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. And now here's your host, Chris
00:18 What I'm going to start off talking about today is evolution and evolving as practitioners and business owners. So you know, the process of growth is never linear. It's a cycle. It's a heartbeat, it's a an ebb and a flow, right? And I think there's just this innate and instinctive need for us as humans to explore and to learn new things and also to do new things so that we can become something new. And it's that process of becoming something new that I think is the hardest thing when it comes to evolving and growing. Not just, you know, as human beings, but in our careers, in our path as a business owner in hour in our families and everything that we do. As we start to expand in our awareness and expand in our understanding of things, we naturally start to then shift in our beliefs.
01:25 And when our beliefs begin to shift, then what happens is, or behavior starts to shift. The issue is that when we're strongly identified with certain opinions and certain beliefs and then those beliefs come into question based on, you know, whatever, whatever happens to us, whatever we run across in our day to day life, there's really two tendencies, right? One is that we want to hold onto the belief that we, that we had, that we, that we hold dear to our heart. And the other is that we want to explore this new belief and this new way of thinking. And in doing so we must change what we're doing. Well, let's change how we behave. We change the, you know, we change ourselves. Really we ourselves change. And if we're gonna ever really have the kind of success that we want to have in life and in business, then we have to be willing to change.
02:29 We have to be willing to adapt. You have to be willing to grow and we have to learn how to do it in a way that that's resilient and that is reflective leaning. That we're not just reflexively making changes, but we're reflecting on ourselves and on our lives and on what it is that we want to be accomplishing in the world. And then we take that and we turned it into something. It's intentional when we're reflexive, reflexive, meaning we're just reflexively reacting to things in the moment based on our emotional whims. It's very difficult, if not impossible to have really meaningful growth in our businesses and our lives because it completely indicates the process of rational thinking. And as much as sometimes I think in in creative circles, in the artistic circles that I used to be more heavily involved in, I think that there is some pushback against being overly rational, right?
03:37 We want to be tapping into that intuitive in the moment kind of emotional sense of what to do, right? And Yeah, when you're, when you're in this, when you're in the container of a, of a piece of art, whether that's a, a painting or a song or whatever, when you have that container, it gives you that container within which to really explore all of those emotions and all of those feelings. But, well, we're not in that container. Those emotions and those feelings, if, if they're left to kind of run a muck as we are doing our thing every day, then we're really kind of handicapping ourselves in many, many ways. So when it comes to this thing of owning a practice, growing a practice, expanding our impact, all these types of things, one of the most important things that we can do is to really not engage in too much emotional drama and wanting everything to feel good and everything too.
04:50 You know, all this thing about good and bad and right and wrong and all these, these polarities and these, these dichotomies that we can get ourselves wrapped up into. There's a reason that all the sages talked about the fact that pretty much all human issues, all the, all the problems that we create for ourselves and really all the unhappiness that we create for ourselves. It really just boils down to our own obsession with what we think is good and bad and right and wrong, and all these other things. And then a super imposing that upon the world and allowing ourselves and choosing, really choosing, even though we're many times not realizing that we're making that choice because we are the ones that choose to label and define good versus bad, right versus wrong, you know, happy and sad, you know, whatever, a win and a loss.
05:46 I mean seriously, all these different things. We are the ones that define what those things are, whether those are defined individually or culturally. We agree as to what those things are and we choose to keep looking at the world and making those labels and putting those value judgments on everything. And that's what gets us all twists up when we run up against some of our own edges, our own growth edges, as you work, as some people like to call it the boundary of our growth, when we're pushing those boundaries, which is going to happen whether we want it to or not. And I think that people who become really bitter and cynical and unhappy in life are the people who get stuck pushing up against one of these boundaries and they just can't push any further. So they feel the pressure coming from behind them to grow, but they constantly have to push back against that because there's something about that next phase that is disturbing or so against their own internal belief system that they just can't bear to go there to look at it, to really allow that next phase of growth to happen.
