
[00:12:06] when you, when you don't have the experience, you'll, it's gonna be harder for you to fold in that experience. So you now need to grab other people's experience and what you wanna do with that, with that one is just to be realistic about it, because if you can be realistic about your study needs, you'll, you'll waste less time.
[00:12:32] You really will. You'll waste less. number four is to build in the breaks. Right? So what do you do in those five minute breaks? They don't need to be huge chunks of time when you're talking about building in breaks. It's two, two various levels of building in breaks. It's when you're studying and you're saying, okay, I'm gonna study for 30 minutes.
[00:12:52] I'm gonna take a five minute break. I'm gonna study for 30 minutes. I'm gonna take a five minute break I'm studying for, you know, on the weekend. I. You know, do four hours worth of work, but in between those four hours work, I'm gonna give myself 15 minutes break time in between. So you can do something like that and just break it down.
[00:13:10] But then there's the break of like, if you're studying for months on end, you need to make sure you're giving yourself those breaks in between as well, just to kind of help make sure that you're not wasting your time in terms of. It's the same thing. If you think about those breaks you can do that in terms [00:13:30] of in terms of your reading as well.
[00:13:32] So you can break that into it. So I always say build in the breaks because it allows you to like get up and move. It allows you to, you know, relax your mind for just a little bit. And that's all, that's all geared toward, like, you know, when you. When you schedule out your, your schedule and you time yourself and you analyze your study needs you, all of those things help you to, to essentially have that game plan and build in everything that you need to so that you don't waste the time.
[00:14:09] It might give you a really clear example of Like when I am reading a chapter, when I'm reading a particular chapter, let's say, let's say hands, cuz we're about to get started in the hand exam prep program August August 2nd is the first Tuesday of the month we're gonna get started. We're gonna get started in two weeks of hands.
[00:14:28] So one of the things I do is I chunk out all the topics on. and when I'm reading a particular chapter and I I'm meant to bring the book so I can give you an example, but open up any chapter, open up any chapter, and you can see, like, in my hand, like, don't start a chapter one. , don't start a chapter. One chapter one will like kill your motivation, kill any desire you have, because it's.
[00:14:57] Some of the driest material. So [00:15:00] usually in my exam prep program, I'm like, just start watching the videos first, cuz we dive into the different chapters and the different lectures and stuff like that. But don't read chapter one yet. Cause it will just kill your motivation, but you can start with like, understanding tests, different types of tests, then you can understand, but when I'm looking at a particular chapter, I'll look at that, like rehab of the hand, you know, that's my favorite resource anyway.
[00:15:25] Right? So let's just say rehab of the hand. And I actually flip through the whole chapter and I say, how many, how many pages is. How many pages is this. And then, you know, at the very beginning of that chapter, there's there's a section called like critical points and I'll read, I'll like, look through that and I'll look at the critical points.
[00:15:45] And so I'll mentally think about everything that they, those are bullet points. They want you to know those bullet points, like, okay. Those are the bullet points. And then when I Skimm through the chapter, I look for headlines. I look for big headlines, so there's big headlines and then like sub-headlines, and that's essentially how I might break up reading a chapter so that I can plan it.
[00:16:08] You know, I can plan it really well. And then I'm gonna set a timer for myself, like, okay, this part I'm gonna give myself 10 minutes or 15 minutes to get started. I'm gonna time myself. I'm gonna go through that. And then I'm gonna make sure that, you know, because if you try get it real small, you'll make sure that you're okay.
[00:16:24] I took these particular notes. And then I'm, I plan to get through this particular [00:16:30] chapter in, in a certain amount of. but you're build, you're breaking up, you know, essentially those tho that chapter. So you don't, you don't waste any time you break it up. And then you're saying, okay, if I get to halfway through this chapter and I really retain, I'm gonna take a five minute break.
[00:16:47] I'm gonna, oh my God, I'm gonna work on my thoracic extension. I might, you know, Do some, some movements I might stretch, I might get some water or, you know, anything like that, that kind of builds in that particular break for you. Is this helpful at all? Is anyone watching that says, okay, you know, I'm gonna apply some of this.
[00:17:07] Really. One of the biggest things is breaking it up. If you have any comments, if you've done this and it's worked, please let your friends know. leave the comment in the chat. And if you're watching this as a replay, definitely just play along and leave some comments. Let me know if it works and that way other people will know that if it works for you might, it can work for someone else.
