What is the one thing that successful chiropractors do at the Holiday Season? Yes, they have fun, regenerate and relax with family and friends.  But more importantly? There are some basic steps that the ones who are creating the life and practice of their dreams do routinely at year end. Here they are:

• Take some time to reflect on 2009.  What did you set out to accomplish? What was your intention for the year?  Did you accomplish those things? What were the wins? More importantly, what needs to be improved upon? What didn’t  you accomplish but you learned something about yourself? How did you deal with challenge and adversity? Overall, how did you show up this year? In life and practice?
• Set a theme or intention to 2010: Maybe it’s practice growth. Maybe it’s the year of leadership.  Have an idea how you want 2010 to end before it starts
• Define your mission for 2010. In a written paragraph and look at it every morning to remind yourself of this big picture thinking you’re starting the year off with
• What are the Top 5 goals that you have to accomplish to make 2010 your best year yet?
• Set time aside each day (preferably the morning) to review your Top 5 goals and write the 5 things you must do today to move you towards those big goals
• Lastly, be disciplined and committed. Take your success seriously.  Get a coach. Show up big. Get organized and focused on making your goals a reality.

Have a very Happy Holiday with your family and loved ones.  From us at Rosen Chiropractic Coaching, we’re wishing you a safe and happy New Year and that 2010 is your best year yet!

Tags: Chiropractic Practice Success, Goals, New Year's Resolutions, Success, Successful Chiropractors

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. No gifts, no pressure. Just family, friends, and loved ones. The idea of just getting together to be together, being present, enjoying each other’s company and being grateful for what we have.  The most important thing in our lives are the relationships and love we have.

The first key to having the life and chiropractic practice of your dreams? Be grateful for what you have. What you focus on, expands.  So if you focus on what you don’t have… guess what?  It grows. So why not focus on what you are thankful you already have?  It will naturally expand. This mindset and feeling of gratefulness will bring you to an entire new level of attraction and success.

My suggestion? Write down 5 things you are grateful for in your personal life and 5 things you are grateful for in your chiropractic practice at the end of each day. This is the starting place for explosive growth and success in a TRUE Wellness Model. Have a mindset of abundance and satisfaction drive your decisions and actions, not from a place of lack and fear.

At Rosen Coaching, we are so grateful to have you be a part of our lives and to have you be a part of our mission to have chiropractors be the recognized leaders of TRUE healthcare and the wellness revolution!

Tags: Add new tag, Chiropractic Practice Management, Chiropractic Practice Success, Gratefulness, Leadership, Success, Thanksgiving, True Wellness Model

The following is a guest post from Dr. Steve Silk, the Chairman of the Board of Directors for the Chiropractic Awareness Council. He has graciously agreed to share a recent post on H1N1 to help chiropractors to communicate with their practices and communities.  People need empowerment and not fear, they need Care vs. Scare communication. So please share your truth ~ the people of the world need to hear it! For those of you who would like to do a Swine Flu talk, please email me, as Rosen Coaching has some resources for you.

