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? I'm going to ahead real quick, just give me a second while I share this video into my Facebook group that I want them, I really want them to see this. This came up this morning during the Round Table Thursday coaching call I do with my mentorship group, and it's such a powerful principle and people don't, I think, realize. I mean it's one of the things that's counter-intuitive, obviously, that's why I put that in the title. A lot of people avoid it and they really end up limiting, severely limiting the growth of their practice this way. [0:01:03.2]
What it boils down to is what a lot of people think, of course that personalizing care for patients, which really means that we're building the entire plan and treatment process around their condition and helping to devise a custom way for them to address whatever health concern it is they have. By the way, as acupuncturists, naturopaths, whatever type holistic care provider you happen to be, our job is we're not dealing with critical care. So people who are coming to us, generally speaking, are not facing imminent death. Which doesn't in any way actually diminish the importance of our care. I think in many ways our care, level of importance for the people who come to us this is tremendous because it's one thing to save a person's life, it's another to teach and help someone learn how to live, how to truly live. [0:02:13.3]
A lot of people have to go through a near death experience or a very severe illness to finally realize, "Oh my gosh, I better live, I better take these days and this time and not take it for granted and enjoy my time here on this earth and really learn how to be awake and live with vitality, purpose and joy." But a lot of people are coming to us, that's exactly what they're looking for. Whether they've had a close call or not, what they're really looking for is a way to live in a more complete, whole, joyful and purposeful way. The way we help them do that. They come to us under the guise of that they need help overcoming a medical condition, and of course, that medical condition or that disease, that state of dis-ease is something that is causing them pain whether, it's physical pain, emotional pain, whether it's a constant or intermittent, whatever the situation is, it is becoming, it is starting to affect their ability to live their life. [0:03:20.7]
It may not be life or death, but it is hindering their ability to live the way they want. A lot of times, well all the time actually, people who we see are unwittingly and through what they don't realize are, well I guess we call it poor choices whether it's diet, lifestyle, relationships, emotional states that they tend to hang out in, whatever it is, they are unwittingly generating the disease. They are unwittingly causing the discomfort and the pain in their body. [0:04:05.2]
And if we really are doing our job what we're really doing is giving them the tools, the resources and the guidance so that they can emerge from that state and they can emerge from that state stronger, more focused, more joyful and more hopeful. At the end of the day, that's the way I see my role anyway, because what I want to do is, I don't want to give people fish. I mean there's that old parable in the Western Bible about if you give a man a fish and he'll eat for that day, but you teach the person how to fish and they will eat for a lifetime. I like to teach my patients how to fish. What can you do on your own, simple, easy stuff that's going to help you not only become more healthy and strengthen yourself, but to stay that way for as long as you want. [0:05:08.3]
So one of the most counter-intuitive things that people think is that okay, for me to be personalized and to really personalize process for my patients I just got to like let it be this open ended creative kind of thing. Each patient kind of gets their own unique version of the care. Nothing could be further from the truth. Actually letting things just kind of be whatever and not having this thing that I'm telling you about really limits your impact, number one. Number two, it kind of exhausts and drains you as a practitioner, also really exhausts and drains the patient as well. People will struggle with this for years and years and years and really kind of sit at a certain level of growth in their practice because they are unwilling to do this thing that I'm about to tell you. [0:06:04.5]
They resist doing it because they feel like it takes the genuine and sort of creative aspect of practice away, and it makes things too cookie-cutter. Well what I want to tell you is this. When you do this thing, it actually does the exact opposite. From the outside and from someone who's opinionated and sort of has this outlook or looking at it from the outside, they're going to say, "Oh, it's cookie-cutter..." But what they don't realize is that on the inside to the patient and to the practitioner, what it does is it allows us this thing I'm going to tell you about, it allows us to focus 99% of our energy, time, words and thoughts on our patients, on each individual patient. People wonder how is it Chris, they'll ask me, "How is it Chris that you, you'll see 25 patients in a day, you're not tired and the patients are really happy and they feel like they're getting really good care and they're referring. How do you do that? Because like it just seems like if you're not spending time, how are you going to be able to get all that, how are you going to be able to get quality?"[ 0:07:24.5]
