We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Andy Chen a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Andy, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?
I was born in a first-generation Asian American family so there’s a lot of resilience that comes from my upbringing. My parents immigrated to a country where they didn’t speak the language to provide a better future for their family. I watched my mother struggle with mental health issues while my father worked long hours working his way up from being a dishwasher to the head chef at a popular French restaurant in New York City. He’d work grueling hours while even working for free at times to support the kitchen which would lead to more opportunities in the future. I would see him come home exhausted, dealing with nagging aches, and waking up the following day to do it all over again so he could continue to build a life for our family.
Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
I am a physical therapist. My big idea is that everyone is a few ‘aha’ moments away from living the life that they want to live. I want to be able to provide those moments for the patients that walk through the door. Our typical client has seen multiple healthcare providers, surgeons, rehab providers, and trainers without any success.
They get more clarity with our approach because we consider all of the factors that can be contributing to a person’s pain. Most people will look at only the site of pain but not the surrounding areas. Some people will look at the surrounding areas but they don’t consider the whole person. The human body is so complex and there are so many factors to manage, what makes us special is we try to cast a wide net to make sure that we are not leaving any stone unturned.
The most exciting part about my job is giving people hope that they can heal and become more resilient so that they can get back to meaningful activities. I’ve been fortunate that a lot of colleagues have sought out my advice that I ended up starting an educational company where we teach other coaches and clinicians our framework on how to solve complex movement problems.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
The three most important qualities that have impacted my journey are curiosity, compassion, and communication.
Curiosity is what drives you to continue to learn and develop your craft. For people who struggle with curiosity, I honestly think they might have chosen the wrong career path. I worked a lot of jobs and changed majors twice before finding out what genuinely interested me. Human movement, sports medicine, and every field that relates to physical therapy is something that I am extremely interested in, and studying it feels like play.
Compassion is one of the core skills in most professions but especially in healthcare when you’re exposed to people when they are at their most vulnerable. There is a great quote from Theodore Roosevelt and it’s “no one cares how much you know until they know how much you care”. This is one of the biggest reasons why I focus on developing trust first before trying to display my expertise. The best way to improve on this is just being aware that it is a superpower. Most people are always well equipped with the tools to help and they are qualified to do so but we just need to take a step back and be a human being first for the person in front of us.
Communication is a foundational part of our framework because there are a lot of things that people need to learn about how themselves and their bodies to heal. Being an effective communicator allows you to convey your ideas better and hopefully, that creates a better transference of knowledge for the people that you work with. One of the ways to get better communicating is by expressing your thoughts more vocally by having conversations with colleagues or writing more often so you can put your ideas on paper.
We’ve all got limited resources, time, energy, focus etc – so if you had to choose between going all in on your strengths or working on areas where you aren’t as strong, what would you choose?
I think it’s better to go all-in on your strengths because it will give you the best bang for your buck. We all have a limited amount of time and if we dedicate that time to our strengths then we can delegate the rest. If you do the work that you enjoy doing then you’ll be more efficient with your time and produce more quality work. I wore a lot of hats when we first started our business but now I only wear the hats that play to my strength. The other tasks can be fulfilled by someone who has strengths that will allow them to thrive in those roles.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.momentptp.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr.andychen/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andy-chen-momentptp/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/drandychen?lang=en