“Friends…
I don’t believe I have seen such a contrived panic about a relatively innocuous issue in my life.  You would think the end of the world was right around the corner.  I have already talked about this one-on-one in the office with many of you, but for the rest, let’s have a few minutes of logic, truth and reality.
First, I need to get the legal stuff out of the way.  So let me absolutely clear: I am not attempting give any sort of advice on how you should proceed with taking care of the health of you and your loved ones in any form or model of health-care delivery but my own: Chiropractic.  The following is based on the expressing of my personal opinion.  But I can assure you that my opinion is based on historical data, research evidence and 20 years of clinical experience.
Second, I also want to be absolutely clear that my heart goes out to anyone who has lost a loved one…to H1N1, “regular influenza” or any reason.   There are FAR too many premature deaths in our society, driven by the increasingly toxic world we live in and accentuated by allowing a sickness-treatment model of care dictate how we create health.  It’s a lot like a bankruptcy agent telling you how to invest your money…not being broke is a lot different from being wealthy.
Finally, I believe that we all need to take that deep breath I mentioned in the subject line.  Go ahead, do it.  That will help you begin to deal with the anxiety that is building across our nation.  That anxiety is in the form of mass hysteria that is bubbling up regarding the predicted scourge of Swine Flu (now called H1N1).  It is a situation driven by one emotion: Fear.
Fear is a great motivator, it makes us do knee-jerk reactive things.  Just look at what it did in Salem Massachusetts in 1692 (a lot of probably nice men and woman were burned at the stake or hung for the crime of being “witches”), the north-east US during the War of the Worlds broadcast in 1938 (a lot of people went berzerk and starting preparing for the end when they thought that Martians had invaded New Jersey) and a large chunk of the German populace during the Holocaust from 1941-45 (an AWFUL lot of Jews, gypsies, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, eastern European immigrants and mentally challenged people were medically experimented on and sent to the gas-chambers for simply being “different”).  Now we have the drums being banged for H1N1.
For those of you who are currently sick or have sick kids…I get the fear you are feeling.  I had a really good dose of it myself when I picked up malaria in a remote village in Northern Thailand…all by myself a million miles from home, sicker than I had been in my entire life and wondering if it was my time to meet the Creator.  Well, once I got over my initial anxiety (and all the wild fear-driven thoughts that went with it), I became quite excited at the level of fever I was experiencing, the amount of fluids coming from various parts of my body and just how intent my immune system was at keeping me alive.  So while it was no fun, the lesson I learned from it was that this earth-suit my soul calls home is well-equipped to look after my needs with no help from absolutely ANYONE!
Before you decide on how you will deal with this issue (and again, I am NOT telling you what to do…I’m not your mother!), here are a few things that you really need to consider:
1)  You are still more likely to pick up Tuberculosis (which is really running rampant these days on northern Ontario native reservations), get hit by a car (will you be driving today?), drown in the bathtub (planning on being clean this week?) or die from taking over-the-counter medication (more on that later)…so why isn’t the Ministry of Health and the media screaming about these more vital issues?  I don’t think that people realize that the risk of being infected with this germ is really low, with risk estimates at about 1 in 175,000 (about the same risk as being attacked by a shark) from info supplied by Health Canada.  You risk of dying?  That is put at about 1 in 425,000 (less than 0.0002%) which is just a bit less than your risk of dying from a meteorite strike.
2)  The predicted “high-season” (based on WHO algorithms) is the last two weeks of October and the first two weeks of November.  We are half-way through this “epidemic”, so hang in there people, we’re all going to be OK.
3)  Now this is a BIG one, so really consider this: Healthy people don’t get sick, and definitely don’t die…sick people do.  The inference in a lot of the reporting is that healthy people are being affected.  This is ludicrous.  The people who are getting sick are run-down at some level, and the ones who die are immuno-suppressed…it’s as simple as that.
4)  The best to survive ANY infectious process is still the same as it has been for the entire length of time humans have roamed this planet: our immune system.  Here are my suggestions on how to almost guarantee that your immune system will NOT let you down…ever!
1)  Get adjusted regularly (ensured the growth of my profession and got a LOT of people
thru the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918!)
2)  Eat well (especially fruit and veggies), and consider supplementing your diet with
Vitamin C, Vitamin D and Omega 3 fats
3)  Drink lots of fluids (mostly water and tea)
4)  Exercise daily…even if it is just a 15 minute walk
5)  Get a good night’s sleep
5)  Recognize that there are a lot of innuendoes, half-truths and flat-out lies being disseminated throughout our media by some of our “trusted health leaders”.  We are being told that research shows that the H1N1 vaccine is both safe and efficacious.  I suggest if you are considering rolling up your sleeve for the H1N1 shot, that you ask the person giving you the jab a few questions on efficacy (does it create a specific antigen-antibody complex, necessary for true immunity?) and safety (does it have any nasty side-effects?).   I know the answer to both, No to #1 and Yes to #2.  However, most people will be told the exact opposite, because most of the folks delivering the procedure have no clue about the background of what they are doing, they are simply “following orders”.  Just so you know, the “research” that has been quickly done was carried out on a very small group of people (and to the best of my knowledge, none of it on kids by the way), with no long-term follow-up of side-effects (the only study that I am aware of that looked at this only tracked their participants for three days after their injection).  So this is a typical case of “buyer beware”.
5)  You need to know another little tidbit of info: ANY flu-shot shows very LITTLE ability to reduce influenza rates ANYWHERE.  For example, Ontario introduced “free” (translation: we pay it with our taxes) flu-shot’s in 2000 and has seen the rate of usage almost triple….yet influenza infections and deaths have risen significantly during the same time period.  The obvious conclusion?  The shots don’t work.  The Ministry of Health’s conclusion?  We need to vaccinate more people.
6)  Want a really good overview of the pro’s and con’s of this whole debacle?  Go to the following website ( http://swineflu.mccoypress.net) and poke around a bit…well-laid out with tons of good information to help you come to a confident conclusion on the topic of Swine Flu.
I hope that the content of this email helps you to weather the storm, and allows you to relax a bit and NOT react to the fire of fear that is being fanned by the media.  I also hope that it helps you to make the absolute best decisions regarding your health…both for this issue and for every issue that impacts you”.
Sincerely,

