Welcome to More Patients, More Impact, More Income. The podcast for real holistic medical practitioners who want to grow their high impact, high income practice without selling out. Now, here's your host, Chris Axelrad.
Chris: What's up, everybody? This is going to be a good one because I know that this word "lust" has a lot of certain connotations in our culture, which is unfortunate because this concept really is so much broader than just the sexual connotations that are associated with it normally, and really, the way that we can fall a victim to this and how it can really screw us up in terms of our success really has to do with the fact that you know there's this sort of sense that we always need to be having fun. We always need to be excited, you know, that there's always got to be some kind of like emotional charge to what we're doing or it's not valuable and we're not doing good work unless it feels good. [0:01:07.8]
And a lot of times, look, the bottom line is the work of building a successful practice, in many ways, is not glorious at all. In fact, the day-to-day of just doing the work and showing up, really, there is no glory in it and people who are constantly looking for that high, that rush, that fire in every single thing and get disappointed or, you know, I call it the adrenaline endorphin and you could also call it the dopamine prolactin, so you can call it whatever you want, but the key is that whenever we have a high, there's always going to be a low. This is the yin and the yang. We studied this over and over. If we are in Chinese medicine and we have studied any Daoism or studied Qigong or any type of discipline that's related to the foundations of Chinese medicine, we know about yin and yang, and we also know that in the five element system and in the emotional landscape of Daoist alchemy, we talk about fire and we talk about the emotion of fire being joy and the excessive joy. [0:02:24.6]
And what do they mean by that? Well they don't mean like never feel happy. In fact, they don’t mean that being happy is like somehow going to scatter your energy. What they mean, though, is that excessively seeking out excitement and joy will deplete you, even if you are able to generate some of that, right, you're going to crash afterward because you can't sustain that kind of excitement and rush all the time. So a lot of what people end up doing in their marketing and in their practice is they get bored and then they feel like… they just don’t feel inspired in their practice. [0:03:11.3]
You know, maybe they complain about, "Oh, I wish I could see more of these kinds of patients," and "these kinds of cases are just so boring," or "man, you know, it's just so, the drudgery of every day, just doing the books or you know looking at the numbers or paying the bills or whatever," you know, just drags you down. Right? And the point is that when we're always wanting everything to be exciting and everything to be pleasurable, we end up really to where nothing is pleasurable. We end up actually losing out on the real pleasure of life, the real joy of life, which is a very quiet, what I call abiding joy. It's like this very quiet inner sense of purpose and a very gentle and sustained sense of inspiration and connection with just this beautiful presence of what I call… I don't know what you would call it, but you could call it the Dao code, whatever you want. [0:04:18.6]
Call it God. You can call it the divine. But the main thing is, when we are able to take a step back from always needing to feel excitement, always need to feel, you know, it's very addictive. The emotions can be so addictive. People get addicted to the emotions of their anger. We're going to talk about -- that's actually one of the seven deadly sins is what they call wrath or anger. People get very addicted to, we can get very addicted to our anger and our, just, and our feeling of being justified. We can use that as fuel, and anger is fire, there's nothing wrong with anger. Anger has a very powerful energy and I remember one of the teachers that I studied under when I was doing a lot of meditation stuff, and one of my meditation masters/gurus/teachers/whatever you want to call it, you know, he said something to me I'll never forget, because I was going through part of my meditation training was bringing up some very deep seeded anger, deep seeded anger was coming up and I was really wanting to go sort of tell the people I was angry at you know like why I was angry. [0:05:32.7]
And these were people who were very close to me and they were family members and you know I went and I talked to him because I really, I sensed you know this was a pivotal decision. Like, you know, to go, you know tell these people could be a very hurtful thing, right, and I just wanted to ask him like what do you think. And he said look, he said, "Anger is fire and you can either use fire to burn the house down or you can use fire to light your way, and you have to decide what you're going to do with it, but if you use your anger to light the way, then what happens is you end up channeling your anger into leadership and into something positive." [0:06:15.3]
But using the anger in the other way, as a way of sort of feeling justified and all that is a form of lust. It's a form of wanting to feel that excitement. It's that adrenaline rush we get from it, but in the end, we're just addicted to our own adrenaline and we're not really just calmly doing the work every day. Again, like, the work's its own reward and all of these seven deadly sins that I've been talking about, the reason that they are called the seven deadly sins, again, is not because we die from them, although like I have said before, I mean if you get caught up enough in some of this stuff, you could end up burning out. You could end up harming yourself. I mean, greed, where it's just never enough, it's never enough, it's never enough, I mean, you just like consume all of your ching, your chi, everything just dries up. [0:07:10.4]