07:02 And the word allow came out right there and it's a very important words. It's something that I think is a critical concept to understand that growth is not a process. While while on the one hand, yes, we can do things to encourage our own growth, we can do things to help stimulate growth. Right? So just like you can put water on a plant and you can put fertilizer in the soil and then you know, theoretically the plant is going to grow more, but growth is not something that we control. Okay. Growth is something, it is a natural process that has its own speed and its own. It's own pace and yes, sometimes it happens faster, sometimes it's not as fast. Sometimes I think really we get into these growth phases where we'll have a a certain amount of growth and then course we kind of plateau and that's totally normal by the way, plateaus are necessary in the growth process because we have to have time to integrate the changes and integrate this new vision and this new way of seeing things and this new way of being before the next growth phase.
08:16 And so this is why we tend to grow in spurts. We tend to grow in, in these, I guess you could say compressed time windows where we see a lot of growth and then all of a sudden it kind of levels off. Then what a lot of people do in those cases is they, they start to get upset and freak out and get anxious when the growth slows down, when that's just the normal part of the growth process. You know, if we look at life in general, life is an oscillation. Everything oscillates, you know, we breathe in and we exhale, we inhale and we exhale. There's ebb and flow. There's high tide and low tide. The seasons cycle between cold and warm. So there's always this oscillation going on. And I think that there's two ways that we can stunt our growth. And one is the way that I just mentioned before, which is that we don't allow it to happen in the first place.
09:11 So we see the growth coming and we feel the push of the growth, but we're going to push back against it because there's some way in which that growth goes against our beliefs. It goes against the way that we, I think things should be right. I think this happens a lot in our, in the acupuncture and Chinese medicine field around some of the very old school ways of doing things, which are really awesome and really cool, but can also be very time consuming and may not be the best choice in terms of having the time and the resources to serve large numbers of people. And so there are people who will really hold on to these very oh school concepts because they just can't let those things go. And even though there's this push and they feel as pushed, like, hey, you know, there's more and more people coming on, you know, there's this calling that I'm getting to serve more people and I need to, you know, speed up my process.
10:19 I needed to make my process more efficient. And some of those old school things of, you know, creating all of the custom prescriptions and doing things like that may not in someone's particular case, it didn't for me. And I'm not saying it will for everybody be an issue, but it was for me to keep doing that. So be able to let go of that and, and allow that growth that I was feeling to, to, you know, push me forward and then to try again. The thing about growth too is that it's always an experiment in many ways. You know, the moral where you are willing to experiment and try new things. Even realizing that, you know, nothing is permanent, everything is in constant flux changes. Oh, the only constant. Right. And when we're going through change, you know, none of the things that we're doing are set in stone until we decide, hey, this is working and I'm going to keep going this way.
11:21 Right? That's one of the key things about growth is to allow your intuitive sense of what's next and your intuitive sense of what things need to change and what things to stay the same for now to guide you. So to allow that to guide you and to be open to the new things that that you want to do while at the same time. Okay. At the same time, not allowing emotion two be the factor, which sounds kind of weird because like I think most change really in my, in my view or in my life anyway, most of the big changes I've ever made, we're initially initially because of a feeling because of of an emotion and intuitive sense that wasn't out. I don't think, something that I could classify as a thought or a rational thought. It was just this feeling that I had. Right? But the actual process of the change [inaudible] is something that has to be in many ways if it's going to be successful, especially in business, there has to be an element and of being methodical about it and having a set, rational, logical sequence to the change you know, sudden changes sudden and irrational changes almost always lead to, and I'm not saying it's always wrong, of course, you know, it's in fact it's, I'm not saying it's wrong at all and everything depends, depends on the city.