[00:17:30] Right. It works for me when I chunk the information up, make it small and it makes it so that I stay on track with reading and I don't waste a lot of. right. If it doesn't work for you, leave a comment too. Say why it doesn't work for you. Cause understanding why it doesn't work is really important as well.
[00:17:51] So they're both important. And then the last thing is really to execute on your plan, right? So if you have the right materials you're studying in the right order, you know, when to [00:18:00] do all those PR you know, practice exams, stuff like that it won't deplete you and you won't waste so much time when you're studying.
[00:18:07] Right. So you wanna study in a way that, you know, not only helps you prepare for the exam, but you wanna make sure you're studying in a way that helps you to master your craft as the expert hand therapist. All right. And one part of the one part of study is the reading. You, you gotta be able to read a certain amount of information.
[00:18:30] It, it, there, you've got to take some notes. You've got to, you know, watch some videos. You've got to there's, there's a lot of different ways in which to learn. And one of the key things is to learn how you are studying now. Not when you were in school because there's a lot of us out there that, you know, it's been years since we have been in school, it's been years since we've taken exam.
[00:18:57] Right. So in a way you've got to inundate your you've gotta get yourself rolling again in this study. all right. So for those who are feeling like they're wasting time, spending long hours studying and feeling like you're not retaining anything. Those are the five tips. So the most important plan out, schedule it out, right time yourself.
[00:19:23] That's the second, but probably the first, most important. Time yourself. It works. [00:19:30] And if you need to small start with smaller chunks of time and then just keep building and keep building, right. Plan your studying out based on your work. Experience's really gonna help you cut down drastically what you need and it'll help you to to, to know which.
[00:19:49] chapters in which areas to really put your focus on it really makes a huge difference build in those breaks so that because of the natural breaks in there, it's going to, it's going to help you stay on track. So you don't wanna study for two hours without a break, because if you've wasted two hours, I think you've wasted two hours.
[00:20:10] Right. And I don't want you to do that, cuz you're just gonna feel frustrated. And then of course the third. Easy, but not so easy is to execute on your plan, be gentle to yourself, be kind to yourself and really honestly, give yourself a chance to be successful. Give yourself a chance to be successful. I've been talking to a lot of therapists in the last several weeks, and man, we are so hard on ourselves.
[00:20:37] We are so hard on our. I'm totally guilty. You have to work on ensuring and making sure that that I'm gentle. And I'm kind to myself. So, I hope this really helps you in terms of how can you consolidate your studying and, and be more efficient and save time when you're studying, when you're reading.
[00:20:57] If you have any questions about. [00:21:00] what you need to do to prepare. If you're looking for help structure, accountability, support, the hand exam prep program is open. I'm actually opening it. Now until August 2nd, we're gonna open up. We're gonna go start our 12 week intensive prep. Right before the November exam.
[00:21:22] So if you need help now is the time to get in here, apply for the program. Once you go in and apply for the program, I'll send you some questions and we'll do an initial assessment to see where you're at. See if this program can help you and what are the gaps that you need to be, you know, filling in to help you be success.
[00:21:42] I'm gonna do a hard stop of letting people into the program August 2nd, because I'm, I'm dedicating all my time to ensuring that the students are inside the program, gonna get the best and make sure that we hit a home run come November. So, so if you're interested in getting help, if you've been on the fence, thinking about it, apply for the program, I am going to have a hard stop in August.
[00:22:05] And that's it. And I'm gonna come and I'm gonna talk a little bit more about some, some hand some hand cases. The next time I come on, let me see when I was gonna come on and, and talk about some of the, some of the cases I've been, I've been having lately. It's been, it's been kind of crazy.
[00:22:25] So all. All right. I hope that helped you. If [00:22:30] you have any questions, I look forward to talking to soon. All right. Thank you. Bye.
[00:22:37] Hey, thanks for listening to Wong's world podcast. If you are brand new to the hand therapy world, head over to my website, www . Hand therapy secrets.com, where you can get started with some of our free guides and paid programs for both OTs and PTs diving into the world of hand therapy. Or if you've been listening for a while watching on our YouTube channel and you think you could benefit from developing and moving your career further along in hand therapy, reach out to me and my team at info @ Hand therapy.secrets.com and tell us exactly what you're looking for, By the way, if you know someone who could benefit from today's show, please share.
[00:23:14] Thanks. See you on the next episode.