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And the thing is, is that because of the process that we have and because I don't have to ask questions like, "What am I going to do next? What do I need to do next with this patient? What's the next step for this? Who's going to take care of this, who is going to do that?" All those questions are already answered because I have frameworks, and that framework is very clear. [0:08:05.5]
So what happens is 10 minutes with my patient is 10 minutes that I'm 100% focused on that patient, I don't have to think about anything else. I'm not thinking about who's next, what's going to happen here, how many patients I have coming, what's happening next week because we have this system and it's a framework that allows us to be very easily, step by step. The analogy I used this morning in my group with my students was it's like riding a bicycle. When you get on a bicycle you don't sit there and think about how to use the brakes, how to steer, how to balance, how to pedal. All those things are automatic, it's like muscle memory, it's like neural network, neural circuitry that is just automatic. You can put it on autopilot. So what do you get to do? You get to focus on where you're going, and then for me, I was riding around traffic, this was this past weekend, and it's why this analogy is fresh in my mind. [0:09:02.9]
So I was in Vancouver, Integrative Fertility Symposium, and I rented a bicycle from the hotel I was staying at to go ride around. I was in downtown Vancouver. What was I paying attention to, I was mostly paying attention to the cars and making sure I didn't get run over, but I was able to stay safe and not get run over. Why? Because I could put all my attention on that, and I wasn't thinking and having to consciously process all the data of my feet moving and the balance, the brakes and all this kind of stuff because all that stuff is automatic. If I had been riding around in the mountains or riding around beautiful prairie or something like that where there's not a lot of cars, I could've easily just ridden and just had really been relaxed this whole time I'm riding the bike and looking around, I'm looking at all the beautiful scenery, taking in all the beautiful smells, and that's what framework in your clinic does for you. [0:10:00.0]
The framework makes all of the business and all the mechanical stuff, the pedaling, the steering, the balancing and just the actual driving of the business part automatic, so you don't have to think about it at all. Then you can put all your attention on your patients and not worry about any other stuff, and guess what, then your patient gets this very, very personalized, very detailed and very focused care that they wouldn't be able to get otherwise. They wouldn't be able to get otherwise if you're like all over the place and the process is just like this, it's like you're trying to wrangle the patient along and they don't know what's next, you don't know what's next, it's all very sort of open ended, which to me always feels a little iffy, like when things are open ended. It's like, "I'm not really quite sure. Are we going to keep going weekly or are we going to do every other week?" [0:11:02.6]
You have a process, you have a pathway, and that pathway is clear, consistent and it's communicated in a very clear way at the very beginning of your process that you're working with the patients, and throughout the process we're reinforcing those, what we call those cues in those different stages, so the patient has really, it becomes like this dance, and it just becomes very beautiful and very easy to do, and also it's a really, really amazing boundary that you create when you have this process. Because number one, when you're working within framework you feel confident and you feel safe. And that sense of confidence and safety that you feel is transferred to your patient, and they sense that confidence and they sense that safety, and it makes them feel really good when they're in your space. [0:12:02.1]
They feel really, really good and actually want to come back, believe it or not. I know that sounds weird, but they want to come back. You don't have to... We're going to have a party later. Actually my Sugarland office which is open it's our fourth location, we're going to open house and I'm pretty excited about that. But the process is so clear and so easy to follow and so liberating honestly for you and for your patient, because they're not walking into a mess, they're not walking into this disorganized thing. They're walking into something that is very predictable and very simple, and they know exactly what to expect, and every single time they know the steps and everything like that. And again, within that framework you have all of this creative space to focus on your patient. It's a beautiful thing and it works and it's one of the reasons why we have a really good retention rates here at my clinic, and that's what's made it possible for me to start to open multiple offices and hire people. [0:13:12.8]
The other thing framework does is it gives you something you know actually teach other people how to do. When you bring associates in, if you don't have a framework, then what ends up happening is you have two different practices because you practice this way, your associate just makes up their own framework, and then if you cover your associate or they cover you, the patients have schedule on different days for different reasons, they have this completely different experience and then, again, it just doesn't help. It really doesn't. [0:13:49.7]
Anyway, you guys enjoy the rest of your day, I'm going to do the same. Peace, enjoy the rest of your day.
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