Tags: Care vs. Scare, Empowerment, Fear, H1N1, Hysteria, Media, Rosen Chiropractic Coaching, rosen coaching, swine f, Swine Flu, Wellness Chiropractic

Whether or not you think you have a philosophy, you do. Even choosing to not have a philosophy is a philosophy! Chiropractic philosophy is one of vitalism and deductive reasoning.

The problem is, over the past 114 years we have fallen into the trap of looking to the mechanistic, allopathic model of science to validate what we know to be true. And it doesn’t work. It’s like trying to get insurance companies to pay for wellness care – it’s just not their model. But the funny part is, science and philosophy are not separate. Even scientists have a philosophy! Dr. Eric Russell, professor at Parker Chiropractic College gave a great four-hour lecture at Life Lyceum 2009 on Science vs. Philosophy. And the conclusion is, we need both…but in balance. Not the idea that science reigns supreme over everything else. That philosophy is the starting point of everything, even the god-like institution of science. (Have you ever wondered what a Ph.D stands for? Doctor of Philosophy in whatever the chosen field of expertise!)

So what is your philosophy? How grounded are you in the vitalistic philosophy that formed this profession? Why do you do what you do?

Mechanism vs. Vitalism: What is chiropractic’s philosophy?

Mechanism as a Philosophy, is defined as:

a. the view that all natural processes are explicable in terms of Newtonian mechanics.

b. the view that all biological processes may be described in physicochemical terms.

Vitalism, as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary,[1] is

a. the doctrine that the functions of a living organism are due to a vital principle distinct from biochemical reactions

b. the doctrine that the processes of life are not explicable by the laws of physics and chemistry alone and that life is in some part self-determining

The great news is, science is starting to have research that is actually illustrating our vitalistic philosophy! I was so inspired listening to Bruce Liption, Ph.D speak about the vitalistic nature of cells, and their ability to survive even when the nucleous is removed. How is that possible if we are only the sum of our parts and the DNA is the “brain” of a cell? Hmmm, guess there is more to it!

I’ve been honoured to be involved with Tedd Koren and speaking at Koren Specific Technique seminars. KST is one of the great vitalistic techniques out there.  The time is now chiropractors to have a look at your philosophy and get clear on what you are trying to accomplish with your care. If there is any incongruence, it will inevitably lead to destruction.

If you are stuck practicing in a pain-based model, treating the body as if it was a machine instead of recognizing the vitalistic self-healing and self-regulating laws of the body and you want more out of practice… the time is now! People want vitalism and wellness care and it is time that our profession became the recognized leaders of this movement! Who wants to join us?  We are vitalistic chiropractic coaches who can help you THRIVE in a TRUE Wellness Model!

