What Does it Mean to be a Speech Therapist?

Happy Better Hearing and Speech Month! Hear from one of our speech-language pathologists about what being a speech therapist means to her:

"To me, being a speech therapist means taking some of our most intuitive and meaningful functions and teaching them to other human beings as conscious actions. Let me explain:

Say your name. Now, when was the last time you thought about how you say your name? The idiosyncrasies of tongue placement, lip movement, and overall mouth positioning for each individual sound.

That's just our stereotypical speech sound therapy. What about language: answering questions, following directions, interacting with your peers, communicating emotions, remembering information. And then there's that whole chewing and swallowing that we can help with, too.

Whenever I'm in session, I'm constantly thinking about how I communicate, recalling my training, figuring out how this all does (and doesn't!) translate to another human being, examining their approach and perspective, and integrating all this information into a therapy.

I love this profession because it's the ultimate vessel for self-reflection turned empowerment of other people. The best days are when clients learn something, but every day I learn something."

-Erika Baldwin, M.S., CCC-SLP

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