Envy? Same thing. You know, you're constantly looking at other people. You never feel like you're enough. It's just this restlessness inside yourself. We talked about -- yesterday, what did we talk about? Envy. Greed. Hell, I don’t remember, but today we're talking about lust and lust is like that constant need to be excited and constant need to feel like cool and happy and fired up and you know, nothing will derail you more. In my practice, every day I see the same types of patients, pretty much, with similar types of conditions and similar, they're all, they all kind of fall into similar treatment plans and all that kind of stuff and I remember for a long time, first three or four years of my practice, five years of my practice, I really kind of fought against that. [0:08:02.5]
I wanted everything to be unique. I wanted everything to be cool. I wanted it to be all about me and how smart I was and how every patient, I was going to think of this elaborate like treatment plan and all this elaborate formula and all that. And again, that's a form of this excitement seeking, this thrill seeking, where it's more about us than it is about our patient. And I remember when I finally just kind of surrendered to the simplicity. Of course part of it was, you know, I wanted it to be all exciting for me, and then what happened was I got like really fucking busy, and I really didn’t have a choice, honestly. I was either going to, by continuing to make it about myself, see, and the excitement of making everything so exciting and complicated so that I could feel good about it, if I kept going that way, then number one, the impact that I was going to be capable of having would be severely limited because I wouldn’t be able to see that many patients. [0:09:10.5]
The second thing is that having to think that fucking hard about every single case, when I started to see 10, 12, 15 patients a day, it started to really wear me down, and look, the road to success is littered with the remains of people who wanted to try so fucking hard and wanted to be all exciting and all glorious, and just, they lost themselves in seeking that high and that fire, instead of just settling in to the simple inhale and exhale, just breathe into that simple, that whole chop wood, carry water mindset, you know. Just the little things that you do every day. [0:10:02.9]
If you're ready to fill your practice and keep it full without the stress and overwhelm, then get instant access to your free autopilot patient attraction playbook now at www.HighImpactPracticeSystems.com/autopilot.
Another way that people that lust for excitement and lust for power can screw us up in terms of our success is when we won't let go of control. There's a comfort in feeling like we're in control of stuff. You know, when I say letting go of control, I see this a lot with people who have a really, really hard time getting help, you know. Like they just, they can't let go of control of certain aspects of their practice and allow someone to help them, whether it's answer the phones or checking patients out at the front desk or whatever it is. [0:11:00.6]
And it's really, again, sort of this, it's an adrenaline rush to feel like you're the one doing it. Right? And it kind of gives us a feeling of feeling proud of ourselves, but at the end of the day, it just drains us. So, like I've talked about before, these "sins" really are fundamentally talking about things that are missing, okay? A sin means without, it's like a hole in our spiritual and mental/emotional bucket through which we're just leaking energy. And when we're constantly seeking and wanting things to be exciting for us, we're just, we're leaking energy and you know, like I was saying, in my clinic now, every single day I see almost like some variation of the same thing because I do a lot of fertility and endocrinology, and on the one hand I could sit there and complain that it's so boring, you know. [0:12:02.2]
The treatments are like, anybody who shadowed me in my War Room program, you can come, you can shadow me for two days in my clinic and you can watch, you know, I'll see 23 to 27 patients in a shift. It's smooth, flows really well, people, we just have a great time, and the results, the clinical results are you know really amazing. For me, it's kind of like, I don’t have any kind of special magic, like I don’t do these Tung magic points or I don’t do the balance method or any of that. I'm just so, my shit is so simple, but that's the beauty of it to me, is it just feels so good. It feels so natural. And the key is that like if you watch me, if you come shadow me, you're going to see, like, all pretty much like 80% of my treatments are almost the same, you know. And I used to fight that. I used to think, wow, you know, how could this, it needs to be so, you know, unique and special to each patient. [0:13:01.0]
Yeah, when I let go of that I finally just surrendered to the simplicity of it, that's when things really took off. I mean, that's when the practice like doubled and started to really start to take off to where it is today, to where now we have three offices. We're negotiating on a fourth office. I've got three people working with me. We have got four nonclinical employees and you know, no, every day is not exciting. Every day is not some kind of party. Every time, every time a patient comes in, there's not some kind of big miracle. It's not instant gratification, which you know, if we want to really sum it where lust screws us over, it's all about that instant gratification. Like we want it and we want it now. We want that pleasure right now. We want to put that needle in and have our patient tell us that all their pain went away right then and there, you know, and then we can feel really good about ourselves, like, yeah! yeah!, you know. [0:14:07.9]