Tags: Chiropractic Coach, Chiropractic Consultant, Chiropractic Philosophy, Chiropractic Practice Management, Chiropractic Science, Dr. Bruce Lipton, Dr. Eric Russell, Dr. Tedd Koren, Koren Specific Technique, KST, Life Lyceum, mechanism, Pain-based chiropractic, vitalism, Wellness Chiropractic

Why haven’t chiropractors marketed chiropractic as well as ShamWOW has marketed a stupid sponge cloth? That thing is a global phenomenon in a microcentury and chiropractic is 1000x more amazing and has been around for 114 years! (If you don’t know what I’m referring to, click here).

One of my favourite leadership gurus is Robin Sharma who’s coined the term, Merchant of WOW.  And I think it’s time chiropractors started acting like Merchants of WOW.  It means obsessive attention to detail in every aspect of your office, it’s decor, the chiropractor’s healthy image, the “red carpet” service to every person that contacts or comes into the office. It means refining your technical skills, growing your understanding of our philosophy and taking your communication skills and procedures to the next level.

Every step of the way we want people to think and to say, “Wow”.

The trouble is, a lot of practice management companies teach chiropractors to make their patients say, “Wow, I had no idea things were so bad”.  And from our perspective, there is no place for Scare Tactics in a TRUE wellness chiropractic practice.  We feel people should say, “Wow, I had no idea chiropractic could help me in so many ways! Wow, I had no idea you could affect my nerve system and my entire body”!  We want to be motivating them by what they want, as opposed to motivating them with fear and what they don’t want. It’s subtle, but has huge ramifications on the relationship long term. Sure you might be short term compliance with fear, but it doesn’t last and the relationship is tainted.

So how do we do that? We teach them under the radar, planting seeds and asking questions to help stretch their consciousness with every interaction in the office: How the CA answers the phone, your First Visit Forms, the look and feel of your office, your communications and procedures of Visit 1, Visit 2, Daily Interactions, Re-Evaluations and Re-Reports, how you handle difficult questions and situations, and how you manage your team.

It’s time that people start saying ChiropracticWOW! The wellness revolution is upon us and it’s time we step up and lead it.  If you want to know more about our chiropractic coaching and how to THRIVE in a TRUE wellness model, let us know. We’re here to help.

Tags: Chiropractic Coach, chiropractic marketing, Chiropractic Practice Management, Chiropractic Wellness Model, communication, LAASR, Leadership, merchant of WOW, Robin Sharma, scare tactics, Success, Wellness Chiropractic, Wellness Chiropractors, wellness revolution

September 18th, 2009 is chiropractic’s 114th birthday!  On that day, Daniel David Palmer made the connection between the spine, nervous system and overall health and well-being. And the trusting deaf  cleaner Harvey Lillard allowed DD to adjust him, which resulted in his hearing being restored.

We’ve come a long way since then: chiropractic is a household name, from the original Palmer Chiropractic schools there are now dozens around the world including Australia, New Zealand, U.K and most recently Barcelona Spain! We’ve done a great job getting our name out there.

But where we’ve failed miserably in chiropractic is letting the public know what we do. I dare you to go outside your practice and ask 100 people what chiropractic is. What would they say? Neck pain? Back pain? Check out this video of someone who braved the streets and dared to ask:

What about inside your practice?  If Dr. Rosen and I sat in your reception area and asked the next 100 people who came in, “What are you hear for?  What is chiropractic?” What would they say?  If you don’t like the answers you are hearing, it means they don’t get the whole story.  You might be educating them, but they way you are educating them isn’t working. If they can’t articulate the whole story themselves, we’re in trouble. Our practice and our profession.

We feel there is a communication crisis in that the public does not know what we do. And our profession is stuck at a minimal percentage of the population utilizing our services. And the ones who do don’t really know that we are health and wellness doctors. They think we ‘crack bones’ to help back pain.

