Hi, I’m Carrie Hall.
I have spent more than four decades asking questions about how people - and organizations - move forward.
My career in physical therapy has taken me from clinician to educator, author, entrepreneur, practice owner, mentor, and professional leader. Each role has shaped how I think about leadership, healthcare, and the challenge of building organizations that remain both excellent and sustainable.
In 1995, I founded Movement Systems Physical Therapy in Seattle. Over the next 26 years, I grew and led the practice through the realities familiar to many private practice owners: hiring and developing people, building systems, navigating reimbursement and healthcare change, maintaining clinical quality, managing growth, and learning when the organization needed something different from me as its leader.
I sold the practice in 2021. That experience reinforced something I now bring to my mentoring work: the skills that allow someone to build a successful practice are not necessarily the same skills required to lead it through every subsequent stage. Leadership has to evolve.
Today, through SISU Physical Therapy & Mentoring Services, I mentor physical therapy practice owners and leaders as they navigate that evolution. I am particularly interested in the intersection of leadership, organizational health, operational sustainability, and professional purpose. My role is rarely to hand someone a formula. It is to help them see their organization more clearly, ask better questions, identify the decisions that matter most, and build the leadership and systems necessary to move forward.
A Career Grounded in Movement
Clinical practice and education remain foundational to how I think. I have taught physical therapists throughout my career and am co-author of Therapeutic Exercise: Moving Toward Function. My academic and continuing education work has focused extensively on movement-system diagnosis, therapeutic exercise, and clinical reasoning.
That clinical lens continues to influence my work with organizations. Good clinicians assess before they intervene. They look for patterns rather than isolated symptoms. They identify contributing factors, test assumptions, and adjust as new information emerges. I believe organizations deserve the same discipline.
A scheduling problem may really be a leadership problem. A revenue problem may be a capacity problem. A staffing problem may be a systems problem. An overwhelmed owner may be evidence that the organization has not yet learned how to operate without them.
My job is to help uncover those relationships.
My Approach with Gentle Power
SISU reflects the kind of leadership I believe in. Leadership does not require choosing between strength and humanity.
The strongest leaders I know combine persistence with curiosity, accountability with compassion, conviction with humility, and courage with the willingness to reconsider what they believe. That is Gentle Power.