Compliance and Self-Regulation are not the same thing. In my opionion, compliance should NOT be a goal. Who is compliance serving? The professional’s needs are being taken care of with compliance. Compliance is to please someone elses desire. Compliance makes the work enviornment much easier if our clients come in ready to do what we say. However, Self-Regulation is the ability to calmly attend. Before any learning or growth can happen, we need to be self-regulated. Before any meaningful conversation or diplomacy can happen, each party needs to be self-regulated. This means, the professional working with the client needs to be aware of the client’s strengths and weaknesses.
Possibly a client needs lots of volume, proprioceptive input, lots of facial , and vocal affect, and possilby a fast pace and louder volume to gain the energy and excitement to atttend. Or maybe the opposite is true and those conditions shuts down the client. Instead, maybe a client needs a quieter enviornment, a slower paced enviornment where information can be processed or taken in slower.
What ever the need, the therpists job is to find out those conditions, so the therapist can create the optimal envirornment for attending.
Learning can only happen when one can calmly attend. None of us lives in a perfect world , suited to each and every one of our needs. However we all can be overstimulated, frightened, bored or anxious. We attend and respond best when these conditions do not overwhelm or understimulate us. So we need to begin where the client is at by being aware of what conditions assist a client to Self-Regulate.
Compliance creates robots. Self-regulation creates an environment for growth, learning, and responding. Let us know your thoughts— we love to talk about what we do!
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