So what can you do to celebrate chiropractic’s birthday? How about commit to yourself to clearly define your Certainty as a chiropractor?  How about learning how to communicate the simple chiropractic truths in a way that people ‘get it’ and stay, pay and refer?  It is time for chiropractors to become the leaders of TRUE healthcare.  If you’re interested, we can help!  We are committed to helping the profession grow to lead the wellness revolution and transform the way the public perceives chiropractic care. We want you to THRIVE in a TRUE wellness model!

Tags: chiropractic, Chiropractic Coach, Chiropractic Coaching, Chiropractic Consultant, Chiropractic Practice Management, chiropractic profession, chiropractor, communication, Leadership, Wellness Chiropractic, wellness re

We hear again and again that our profession has an identity crisis, but from our perspective, we have a communication crisis!

What chiropractors know (no matter if they practice in a pain-based model or a wellness-based model) is that we help people have better lives! We’ve surveyed hundreds and hundreds of chiropractors around the world, and no matter how they practice, they all recognize that we can not only help people with their pain and symptoms, but also with improved function and a better quality of life!

Our problem as a profession is that the message that we’ve communicated and marketed to the public isn’t unified or clear.  Not like the tequila marketing sign above.  The public thinks that we help with neck and back pain and we know we help people get healthy and stay healthy to essentially have a better life!

As a profession, what we’ve been doing for communicating the chiropractic message isn’t working. Otherwise, at this 114th birthday of chiropractic, we’d be seeing more than 8-10% of the population.  If people understood what we do, because our communication and marketing was working, we’d be a lot further along right now.

If you are interested in finding out more about how to communicate in a true wellness model, in a care vs. scare approach, we encourage you to check out our LAASR program and seek out the support of a coach.  Lecturing and telling people until you’re blue in the face isn’t working. We need to figure out what people really want and then show them how to get it.  Let’s find a better way and start to move our profession into the position of leadership in the wellness revolution we deserve.

Tags: chiropractic, chiropractic birthday, Chiropractic Practice Management, Chiropractic Practice Success, chiropractic profession, communication, communication crisis, identity crisis, LAASR, Leadership, Wellness Chiropractors, wellness model, wellness revolution

One of the biggest classic blunders chiropractors make is to forget they are human first and doctor second. What do I mean?  They are so quick to jump on ‘teaching or telling’ the person in front of them what they think (they are the doctor, aren’t they?), before they really find out what is going on and clarifying the person’s question or statement.

During the Daily Interactions in your office, my favourite question to ask someone who has a question or a concern is,”Why do you think that is”? Assuming we’ve nailed our Visit 1 and 2 communications, we can use this question to help make the picture bigger without lecturing people. The old Ask vs. Tell!

“Doc, my neck hurts more today”, is a good example. The assertive chiropractor comes out with both guns of blame and shame blazing, “What’d you do to wreck yourself”?  The non-assertive chiropractor doesn’t address the concern with a meek, “Okay” response.

We coach our chiropractors to not get caught up how they want to respond but to connect with the person in front of them and clarify what they mean. “Why do you think that is”, is a good start. This little question allows us to:

1. Check in with them and find out what is really going on

2. Help them come to the answer, by asking questions and without you lecturing them (which concurrently creates less resistance and more ownership)

3. Connect the dots for them so that they get it! For example, “Wow, Mr. So & So, your neck is bothering you more today?  Why do you think that is? The last time this was subluxated, do you remember what lifestyle stress you were having then? Yes, it was stress “X”. Have you been having stress “X” again? Interesting… What do you think about that? Can you see that this lifestyle stress is recreating this subluxation?

We need to ensure that every visit people feel valued, given a voice to speak their thoughts, feelings or concerns and that there is a chance for us to give specific feedback.  We are either going to Celebrate & Educate or Commiserate & Educate. And what do we want them to get from our education?

