What do successful chiropractic practices around the world all have in common? Chiropractic technique? Size and shape of the doctor? The politics of the area? Nope, none of those things.  We find, across the board, there are two things that make chiropractors successful and have the practices of their dreams.  What are they?

1. Certainty and Congruent Beliefs

2. Communication Skills

3. Congruent Procedures

I’ll get to the second point in a later post, but let’s start with the foundation of certainty and beliefs!  Recently, I spoke at Dr. Tedd Koren’s KST Seminar on this exact topic and felt like it was one I wanted to share with all of you.

As a chiropractor, you may have unshakeable certainty about who you are and what you do. Or, like many other chiropractors out there, might have some doubt and uncertainty about what you offer. Why?

Don’t you think that after years of education and practice that chiropractors would know who they are and what they offer? That they would be certain about what they deliver? Well across the board, day in and day out, we coach and speak with chiropractors on the phone who are not. And when we survey audiences around the world (with their eyes closed to keep it anonymous) most chiropractors have some uncertainty.

Why?  We believe the original sin in chiropractic is the rah-rah seminar that makes the audience yell out, “Chiropractic can help everything”! And then there is someone in your office who doesn’t get any response to your care. Then what? Either chiropractic failed or you did. So in creeps the doubt and uncertainty!  In our LAASR process, we help you make a promise to truly help people, and to keep your promise!

Here is our Rosen Chiropractic Coaching’s Formula for Certainty:

· Who are you as a chiropractor?

· What do you offer?

· What would you like to deliver?

· What are you certain you deliver?

· How do you monitor what you deliver?

· How do you communicate what you deliver?

· What is your vision and mission?

· Define your persona statement (and become it)!

We suggest sitting down with yourself and your complete honesty and completing the above sentences. Then we suggest that you sit down with your team and do the same. See what truths, insights (good or bad) or “ah-ha’s” that you get from doing this! Once we can get your beliefs congruent, then we install congruent procedures and communications to have the practice of your dreams!

We feel it is healthy to have a difference between what you would like to deliver and what you are certain you deliver. It is always a good thing to be striving to become better at your technique, to grow and evolve your skills as a chiropractor. The truth is, the more you do, the more certain you will be. Only a closed mind is 100% certain, so it is always important to keep growing!

Here are some resources to develop your life purpose, vision and mission.  For those of you who are interested in completing the entire Certainty program, click here.

It’s time to be the best chiropractor you can be, so that chiropractors can become the leaders of true health care!

It’s your choice! It’s either one or the other:

Tags: Beliefs, Certainty, Chiropractic Coach, Chiropractic Coaching, Chiropractic Practice Management, communication, Health Care, Leadership, Success, Wellness Chiropractic, wellness practice management

What Do Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley and a long list of other celebrities have in common? Harmless prescription drug and painkiller abuse in volumes and mixtures. These famous celebrities are the ones you hear about in the media.  However, the fact is, many medical errors are not reported, including death by such medicines deemed ‘normal’ to use by society.  Tylenol, Advil, Demerol, Oxycontin, Dialudid, Panadol are just a start. Throw some antidepressants, antianxieties and sedatives into the mix and voila! You have a highly addictive cocktail of deadly drugs. Do we have a global problem? I think so. We just hear about the famous ones…

From the Death by Medicine Report by Drs. Null and Dean in 2003), as few as 6% of adverse drug effects are ever reported.  Sadly, deaths estimated in 2003 due to adverse reactions to prescription drugs is 2.2 million per year. And the leading causes of adverse drug reactions were antibiotics (17%), Cardiovascular (17%), chemotherapy drugs (15%), and anti-inflammatory agents (15%).  Can you imagine what this number is now, six years later, with more and more ‘advancements’ in medicine and big pharma?

As wellness chiropractors, doctors of ’cause’, we want to be addressing the bigger picture in our offices – that health and life come from the inside-out.  If you are not teaching this principle to the people you serve, you are just another modality to them.  Health does not come from taking medicine or cutting things out of the body. It comes from the life force, carried unimpeded over the nerve system reaching to every cell, tissue and organ in the entire body. Do they know this? Do they understand the physiological implications if this nerve impulse is impeded? Do they know that it is your job to remove this interference and allow the fullest expression of life?  If they don’t, they need to.  Or they could end up like Michael Jackson, just not as famous.

How are you using this most recent, tragic death of an icon as an educational opportunity in your office?  We coach our clients to ask thoughtful questions to the people in their offices to illicit a response, rather than just lecture them about the overuse of medicine in our societies.  We need to shift their consciousness and beliefs about health and wellness.  How about the following as a start to get your mind going:

• What do you think killed Michael Jackson?
• Do you know that prescription drugs are just as dangerous as recreational drugs?
• What happens when you give a healthy person medicine they don’t need?
• If drugs can make a healthy person sick, how do they make a sick person well?
• What do you think, can medicine make someone healthier or just take their symptoms away?
• Where does health come from? What causes us to be healthy? What keeps us alive?
• What does the Nerve System control? What part of your body could live without Nerve Impulse?

