How To Stay Motivated in Vision Therapy When You Have Strabismus

Hi, my name is Melissa Daniels and today I'm going to help you learn how to stay motivated

as you're going through vision therapy. Now I have gone through strabismus surgery

vision therapy for several years and so much more, getting my eyes to work together to get

them straight, the whole package. And now I'm helping other people do the same thing

Now, you can get a lot of my resources over at learn.stervismissolutions.com

There's resources to help you know vision therapy or surgery is going to be a better option for you

Options to help you know how to prepare for those things, how to get through them

You can also schedule calls with me over Zoom. So, that's all at learn.stervismissolutions.com

Now today I want to talk about something that is hard for pretty much everyone that I've ever talked to going through vision therapy

And that is staying motivated. Whether that motivation is short term, the motivation to do your daily exercises

or maybe more long term motivation to stick with the program and actually complete the vision therapy and get the result that you're looking for

So either way, there's some really great techniques that you can use to help yourself stay motivated

And we're gonna go through six of them today. So first and the most important is to pick a good reason

What is your why? There's a lot of books out there about this. It's so important

If you have a strong enough why, you're going to be successful

If someone said, I will give you $1 million, if you can complete vision therapy

and get your eyes straight, would you do it? Probably, right? You'd be very motivated

I know that I could do more if I had that stronger motivation

A lot of people's motivation is, I want my eyes to be straight

I don't wanna look weird or I don't want people to look behind them

or make fun of me or there's a job I want and I need my eyes to be straight, right

A lot of it can be like that cosmetic piece, which can be very, very motivating for people

and that might be enough. I just want to throw in some caution though that if you're trying to

hate yourself into fixing your eyes like I hate the way I look, if I hate myself enough then maybe

I'll change, I can promise you it's not going to work coming from that angle. It's going to be a

lot more powerful if you can say I'm fixing my eyes because I can, because I want this, I think

It sounds fun and it's exciting and it's this adventure that I wanna be on in my life

And yes, I want my eyes to be straight because wouldn that be fun Instead of like I hate who I am I can only love myself if I look different right So get clear on what your motivation is and why you doing it And if you can clean that up and

make it more positive, you're going to have a lot more success staying motivated on that day to day

Okay. The second way that you can stay motivated is to make a decision ahead of time. So what I

mean by this is with strip is missed the vision therapy process is going to take a while some

people it takes years some people you know the shortest I've ever heard was nine months and that

was that was pretty unusual usually it's at least a year a lot of times two years so there's this

huge investment of time and people in the beginning are like well what if it doesn't work and how will

I know and they start and then every week they're second guessing themselves did I do it right or

should I have not done this and is it not going to work right there's a lot of second guessing

going on you're wasting a lot of your energy second guessing and then that is just killing

your motivation to do those daily exercises to show up ready to learn at your appointments and

that's what's actually going to help you be successful so what I would suggest is just

decide in advance I'm going to do vision therapy for six months I'm going all in and I'm not going

to second guess it that whole time. I'm just going to like do everything my therapist tells me. I'm

going to do my home exercises every single day and just be a hundred percent in. Don't second

guess it. And you might do it for a shorter time. There have been times where I said, I don't know

if this is working. I don't know about surgery. You know, I'm second guessing all these things

And I say, okay, I'm going all in until summer break, until my kids get out of school. And at

that point, I'm going to do a progress visit with Dr. Dan. We're going to see where I'm at

see if we think more therapy is the best and most ideal way to move forward, or if it's time for a

break, or time to graduate, or time for surgery, right? So it was setting up that I'm working my

guts out till May. And so then I don't have to worry when it comes April. I don't have to sit

there, or even if I do start worrying like, oh, should I really be doing this? I say, nope, I'm

doing it till the end of May, and at that point I'll revisit. And that can just really help you

stay motivated and working towards that end goal. Okay, third is I want you to set the most

amazing and magnificent goal of all time. Mine is to have perfect Randot stereopsis

central fusion of both eyes, right? Some might say that's impossible for me, and that's okay

right? I have this big goal that I want to achieve, and then I just kind of put it up on the shelf

Okay, and then I kind of forget about it almost. It's still there, it's always there in the background

but the goals that I'm choosing and trying to motivate myself for I really looking at a lot more short goals whether that as short as I want to get at least three minutes of each exercise done today Or maybe thinking about specific exercises like you know sorry this is all messed up