1. The way I live my life can either recreate subluxations or help me stop recreating subluxations

2.  If I have subluxations, there is limited life force getting to my cells, my body is not healing or  functioning at it’s optimum, and I am not living at my greatest potential

If the people in your office are not able to give you the “Whole Story“, give us a call and we’ll help figure out how to communicate this and THRIVE in a True Wellness Model of Chiropractic Practice!

Tags: Ask vs. Tell, Challenges, Chiropractic Coaching, Chiropractic Education, Chiropractic Practice Challenges, communication, wellness chiropractic practice management

Do you remember what finals week was like in chiropractic school?  Long hours, pushing through exhaustion, getting your studying done. Not that it was healthy, or how you would want to function long term, but sometimes we have to hear Dr. Sid’s voice saying, “Do what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, whether you like it or not”.

I find many chiropractors forget what it’s like to have the pedal to the metal. They are used to being on cruise control.  As chiropractic coaches and consultants, we work with our chiropractors to shift their communications and procedures to a TRUE Wellness Model of practice. And sometimes they get halfway through establishing a new (and stronger) foundation of Visit 1 and 2 and get stopped.  They feel overwhelmed and frustrated. And we have remember that, “Rome wasn’t built in a day”.

The truth is, having a successful chiropractic practice is simple, but not easy. If it was, everyone including you, would already be thriving.  Keep in mind your results in practice are directly proportionate to your communication skills and our level of certainty.  And if we want to change the results we are getting, we have to not only change our procedures and skills, we have to also change ourselves. Sometimes we have to push through with motivation like it’s finals week, to get to the next level. Without this push through The Dip, we’ll never get the results and changes we are looking for in a timely manner.  And we all want results yesterday!

Are you ready to take your practice to the next level? Do you want to thrive in a TRUE Wellness Model? If you’re ready to work, we’re ready to help!

Tags: Chiropractic Coach, Chiropractic Consultant, finals week, frustration, hard work, overwhelm, Results, The Dip

In the book, Change or Die by Alan Deutschman he studies the 3 keys of change, and what works and doesn’t work.

In a recent blog post, Ask vs. Tell, I explored the power of asking questions to shift consciousness, beliefs and therefore behaviours.   This follow-up post is meant to look at the two types of questions we can ask: Scare Questions or Care Questions. What do I mean?

A good portion of our profession and practice management companies uses scare tactics and fear to manipulate people to do what we want.  Our perspective, at Rosen Chiropractic Coaching is that fear and manipulation have no place in a chiropractic wellness model.  We stand for clean communication with compassion.

In Change or Die, Alan Deutschman explores the three “F” words: Force, Facts and Fear and why they don’t work. When the three “F” words become too much, people go into denial as a protective mechanism. They make irrational decisions that could cost them their life (only 10% of heart attack patients changed their lifestyle despite the fear and threats).  In contrast, Dr. Dean Ornish had 75% of heart attack patients change their lifestyle with the three “R” words: Relate, Reframe, Repeat.

So we need to relate to the people we care for. We need to build rapport, bond, connect, offer hope and relieve their fears.  We need to reframe their consciousness and beliefs about health, and ask questions to shift their current paradigm, to plant seeds and teach under the radar. And we need to repeat these questions in our daily interactions, our Touch-Tell-Ask-Teach and find ways for people to become successful every visit, working towards a new goal. We as their doctor, need to lead them, inspire them and empower them.  And we need to create a culture in our office creates a supportive community.

Because making changes in life can be challenging and these new behaviours need to be reinforced with love and support, not fear and commitment. This is exactly what we do at Rosen Coaching to help you have a thriving wellness practice! We address the 3 R’s in the LAASR Mastery process. If you want a communication system based on the 3 R’s then give us a call!

Tags: Alan Deutschman, Ask vs. Tell, care tactics, Change or Die, Chiropractic Coach, Chiropractic Coaching, Chiropractic Practice Management, Chiropractic Wellness Model, communication, Denial, Facts, Fear, Fear Tactics, Force, Leadership, Reframe, Relate, Repeat, scare tactics, Scare vs. Care, True Wellness Model, wellness chiropractic practice management