May I suggest that you look at our LAASR process of communication (Listen, Acknowledge, Ask, Solution, Resolution) when educating, answering difficult questions and in all of your interactions within and outside of your practice.  It will literally transform your level of communication and results!  It is what we teach and how we coach chiropractors to great levels of success! Let’s start to manage your chiropractic practice in a true wellness model.

Tags: Adverse Drug Reactions, Chiropractic Coach, Chiropractic Consulting, Chiropractic Practice Management, Death by Medicine, Elvis Presley, Health, LAASR, Life Force, Medicine, Michael Jackson, Nerve System, Prescription Drug Abuse, Subluxation, Wellness Care, Wellness Chiropractors, wellness practice management

I’ve been learning to surf since 2005. It’s tough since I don’t live on or near a coast – so I have to travel far and  wide for surf. Both the east and west  coasts of Canada have surf (brrr) and  we’ve fallen in love with warm water  surf of Central America.

Despite not being able to surf on a regular basis, I’ve seen some great improvements in my skill with the investments of time and money that I’ve made so far, yet I’m not where I want to be. There is still lots of surf I can’t handle, and sometimes my surfing gets worse instead of better (Re: My Christmas Vacation in Costa Rica). 

Yet here are the things I’ve learned from surfing that apply directly to succeeding in chiropractic practice.  And as a chiropractic coach and consultant, I work with chiropractors day in and day out on these challenges as they show up in practice. Whether you surf or not, you’ll get this:

• Success and mastery won’t just come to you. You have to create it.  It is not a matter of ‘luck’.
• Your head space and mindset matters! Your subconscious mind is always looking to validate what you believe to be true. Check your head or get a coach to check it for you.
• Get clear on your big vision and keep it in the forefront of your mind, even when you are not getting results. Keep perspective.
• Set realistic goals to reach your vision.
• Don’t be so hard on yourself. It doesn’t help you get what you want any faster or easier. It probably makes matters worse.
• Plan your work and work your plan. Consistent action is the only way to achieve your goals. Actions are the small things that create the BIG thing: Success!
• Repetition is key. Just because you’ve done something once doesn’t mean you don’t need to practice.  
• Recognize the first step is unconscious incompetence: you don’t know what you don’t know. A scary place!
• Next is conscious incompetence: you know what you don’t know.  At least you can seek out answers and get help.
• Then comes conscious competence and you start to get the mechanics of the skill. Ahhhhh finally! If you want to be mediocre, stop here.
• After hard work and refinement, it becomes unconscious competence where you don’t have to think about what you are doing because it is so ingrained in your nerve system – and you are on your way to mastery!
• As soon as you think you’ve got a skill, something will happen and you’ll be back at square one again. Shake it off and go again.
• Patience is key – you can’t rush nature and you can’t push the universe.
• Be prepared, develop strong foundational skills and work hard – the opportunity will come to you when you are ready.
• Results don’t happen immediately!  Real successes are not quick fix solutions. Get to the cause.
• Don’t always do what everybody else is doing. Be exceptional.
• Be grateful for what you have and what you are given! Gratitude every step of the way is key.
• Take responsibility for everything.
• Get back up. Paddle back out.
• Everything has a Dip: excitement phase, frustration phase, uphill battle phase, and then success.
• Don’t start something unless you want to push through The Dip to get to the other side – otherwise it is a complete waste of time and money.

Chiropractic practices always have a Dip, whether it be starting a practice from scratch, buying an existing practice, or changing your practice from a pain-based model to a wellness model.  We get excited by the idea and we start the process.  We soon get frustrated by the lack of immediate success, wonder what we got into and either quit or press on.  Those who continue to keep their vision big and take action on their plans eventually push through The Dip.

Your DIP could be building a dream team staff, it could be breaking through the glass ceiling of the volume you’ve always maxed out at, it could be starting your practice, or changing your chiropractic practice to a wellness model. Or something else entirely.  But your good idea starts to seem like a bad idea when you are in The Dip. That’s when you know you need help!

If you want support getting through The Dip, email me.  I’d be honoured to help coach and consult you through the process and help you get the success in chiropractic practice you are looking for!

Tags: communication, Success, Surfing, The Dip, wellness practice management

As chiropractors, hopefully most of us are communicating with the people we care for about the concept of health as a process vs. health as an event.  The accumulation of stress over time and the removal of such stress is the creator of health or disease.  Nothing from the outside. Nothing that just ‘happens’.