The gem vector graph, right? And seeing more depth. Seeing more depth in front or behind

Working on, there's different numbers that, you know, you're going to do in vision therapy

where they're working on your vergence, your base in and your base out, the convergence and divergence

You can say, my goal is to get to five. My goal is to get to 10. My goal is to get to 15

Wherever you're at, it might be just to experience any amount of stereo, right

Make it a small goal and then work towards that and just choose these littler goals

that are gonna help you get that big one. But you can't sit there and think like

I don't have, you know, for me, I've been working for four years and I still don't have central fusion

in that perfect Randot stereopsis. And I have so much other stuff that is so much better

But if I were to just focus on that really, really impossible to reach goal

I could just lose motivation so fast and just be like, I'm a failure

I can't accomplish anything, right? But I'm focusing on these smaller, more attainable goals

that are gonna help me get there eventually. So have the huge goal, but also you can shelf it and work on the smaller things as you go

Next, I want you to talk about what you're doing. I want you to tell your parents, your siblings

your friends, your family, post about it on Facebook or Instagram. Tell, you know, I love

to tell my kids like, Hey, I have a goal. I'm going to try to do my vision therapy five times this week. And they're really good at being like, mom, did you do it? They love to have something

to check in with me on. But the more you're talking about it, the more you're talking about

your big, exciting goal or your little goals you're trying to achieve, the more your brain is going to

be thinking about it and looking for ways to accomplish that. You can even go as far as to

have a buddy that you're checking in with. I've definitely done this throughout the process where

I find someone else who's going through vision therapy and I say, hey, you want to check in

together and see if we can finish our goals? And just having somebody to check in with on that daily

basis can really help you stay motivated. So talk about it. Don't keep it a secret and deal with it

all on your own. It's easy to do that because not everybody understands what's going on, but they

can. And actually people really do care about you, I promise. And they want to know. And as you talk

about it more, it's going to make it better for everyone. For number five, I want you to look at

the things you know are going to be roadblocks in your path to succeeding with vision therapy

whether again that's your daily exercises or long term goals. You already know what your roadblocks are right You probably already tried this or you tried to lose weight or start an exercise Like you know the things that are going to set you back and the things that are going to be hard for you So identify those roadblocks and then solve for them This might be

having your kids interrupt, right? That's a big roadblock for me is when my kids come in and

interrupt me while I'm doing my exercises because everything feels like an emergency and then I

I abandon my own thing and go help them, right? Other roadblocks is I feel too tired, I just don't want to

Another is that I know I'm doing a hard exercise and I might be getting some side effects

and I wanna avoid that, right? So I have all these things that I know

are going to cause me to avoid doing my vision therapy. And so then what you do is you take each of those

and you solve for it. You come up with a solution and I can't tell you what the answer is but you can

You know, if you sit and actually think about it, Okay, if your kids are always interrupting

and that's why you don't finish your exercises, okay, when can you do it when they're not going to be interrupting

Can you put on a show for them? Can you do it when your spouse or another loved one is home that can help with the kids

Can you do it when they're asleep? There's so many different options, but just recognize like

yeah, this is gonna be too hard when they're awake. I gotta figure out another plan and just solve for it in advance

That can keep the motivation going and just also help you form better habits around it

okay last I want you to identify as somebody in the strabismus to stereopsis club okay I just

coined that term today this is a club you are in you are a person with strabismus you're trying to

get stereopsis you're trying to achieve this right you are one of us you are the kind of person

that is going to keep working on your vision because it's fun because it's exciting because

you want to, right? You are a person that just does it. Even when it's hard, you are a strabismus

a strab as people in the optometry world call us. You're a strab who does their vision therapy

And if you identify as part of that group, it's going to be so much easier to motivate yourself

to do your exercises. It's so much better than saying, I like to do therapy, or I want to do my

therapy you just say no I'm I'm someone who does their therapy I'm a strabismus

to stereopsis club member I do this this is fun for me I do it every day I do the

exercises my optometrist tells me because I believe that this is gonna work so

just identifying as somebody who does their exercises is gonna really take

your motivation to the next level so those are my six best tips for staying

motivated. If you have more tips please put them down below and if you would like

to talk to me on zoom and we could talk about your personal motivation in your

situation I would love to help you with that. That's one of my favorite things to do. You can do all of that over at Learn Dots to Business Solutions dot com and I

will see you in the next video