Chiropractic Practice Blog

What is a perfect day for you?

If you don’t know what would make a day perfect, it’s unlikely that you have many of them. The way you have more perfect days is to distinguish what a perfect day includes. That begins by using language to describe the aspects of your ideal day. Write it down. As you do, here are some areas to consider:

The three things: How much of your perfect day involves each of the following and in what proportion: people, things or ideas?

The four relationships: Make sure your perfect day includes a healthy mix of the physical, the intellectual, the emotional and the spiritual.

The five senses: We experience the perfect day through our nervous systems. Consider the role of sight, sound, smell, touch and taste in your ideal day.

Living consciously is a choice. What you regularly give your attention to grows. If one of your beliefs about a perfect day is that it can’t be planned or worse, that you don’t deserve one, start there. Because that’s a lie.

There's been way too much energy applied to managing patients and way too little thought given to managing a patient's hope. Hope is an essential ingredient of the healing process that is often overlooked by those inclined to relish the technical aspect of when and where to adjust. Naturally, this reduces patients to mere spines, cases, insurance policies and practice volume statistics.

Patient hope exists on a continuum. At one extreme you find the "malingerer" and hypochondriac who receive too much secondary gain by not recovering. At the other extreme you see the patient who enters with the spoken (or unspoken) belief that they will experience a one-visit miracle cure. Somewhere between those two extremes are the patients who have "succumbed" to consulting a chiropractor and show up hopeful, but wary. Left and right of this middle range is where the majority of patients find themselves.

Anyone who has heard me speak or listened to The Seminar, know that I place a high importance on the precision of language. Sloppy language is a sign of sloppy thinking which manifests as a sloppy life and practice.

Here are some words that are often used interchangeably. Which of each pair is more congruent with your purpose and intention?

Appointment: a specific time reserved for something or someone
Visit: the act of going to see a person, place or thing for a short time

Admit: allow to enter; grant entry to
Accept: welcome into a group or community

Diagnose: the process of identifying a disease by its signs and symptoms
Assess: To determine the value, significance, implication or extent of

Treat: subject to a process with the aim of alleviating a symptom
Care: attending to someone or something; to feel concern or interest

Adjust: to bring to a more satisfactory state
Manipulate: to control or influence skillfully

Is your fear of strangers interfering with your ability to get new patients?

If you're like many of us, your mother imbued you with a fear of strangers. This may have served you as a child walking home alone from school. But today it's wreaking havoc on your new patient acquisition ability, since new patients come from telling the chiropractic story to as many strangers as possible.

The Disney organization refers to the essential skill necessary here as being "aggressively friendly." It's an unusual combination of words!

It means being deft at introducing yourself. Speaking first. Having ease around strangers. Volunteering something about yourself. Being proficient at small talk. Making others feel comfortable around you. Explaining what you do in a way that prompts others to want to know more. Having a well-developed sense of curiosity helps.

Here's what's so ironic. To the strangers you're apprehensive about, you're the stranger!

I was speaking with a doctor on the phone the other day who was lamenting about the state of his practice, recounting the different adjusting techniques he had employed over the years. More recently, his analytical bent had prompted him to pursue various postural and structural models of chiropractic. "But I was the busiest when my purpose was about finding and reducing subluxations," he confessed.

It's tempting to think that your practice volume is the effect of what you're doing; a technique, a procedure or a script. Perhaps initially, but sustained practice performance is the result of something far more subtle. Many chiropractors search for it at technique seminars and practice management programs. Predictably, they often see a brief bump in their numbers, but the practice fails to maintain this hoped-for increase. Experience these roller-coaster ups and downs long enough and you can become cynical and resigned. What is this elusive quality?

Once the wrapping paper and ribbons are cleared away, we're left with the realization that the tangible gifts we give and receive, pale in comparison to the gift of life and the forgiveness of our shortcomings. The spiritual supersedes the physical--the eternal trumps the temporal.

Same in your practice.

Your words and procedures pale in comparison to your purpose and intent. As you release each patient's potential for health restoration, look beyond the immediate gratification (yours and theirs) and consider the consequences that you often don't get to see:

A more loving spouse
A more understanding parent
A more dedicated employee
A more generous boss
A more considerate commuter
A more confident teenager
A more creative teacher
A more energetic senior

Reducing symptoms gives you job. Educating patients creates a career. But enhancing the way others live their lives produces a legacy.

You make a profound difference. Thank you for being a chiropractor!

If your practice volume isn’t as great as you'd like, there's a good chance you’ve given considerable thought to how to turn things around. That search could send you down an unproductive rabbit trail to "causes" outside the four walls of the office and "causes" beyond the space between your ears. While it's convenient to blame the weather, the economy, the HMOs or the cheeseball advertising of other chiropractors, these are NEVER the real cause of slumping numbers.

Similarly, subluxations aren't the real problem patients have. They are merely the manifestations of poorly accommodated physical, emotional or chemical stress. Adding energy to their spine to put wayward bones back in formation is pure folly if you ignore the originating physical, emotional or chemical stressor(s), which may or may not still be present. Subluxation is merely a symptom.

Same with a downward statistical trend.

It's time for some self-reflection. Something most of us in our hurry-hurry bulldozing into the future don't do nearly enough of.

Is next year tinged with dread? Is there uncertainty, because you allow doubt to corrode your vision and outside circumstances to make you reactive? Is there a sense of heaviness that things won't work out as you hope?

Then, so it will be.

Or do you see next year as the best year ever? Is there a sense of optimism as the lies of symptom-treating create an even greater demand for chiropractic? Do you have profound gratitude for the knowledge and skill you posses? Is there hope, faith and confidence that come from walking in the truth?

Then, so it will be.

You can't control the winds, but you can set the trim of your sails. What course will you set? You're more likely to stay on course if you write it down.