Monday, April 12, 2010

Tip #23

Due to speaking engagements, I have had to take a few weeks away. I have spent a lot of time writing and that is good because it generates new ideas and thoughts. Simply, the act of writing ignites your creative side and allows you to filter and condense your thoughts so they are easily understood.

I get my ideas from many different places; my own experiences, conversations with my wife, our patients, friends on facebook and other social media sites and divine spirit.

My wife (Dr. Nancy) and I are blessed to have the kind of relationship where we spend a lot of time talking. We love top be with each other, we love chiropractic and we love helping others. Today's tip could be written about on many different levels as the art of talking is a dying one.

Everything aside, today's tip is huge and discusses the one and only sure fire way to increase your patient, your ability to create wellness and wealth and how you can become the coolest office in your town.

Tip #23 - Connect with People

Right there is the biggest and most important tip you will ever receive from any mentor or self-help book. Bar none, your ability to connect with people is the single most important factor in achieving success an all areas of life - including your practice and will determine the number of people you are able to convert into patients - lifelong patients.

How you treat and interact with people (your ability to get people to like you) is imperative to your overall success and is a skill which can be learned. Now many seek outside solutions to an internal problem (sound familiar) to solve their practice problems. They look for systems and procedures and new forms and therapies while the whole time they have the answers lie right inside of them. Procedures are great and they are necessary but they are not the answer. Procedures and systems are secondary to you and your ability to create relationships with people. Procedures and forms only streamline the process so you can become more efficient thereby allowing you to serve more people in a shorter period of time however, if you can not convert people to practice members then no procedure in the world is going to help you see more people.

It all boils down to one word - RESPECT.

Your respect for the profession drives your underlying belief patterns about chiropractic which enables you to transfer your vision on to the patient.This is the starting point and as with all things, if you want to be successful, you have to start with step one. If you do not fully believe in chiropractic, its philosophy, and the power of the adjustment, stop right now and do a gut check. For students and new docs, I am going to put this very simply, if you want to reduce your learning curve and propel your office into the higher echelon of cool doc, you have got to OWN IT! That mean you live it and speak about it but not just speak about it - I mean speak about it. You know when someone is giving you a fake smile and people know when you are giving them a fake talk. The art of owning it come with time, practice and study but you can always tell the people who own it, they are the ones who are seeing a lot of people and a lot of families. They are the ones who are speaking and sharing with other docs. Owning comes with understanding. It takes time and requires that you make a decision. What kind of chiropractor are you going to be. Right now decide! Are you going to be a broke ass chiropractor who spends their day with a few miserable people and moans about how people don;t get it or are you going to be a chiropractor who loves going to work everyday where they are surrounded with loving caring people who bring their families in just for the health of it? You can be a Victim Vic, Mediocre Mark or a Cool Carl. You decide. While there are many difference between the three (which I will cover later), the main difference is in the philosophical belief patterns of the three and their ability to connect with people and transfer their visions. But, before you can transfer a belief, you have first got to have one yourself.

To respect the profession means that you hold yourself out as a chiropractor and that you are proud to be one. Again, this comes with loving who you are and what you do. When you own the philosophy and respect the profession you will have reached a milestone in your career and will have slain the one thing which prevents most chiropractors from being successful, namely FEAR. When you own it and it overtakes you body and soul, there is no room left for fear inside of you.

There is only one thing which can conquer your fear and that is respect (belief) in chiropractic and a strong sense of purpose and responsibility.

This respect for the profession filters down to how you interact with people. Ask yourself, why are you doing this? For some reason you chose to spend 9 years in school and hundreds of hours studying for boards. You have incurred massive amounts of debt and why? What are you going to do with the knowledge you now have?

It's cool if you want to do physical exams and ortho tests and the like but again where is the power? The power is certainly not in the exams or the forms or the systems. The power is in you and your ability to transfer your vision to people who are desperately seeking it. People want to know the truth and when you respect yourself, the profession and the people enough, you will speak it to them and they in turn may get it (more later) or they may not but that will not deter you you because you will believe so firmly in what you do and the PHILOSOPHY that you will be unshakable.