That's not what it's about. The everyday stuff, just really finding the joy and finding that contentment and that tranquility and just doing your work and bringing that light to your community, bringing that light to everyone who walks into your office. To me, that's enough. You know, to me, that's enough. And like I always say, like for my practice, the deal is like you know, I've set it up to where myself and my associates and my employees like, the financial structure and the way it's all set up, it's like we don’t have to worry, man. Like, we know that we are going to be able to do what we love to do, every single day, wake up every single day, know that we have patients. We know that the business is not going to go bankrupt. [0:15:00.6]
And it's a beautiful thing, you know, and it's simple. And yeah, it's repetitive, and yes, some people might say it's boring. To me, the beauty of it is there's the connecting with the patients, and that's what letting go of this lust for excitement and for gratification allows you to do. It takes that hole and plugs it up so that all that energy that you would be like wasting trying to make everything exciting, all the sudden gets directed into just being present with your patients and having a really, really good time and making really, really meaningful connections, building meaningful relationships with the people who are in your office, including your employees, including your patients, and then through that, things really start to just grow and grow and grow and grow. So again, we have talked about greed. [0:16:01.3]
We have talked about envy. I can't remember the other one. I don't know why I'm having a -- oh, pride. We talked about pride yesterday. Then today, we talked about lust. And again, all of those are just holes in your bucket that when you let go. Again, with greed, you let go of all these needing more and more and more. So you learn how to show gratitude and make a regular practice out of gratitude. For envy, you let go of the need to be like other people and stop looking at what everyone else is doing. It's real easy to get lost on Facebook and social media, especially nowadays, or thinking about a friend or someone you know who maybe is more successful than you, or appears to be more successful than you, because we talked about this in the lesson on envy that a lot of times, man, what it looks like ain't what it is. And we have seen that recently with some very high profile, you know, famous people who look like they had it all, who were so depressed that they committed suicide. [0:17:01.6]
I mean, this is, this is why it's such a waste to look at other people's lives and look at what's going on with other people and use that as ammunition to shoot ourselves down. Because in many ways, a lot of those people, especially on social media, man, I will tell you what, it's an art form nowadays. People will post, they really are good at making their life look amazing and some of that is, again, really pride and all these things, wanting to show certain things to the world that's not real. So, don’t believe any of that shit, and just focus on being yourself. So that's how we overcome envy. With pride, we just really stop feeling the need to be right and just accept our own unimportance and really how small and insignificant we all are. I talked about that on the last training, actually. It was a pretty big part of the training I did on mindset. And then finally, today's topic was how do we overcome that. It's just really, there's a technique I teach actually. [0:18:01.0]
You can join my clear mind program that I'm doing. It's called the embryonic breath and it's just a technique that helps you to anchor yourself into the moment, in a very simple and very concrete way. It's just so non ornate. It's like you just connect with the inherent joy of the moment, and you don’t need to be all excited and you don’t need to be all fired up and through that, your energy is conserved and you begin, you start to have this ability, this ability to direct your energy in a very, very conscious and intentional way, instead of feeling this burning need to you know have excitement and instant gratification. So, there you go. Hope that helps. And if you don’t see how that will sabotage your success, let me know, but the bottom line is, you know, all this mindset stuff and all of this spiritual stuff is so, so critical as business owners, as practice owners, as healers, for us to really show up as the most powerful, impactful versions of ourselves we possibly can because, again, when we talk about these seven deadly sins that have been around forever, in terms of the concept of it, we're really just looking at ways that we waste our own energy and we waste so many opportunities to really use our energy in the ways that we can really, truly make a difference in other people's lives. [0:19:37.5]
So, you know, and it influences decisions, I mean, if you're filled with greed or envy, you don’t make decisions that are, you know, not going to be in your best interest in the long run, and if it's not in your best interest, it's definitely not in your patients' best interest. So that's the beauty of this path, is that the more we fall into alignment with ourselves and the more we take care of ourselves and the more we give that kindness and that love and that mercy towards ourselves and really become more who we are, that is what allows us to become greater healers, you know. [0:20:17.5]
People who can truly bring so much more than just the pills and the needles, which are still important, but that's what takes, that's where when you have this, this extra spiritual connection within yourself and you don’t have to talk about it. Like, I don’t talk about it. I don’t wear special clothes or tell my patients anything about this stuff. I mean the conversations with my patients are very down to earth conversations, but it's just being in that space within myself and I think that's what elevates somebody from, it takes you from kind of average, just your average, run of the mill acupuncturist, herbalist, doctor or whatever and really turns you into that go-to expert that really just, again, that oasis in the desert where your name starts to spread. It's like, like people just know your name because of the impact that you're having on every single patient that comes into your clinic. So I gotta jet. Peace out. Talk soon. Later.
This is ThePodcastFactory.com
