Many people are excited about the Ask vs. Tell, socratic questions of our Rosen Coaching Communications! We’ve just finished our Wellness Practice Blueprint program and people around the world are implementing and changing their communication and having massive effects in their practices already!

As a chiropractic coach, when I listen to live recordings of patient interactions, or are talking down the concept of socratic questions with clients, I find a big piece of the puzzle is not JUST the skillful questions we are asking, but also the “tone” of voice or intention of the question.

From my perspective, the two opposing ways to approach a question are either: an intent of confrontation or an intent of clarification.

Our goal with our tone is not to be condescending but curious!  Our intent is to clarify, not be confrontational!  Truly our intent, our tone, our body language, our facial expressions all communicate a message to the person in front of us. We all know the same question, asked either way, can mean entirely different things!

I personally have heard chiropractors, who are thinking they are doing a good thing by asking questions, speaking down to people, asking rhetorical questions, and making the entire interaction awkward. I have also heard very skillful communicators ask questions to clarify what’s really going on, in a conversationally curious way to have successful interactions and build long term relationships.

If you would like to learn more about how to ask socratic questions in a way that builds relationships over time (as opposed to ruining them) we’d love to send you a free training module called our LAASR Orientation!  Please go to our website and enter in your name and email. In addition to that, we will send you hundreds of dollars of free products from our store as a gift!.

Tags: Ask vs. Tell, Care vs. Scare, Chiropractic Coach, Chiropractic Practice Management, communication

At Rosen Coaching, one of our main tenants that we bring to our chiropractic coaching and speaking around the world, is the concept of “Care vs. Scare” communication. Both Dr. Russ Rosen and I work hard to help chiropractors communicate and practice chiropractic in a congruent model with our philosophy. Our vision is to have chiropractors step into their rightful place as the recognized leaders of true healthcare, worldwide!

Recently, while speaking at an EPOC group in Ottawa, and day in and day out in our coaching conversations with our clients, how deep this concept is embedded in the chiropractic profession really sunk in.

With each interaction in your office, you have a choice: To inspire others to action or to try and manipulate them.  This shows up initially during Visit 1 and 2, but will continue on through your daily interactions, and show up strongly again in your re-evaluations and re-reports, and especially how you handle difficult questions!

Inspiring others requires communicating the ‘why‘ behind chiropractic care and why you do it.  It requires a conversation of finding out where they are at, what they think and teaching under the radar to help them see there is another way. It means empowering people, giving them truth and consequences and leading them to choose what is right for them.  It doesn’t mean sugar-coating the truth, or not talking about consequences, but the intention is to inspire action and empower people.

Manipulating others uses scare tactics to coerce and strong arm people to choosing what you think is right for them.  It means a harsh tone and over-dramatizing the negative, making assumptions, painting people into a corner, giving them one good choice.  Yes this can work in the short term, but it’s not a good way to build strong relationships over the long run, in our opinion.  The intention is to manipulate people to do what you want.

The trick is to REALLY find out what is going on with them, and how we might be able to help them.  Then simply find out what they really want and show them how they can have it!

If you are up for it, I’d like to challenge you to see where in your practice and in your community you can inspire others more.  Will you take me up on it?

Tags: care tactics, Care vs. Scare, Chiropractic Coach, Chiropractic Practice Management, Chiropractic Wellness Model, communication, Rosen Chiropractic Coaching, scare tactics

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

One of my main sources of inspiration on leadership is author, blogger and marketer Seth Godin.  I feel his ideas on change and leadership are not only timely, but very relevant to the chiropractic profession.

I do not believe our profession has an identity crisis. As a chiropractic coach, consultant and speaker in our profession, when I survey the crowd we mostly all agree on what we do and what we are trying to accomplish. What tangles us up is the ‘how’ we do it.  We know who we are, but the rest of the world does not know what we do. We don’t have an identity crisis but a communication crisis! How do I know? For the last 100 years, although the profession has grown, we have not reached our Tipping Point. Still a measly 10% of the population in North America sees a chiropractor regularly. If we didn’t have a communication crisis, most people would know what we do! But they think we’re back doctors…

In Seth Godin’s recent talk at TED, he dives into concepts that are essential for chiropractors to embody if we are going to have a health care revolution and change the world!  We no longer can persuade and push people into our care using Scare Tactics. Rosen’s Care vs. Scare approach is the cutting edge of communication and leadership for chiropractic practice management.

Are you challenging the status quo?  We need to lead people, be a heretic and do the opposite of what ‘everybody’ else does and what ‘everybody’ else knows. Why do you want to be just like ‘them’ anyway? Trying to appease and belong to the status quo is what has damaged our profession in the first place.  If you are not stepping up in your community, speaking your truth and sharing the story, we need to address your mission, vision, values and Certainty. This is the first step in becoming a true leader in your community.

Are you creating a culture and connecting a tribe of people? If they are in your office, they want to be lead. What is the culture you’ve created? At my office, we had a culture statement about what we stood for. And then we created a tribe of people who wanted what we were about!

They key to building strong tribes is two-way communication. Have curiosity about the people in your tribe, help them share and connect their stories to spread the word. Ask questions of your tribe. At Rosen Coaching, our entire communication model is centered around asking questions! Long gone is the ‘I’m the doctor, you’re the patient’ approach. We are human beings first and doctors second. Let us help you connect and communicate in a way that is consistently building relationships with your tribe.

What do most people want? They want to be heard. They want to feel important. They want to be missed. Make them a part of something. Make them a part of our movement to change the world with chiropractic wellness care. Our philosophy of living is one that needs to be heard – the health of the world depends on it.

Tags: care tactics, Care vs. Scare, Certainty, Chiropractic Coach, Chiropractic Consultant, communication, Culture, Leadership, Seth Godin, Status Quo, TED, Tipping Point, transform, Tribe