Meet Michael Derry

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Michael Derry. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Michael below.

Hi Michael, thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?
Two factors have impacted my work ethic throughout my life. The first being my Dad. He instilled hard-working principles and ethics early in my life. He did his best to show us what kind of life we could have if we would work hard. Much of my ethical principles come from history of manual work, which gives me a sense of pride and accomplishment when I’m able to produce something.

A more recent aspect of my work ethic comes from passion. If something is important to me and I’m passionate about it, there’s little that can be done to stop me from moving forward.

My childhood and my more recent endeavors have allowed me to accomplish new challenges and helped me define my work.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I am particularly excited to see the growth of health professions, such as physical therapy in the future. We are establishing environments that are not only friendly for the patients and achieve amazing outcomes, but also, help providers sustain a well balanced life.

Early on in my career, I kept noticing providers, appearing burnt out and not presenting themselves as models of health. At Revision Health and other like minded practices, we are striving to develop an environment where we can remain passionate and provide exceptional evidence-based care. It’s exciting because the clients and patients can feel the difference. It’s either we keep striving for volume or we can focus our efforts around value. When we boil down healthcare, it’s an experience, I need to be focused on relationship based care.

To do hard things and make hard decisions, such as changing health, require strong relationships that cannot be built in 10 to 15 minute appointments. Treating humans is hard and it takes people willing to do hard things in order to make our comminutes healthier.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Looking back I really appreciate my graduate education. Not the model but the process. The process to learn an unbelievable amount of information in such a short period of time. Recognizing that it’s the ability to learn information and adapt quickly, that is the skill. It is just like any other muscle in our body. We have to flex our skills in order to keep them sharp and grow.

Another quality that I value is altruism. We all get into this to help people. We must be people focused. We need to do the right thing and the right thing needs to be the center of our conversations. When treating people, their pain, and their difficulties, we are managing feelings. In any career or sector, we are managing people and the quicker you can recognize that the more effective you will be in your influence.

The last area that really impacted my journey is recognizing imperfection is okay. Our traditional school systems reward organization and high letter grades. I often have to remind myself that it is okay to try something new without mastering the skill prior.

As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?
Dare to Lead by Brené Brown helped me understand that it is OK to be vulnerable early in a relationship. I found it interesting that most of us share similar vulnerabilities, and once we get better at having hard conversations, we can get better at communicating and move even quicker. We think that we can avoid failure by perfecting and proving to others that we have perfected something but in reality that just delays learning. This book has helped me learn and grow quicker than any education I had in my field. I often remind myself, that failure is an event, not a person.

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