After a close family member had a heart attack this weekend I am deeply thankful for event/crisis care that our social medical system provides. It saved her life with incredible speed and skill.  And what I know so conceptually, I was reminded viscerally this weekend where they fall short. Medical care is not designed nor intended to keep you healthy. They view health as an event instead of a process. “This happened, we fixed it. Now take these drugs for life as our best approach to manage it”.  

True health care is the chiropractic understanding: Health is a process. In every moment you are either moving towards health or away from it with your choices. If you accumulate too much lifestyle stress in your nerve system, you will create dis-ease and disease.  We acknowledge this as the CAUSE and make new choices to create a different state of health.  Wellness care is acknowledging what the body needs (and doesn’t need) to be well and continue to take care of yourself with the same level of care, whether you are sick or whether you are well.

But a process takes TIME you say! Ah yes, heart disease didn’t happen overnight. Nor will it disappear with a medical miracle.  They can reactively stop the acute pain of an MI and reestablish blood flow – but the proactive process is just beginning!  But we are a quick-fix society wanting results NOW!  

Even wellness chiropractors, who understand the ‘process vs. event’ concept and communicate this way to the people they serve about symptoms, healing, and chiropractic care can be impatient with their practice and their chiropractic coaching. But I want results NOW they say!  Ah yes, but changes in your practice don’t happen overnight!  Don’t fall into the quick-fix trap, it’s incongruent with our philosophy.

Know what you are trying to accomplish, have an action plan to work towards it, follow through with the actions and produce the results.  In every moment, your chiropractic practice is either moving towards success or away from it with your choices and actions.

Make sure that you are applying the same Process vs. Event principle to all aspects of your life: Your chiropractic practice, your chiropractic coaching, your nutrition, your exercise, your finances… it’s aligned with the laws of nature.  Life is a process, not an event.

Tags: Chiropractic Care, Chiropractic Coaching, Event, Health Care, Medicine, Proactive, Process, Reactive, Wellness Care, wellness practice management

  VS.   

If you are a chiropractor still practicing in a pain based model of symptom relief, I hope you will realize (soon) that the future of the profession lies in wellness care. Like dentistry realized fifty years ago that waiting to pull rotten teeth from people’s mouths with toothaches is antiquated, our chiropractic profession is starting to see the light.  Treating people’s backache’s and using adjustments like expensive aspirin isn’t keeping up with the times.  It’s time to think different. 

People want wellness, look around! From organic food, to fitness gyms people are looking to get well and stay well rather than wait for a crisis.  Our culture is in the middle of a wellness revolution ~ don’t get left behind!  It is time for the chiropractic profession to lead this wellness revolution.  It is up to each one of us.

At Rosen Coaching, we look at two key stats as a litmus test for a wellness practice: your retention or PVA (patient visit average) and the percentage of internal referrals.  You may think you are running a wellness chiropractic practice, but if your PVA is below 60 and your internal referrals are low ~ it tells us that the people in your practice don’t ‘get’ chiropractic like you think they do. If I sat in your reception room and asked the next 100 people through the door why they are there, what would they say?

So what are the symptoms of practice not succeeding and not congruent as a wellness practice?  Of course, low PVA/Retention and low internal referrals as mentioned above.  But what else?  A wellness philosophy for how you manage your practice is key. Do you have systems and a communication model that is reactive as opposed to proactive?  Do  you wait for the number of new people to drop down before you do any marketing or do you have a perpetual, balanced approach marketing calendar?  Do you wait to have staffing issues or do you spend time each week cultivating a Dream Team?  Do you wait for people to drop out of care before addressing their concerns, or do you listen between the words and identify the symptoms of when a person receiving your care is unhappy?  Are you afraid to address their concerns and sweep them under the rug with an assertive or non-assertive ‘brush off’, or do you address them right then and there?  Want some more examples? Disorganization, stress, lack of income, lack of new clients, people don’t ‘get it’, clients don’t follow your recommendations, they don’t sign up for care, they don’t keep their appointments. The list can go on…

Truly the biggest difficulty I see in the profession is the amount of scare tactics that are propagated by some of the biggest chiropractic practice management companies out there.  I truly believe that there is no place for fear and manipulation in a wellness practice, as it is completely incongruent with the very nature of a wellness philosophy.  It’s time to think different and start using trust, hope and truth to help people see what is possible for their well-being. If you are going to have a wellness chiropractic practice, leave the scare tactics at the door.  And start to use a proactive congruent wellness approach in your systems, communications, and practice management.

Tags: care tactics, Chiropractic Coaching, chiropractic profession, communication, future, pain based model, rosen coaching, scare tactics, wellness model, wellness practice management, wellness revolution