TNR Happenings April 9, 2018
TNR members take great vacations
Over the last couple of weeks some of our members have taken great vacations: Dr. Mark Bassett is in Italy, Dr. Lisa went to Norway, Dr. Teri is in Ireland, and Dr. Sabrina has returned from China and Hong Kong. It is so important to take great vacations at regular intervals. Sometimes you take these with kids and sometimes just the two of you. In TNR, we are ‘all in’ when it comes to our practices, but we are also ‘all in’ when it comes to taking regular vacations. They are not luxuries, like perhaps your parents generation thought, but necessary battery charges for high level DCs. Skip the guilt when you are planning your next vacation: they keep your mind fresh and give you introspection into your practice and life. They also keep you from getting into ruts or complacency.
Practice tip of the week
Shift your focus from the problem to the solution. This sounds so simple and yet can be very counterintuitive, for many of us. It is easier said than done. A practice member comes in with x,y, z symptoms and you ask them how they are feeling. Does this direct their brains and consciousness to the problem or the solution? It is the problem, of course. This is how society communicates, but don’t fall prey to this in your office if you want to have a spectacular practice. Paint the picture about removing layers of accumulated injury rather than symptom relief. Let health be your solution or focus of your practice, instead of disease and symptoms.
With our spouses, CAs, and children, we naturally focus on the problems and not the solution and, as a result, we either prolong or never solve the problem. It can be so frustrating to live this orientation in our lives. In our practices, we always focus on the problem of getting more new patients. But, is it the solution or the problem? Ask any established practitioner and they can show you thousands of new patient folders or electronic records that came in for a few visits and then vanished. New patients can be a problem, but the solution is always retention.
With fitness, we look at our physiques over and over (scales measurements, sizes of clothes) and don’t like what we see. By looking at the problem, the solution never gets achieved. If we focus on working out and perhaps cutting out dietary factors that aren’t helping (not your beloved Krispy Cremes), you will solve the problem.
The quicker you help shift the focus of your practice members from their symptoms or disease to health, the easier you make their journey.
21-Day DCME Video Program update
This premium product was designed and created to help practice members build new beliefs that move them from disease to health. Beliefs literally move mountains. I have received exciting feedback from so many members about their practice members. If you have a practice member that is truly interested in their lives, there is nothing like it on the planet. If they are only conditionally committed, they either will not do it or will put in a lackluster effort. I had a recent DCME gasp, “This is the most incredible program I have ever seen! Everyone should be doing this program!” She is in the mental health/social work/psychology field and she actively sees patients in dire crisis. She asked why more people don’t know about this. She works with medical bureaucracy and insurance coverage and she also tolerates low or no clinical results because it’s all she knows. People come in for as long as their insurance pays. She monitors, analyzes, and keeps asking about their wretched problems. But what about us? An astute, high-level member said on a coaching call this a.m. that she periodically goes back to the program to assist herself in the various stages of her life: marriage, pregnancy, kid issues, finances, loss of confidence, relationship strain, ailing or aging parents, etc. She keeps going back to it. Don’t fall into the trap of doing it only once for yourself and then putting it away. This should be the same for your practice members. Do you really think that practice members who do the 21-Day Program once will re-establish new beliefs about health in spite of all the hundreds of thousands of hours of medical programming they have received? It’s not a novel item or a toy to be played with once and then discarded. Make this program a part your life and a part of your practice members’ lives. Behaviors don’t happen on their own; like it or not, they are driven by invisible, subconscious beliefs.
Make your Baseline Assessments into posters
Drs. Christy and Cliff Taylor, Dr. Sabrina, and Dr. Helena have laminated the Baseline Assessment and created their own dry erase posters for office use. This is a great reference for your day to day interactions with your practice members. How about using it when introducing the free BA for children under 15? There are so many creative uses of this tool: Exams, Report of Findings, Energy Visits, consultations, outside speaking engagements at woman’s groups, kids groups, yoga, martial arts, learning centers, daycare centers, etc. At an outside speaking engagement, have everyone fill out the BA. You know something is really good when you see it on social media with non-TNR offices borrowing this concept. Not to worry: these other offices can’t properly use it without much supervised study, application, and TNR event participation. That’s the great thing about being a part of TNR: having proprietary materials and concepts that work like no others. The Baseline Assessment is to be used on a daily basis in your office!
