A conductor is certainly a specialist, but there is a very big difference between being a specialist and being an expert - and I love that difference. I specialise in teaching people with neuro-motor disorders strategies and skills to enable them to manage their bodies better. I don't make up these tricks and techniques, they are not my intellectual property - and I see my role, my specialty, as being able to articulate and share these solutions as openly and as freely as possible, and to facilitate the process of sharing and tweaking solutions that have worked for other people with similar challenges. I have learned some of these tricks from other conductors, but most have been learned by being a partner in a problem solving process with an individual, and more often by letting my clients teach me the tricks they have worked out for themselves. This means that the expertise and success are not mine; it means that I am teacher-learner combined, it means that I'm always on the lookout for new tricks to add to my repertoire and therefore always open to learning and growing, and it means professional humility is a part of being a conductor and I love that.

Lessons in humility come packaged in many wonderful formats. Last week BC, a private client decided to stop training with me. BC is a woman with advanced Parkinson's who started training with me because she was having frequent falls and trouble getting out of bed. After a few weeks of private in home sessions she had mastered the tricks and techniques we had been working on to the point that she is no longer falling and can now get out of bed unassisted, and she no longer needed me to come to her home and practice with her. I could choose to dwell on not being needed - but in reality no longer being needed is the best possible outcome and I'm celebrating. Conductive humility means knowing it is not about me - and that it never was - and there is nothing better than being around somebody who learns something and stepping back to let them own it.

Lessons in humility are sometimes delivered by posties on motorbikes. RP is a stroke survivor and a Harley Davidson enthusiast who has set up a rehabilitation space in his garage with parallel bars and steps - a dream workspace for a mobile conductor. Last week while I was there working with RP, the postie - a big burly guy on a motorcycle - came up the long driveway to deliver the mail. This week the same postie came up the driveway on his motorcycle. He had no mail to deliver, just wanted to tell RP that a few years ago he had been in a bad motorcycle crash resulting in a brain injury, and despite what everyone told him he was now walking again, and was back on his motorcycle, and that RP shouldn't give hope. That day, for the first time, RP and I walked all of the way down and all of the way back up his long driveway. This week RP did it again, twice in one session. Conductive humility is being able to celebrate that after months of RP and I working towards something together and of me encouraging and teaching RP, what got him over the hump was a burly postie on a motorcycle and his heartfelt act of kindness.

It's a long way to the top - but he made it!

I know that my role in the "Enable Me" project is personal trainer / exercise lady. However, I have been switching hats a lot lately -- mid session and discreetly taking my personal trainer hat off and slipping my conductor hat back on, barely stopping to notice how comfortable it feels, but noticing the change in my tone, the way sets and repetitions of exercises give way to rhythmically intended tasks, the subtle stylistic changes in the way the session is delivered. The people I work with in this project are in their eighties -- if they notice the hat change they don't react though they certainly respond. Whether what I am doing would look and sound normal in a CE group but seem a bit odd in the gym is irrelevant to these people for whom the concept of a personal trainer is as foreign as that of a conductor.

Don't get me wrong -- I am passionate about how valuable exercise is for people of all ages and abilities and firmly believe that exercise helps people stay strong and healthy and can actually intervene with what is often presumed to be an inevitable part of the ageing process. But there are times when what is needed and what is more appropriate in a given moment or over a few weeks of working with a particular person is Conductive Education -- the learning, the structured approach to problem solving, the way of breaking complex movements into manageable segments, practicing them, and stringing them back together as fluent, purposeful movement, the use of speech and rhythm and intention and motivation as facilitation -- in other words the unique tricks specific to the conductive trade.

Mr LH's file says that he has had a frozen shoulder, has had a few falls, and has mild cognitive decline. In reality Mr LH's movement and cognition is characteristic of something in the Parkinson's plus family of conditions -- I of course wouldn't try to guess or diagnose, that is certainly not my role, but I am pleased that the case manager and physiotherapist accept my experience based hunch that there is something neuro-motoric going on and have written a letter that Mr LH can take to his GP recommending further investigation. I am even more pleased that Mr LH has spontaneously started rhythmically saying tasks and counting with me (it is often hard for me to get people to count and say tasks in individual sessions, especially if they have not experienced the power of rhythmical intention in a CE group); I am even more pleased that when he counts he can walk and swing his arms and get up from a chair and coordinate complex movements. I hope -- as I often do about my 'hunches' -- that I am wrong and that there is no neuro-motor disorder creeping in. Without my training and experience as a conductor I would have no entry point for working with Mr LH -- I wouldn't know where to start.

Mr GL had a major stroke 15 years ago -- at the time he was fit and healthy and his stroke baffled his medical team and shocked Mr GL and his family. The 'Enable Me' case manager wasn't sure if this was something a personal trainer should be involved in and called to chat with me about how frail Mr GL was and about his increased risk of falls. I reminded her that I had many years of experience working with people after strokes in my previous life as a conductor. Today Mr GL and I had our first session -- within minutes it felt like we had been working together for years. I knew right away which tasks would work and what tricks to start him with, where to put my hands, where to push him, what it must have felt like for him to have his posture and symmetry and weight bearing corrected after 16 years. I saw his eyes light up when he conquered a task that moments ago had seemed impossible -- a few moments and a little conductive magic make a big difference when those moments are spent practicing and learning to apply nifty little CE tricks.

There have been a lot of people in the 'Enable Me' program that have been deemed too frail for personal training and who have instead received physiotherapy only instead of a combined approach -- there are a lot of people in the 'Enable Me' program that I would have been able to help if I had been given the chance to work with them. I got the contract with the 'Enable Me' program because of my work as a Conductor -- somebody whom I used to work with at the local cerebral palsy centre referred me and people involved with the program saw me working at the gym with people in wheelchairs. But I am contracted as a personal trainer, and what I bring to the table as a conductor is not fully understood or recognized, and therefore opportunities to help people as a conductor have been missed. At this point I do not believe that Conductive Education will even get a mention when the reports about the 'Enable Me' project are written up. I hope I can correct this but I am just not certain it will happen. I wish that when the contract was negotiated I had had the guts to stand up for Conductive Education instead of just being glad for the opportunity to take part.

Over and over and over again I hear people relate the advice they have been given by well meaning professionals -- 'you have CP / MS / PD / stroke / old age / whatever, there is nothing that can be done, accept it'. That is just not how we think in Conductive Education -- because I am a conductor I have a place to start and a unique bag of tricks and conductive magic, but more importantly I have a conductive attitude that makes me believe that there is always something that can be done, something that can be learned, that it is worth trying, so I do start, and start again, and try something new if one thing doesn't work. I'd like to think that I am the same when I am wearing my personal training hat -- and I know that if I am it is because that conductive attitude is so much a part of me now, or because no matter what role I'm in, I'm always wearing my conductor hat.

http://195.122.253.112/public/mp3/Beatles/14%20Let%20It%20Be/The%20Beatles%20-%20Let%20It%20Be%20-%2010%20The%20Long%20And%20Winding%20Road.mp3

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