Will announce Boot Camp dates this week!
I will be speaking to Kenny Smoker this week and firming up the dates for this year’s journey. It will most likely be the second week in August. Once these dates are announced, remember to black out the dates on your calendar. Wednesday will be a travel day, Thursday will be a Fun Day Carnival for the kids, Friday will be a Fun Day Carnival, and Saturday will be a community service of epic proportions. There will also be an outdoor concert and a jail visitation. Sunday will be a travel day. Consider bringing your spouse, kids, family, VIP practice members, etc. Of special note: if there are at risk teenagers in your practice, put out an invite to them but remember that they must have an adult guardian with them.
Change the paradigm in your office!
Make sure all of your team is integrated in this transformation. Do this in bits and pieces at your staff meetings at the beginning of the week. You can’t have your CAs asking practice members how they feel, offering medication advice, even with over the counter drugs, or talking disease language in the reception area. They also have to be okay with collecting fees. They can’t flinch when collecting fees or feeling sorry for practice members. This will reflect a subconscious lack of belief in the value of Chiropractic care in your office. Have a changing table in your bathroom. Have a kids play area in your reception space. You don’t have to tear down all the posters off your wall. You can do things in a seamless, subtle way that practice members won’t even notice. You know how people just absolutely hate change. If your changes are subtle then your practice members won’t even notice. Drs. Christy and Cliff Taylor’s office used to be a bank and there is a large vault in their adjusting area. After a full year into practice, they have had practice members ask, “When did you put the vault in your office? I never noticed it before.”
The inconvenience of commitment
Let’s revisit the Sweet Spot model. People outside the sweet spot link up in their brains that convenience equals results, while inside the sweet spot people link up in their brains that commitment equals results. These are two entirely different orientations to life. People outside the sweet spot don’t understand what you’re saying. It flies completely contrary to what they believe. You are not going to convince, prove, or win over people outside the sweet spot. Oh, they will come in for a brief time, question you, offer opinions, and judge you every step of the way. Outside the sweet spot people are very reluctant to giving their commitment because it hasn’t boded well for them in the past. They have been let down, abandoned, or betrayed in their past. When you ask for commitment from them, sparks will fly. They may get verbally abusive, sarcastic, roll their eyes, or display keyboard courage with online reviews of their displeasure with you. People inside the sweet spot will have a déjà vu feeling, like they have been here before. They know the way to produce results is to commit all the way and shut out the fear mongers, cautionary tale people, etc. Have you ever noticed how some people who see a pregnant woman have to tell them about their own horrible experience. A person in the sweet spot will spare this woman a story and will wish them well. As you may have guessed, this isn’t confined to just pregnancy, it’s in all areas of life. If you want results in anything, commit to the process.
In the mysterious world of DCME
When working with a DCME practice member, you get to see first hand just how important the relationship is between the doctor and the practice member. Every step of the journey is an opportunity to increase your relationship first, then educate and offer solutions. Offering solutions or attempting to educate without a rock solid relationship will be tolerated only until the symptoms or pain are gone, then they will be gone as well. Say this to practice members, “I can’t do this for you. I can do this with you; however, I can’t do this for you.” When the practice member says I don’t feel better, the blood tests aren’t any better, the x,y,z isn’t resolving, it’s all a call by the practice member to see if you really care or is this an economic opportunity only for you. Imagine you are a personal trainer and your 350 pound client says after 3 months that they don’t feel like they are making any progress. The reality is, if they only knew the work involved to lose that kind of weight, they wouldn’t make their comments. By the time a practice member becomes a DCME, they are so past threshold and have been to lots of people offering simple solutions to complex problems. Their results are obtained only after an intense, 3-6 month period with no interruptions. When there are soccer lessons, circus lessons, and tutors thrown into the mix, either they or you aren’t realizing the severity and chronicity of the illness. Tell practice members they have to stop their lives and put the kids activities on hold to get their lives back.