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13:25 But what I would say is that sudden and irrational changes that are driven primarily by emotion are much higher risk. So become a problem later and to become, and to actually have more collateral damage then a change that is guided by emotion. Okay. Guided by emotion. But where there's some planning and the navigation through these, the change is intentional as much as it can be. Those types of changes tend to have less to no collateral damage. And what do I mean by collateral damage? Well, I mean, you know, we made some changes on William and we don't think through what the impacts are going to be on our employees, on our family, on our patients, on our financial situation. And we just bill make a change based on some feeling that we have without thinking it through. Yeah. And the risk of damage to all those things becomes much higher to where suddenly because of some change we, our revenue drops or conversely our revenue skyrockets, but also the workload skyrockets.
14:43 We don't have enough, we didn't see through all the different logistical things that needed to be thought through and now our are just like, you know, overworked and we're not able to scale properly. And I mean this happens to businesses all the time that grow too fast and they actually, they actually crash because they grow too fast. You would think that growth, you know, it's like it's growth man. It's awesome. Yeah, we're growing and woo. You know, and I mean it is great to grow but there is such a thing is growth is too fast and too furious and ends up. So where are the structure of the business cannot sustain the growth. Sort of like if you were to build a a second or a third story on top of the foundation that that wasn't built to be able to sustain that kind of weight and that kind of stress it's going to crack.
15:35 Right? So it's just important to be patient and not rush things. And also what that means is that we have to learn how to sit sometimes with this comfort because the stage between where we are and where we're going next in that in between stage of kind of moving forward. You know, and I know you guys all know what I'm talking about cause you'll have these intuitions like no maybe it's time to do this but you know obviously there's going to be a lot of things that have to chase. There's going to be certain [inaudible] and there is potentially, you know, priests, difficult impacts from the change. So you want to think it through. And in the meantime you're feeling this push, but you're having to kind of put a governor on that, put a, put a rate limiter on that a little bit so that you can explore and adjust and look at things and make some decisions.
16:37 Because again, when we decide things we have to decision to decide means you're going to go one way and the other way you're going to let it go. And it is in a way a death, a closing off, but it's also an opening. And when we're making those decisions, it can feel really uncomfortable. And we, we may have to sit with that discomfort for two, three, four months, six months, a year, whatever. As we're going through the process of looking at this next phase that we're, that we're going to open up into. I mean, I remember going back to when I was doing music and you don't get me wrong, I love as a kid and growing up and in my young adulthood, I love music. Music was my obsession, but there was this other thing going on inside of me. I mean that that eventually became, you know, what propelled me to where I am now that I just didn't quite fit in that world.
17:38 It wasn't quite where I belonged and I knew that, but it took a while for me to really get to a place or I could make that move and make that. And in the interim of that time, I had a lot of growth, of course within myself, but there was always that little voice or that little inkling that was kind of pulling at me. And you know, when, when that was going on, it wasn't like, it didn't feel awesome, you know, let's put it that way. There was a little bit of a disconnect or a little dissonance between the direction of my life was on at that point. And this intuition about where I kind of knew in hindsight, I kinda knew that I was going to be doing something different. And finally, you know, that decision point came, came about and the decision point forced me to let go of a lot of things while I was at the same time embracing other things.
18:36 And the more that that decision was bringing up emotions, the harder it became, the more difficult it became. And those emotions. Remember, where do emotions come from? Where do you feelings come from? The links come from nowhere, honestly. Well, like we really literally just make them up. Okay. And they feel like they're, you know, we're sort of taught and I think it's, it's, it's not surprising that we feel emotion as something that's kind of coming from some mysterious place that we're not sure where it's coming from. And it all just feels like it's an external thing or it's something that we don't control. But the reality is that we are generating all of our emotions and they're coming from in many ways and in many cases obviously subconscious sources. But that doesn't mean that we are not the ones generating those feelings. And those feelings have many different sources.
19:43 And most of the sources of those feelings, I'm here to tell you are not places that are going to be helpful or beneficial to our growth. I'm just letting you know that. And that doesn't mean that we shouldn't negate the feelings that we have, but most of the emotional patterning and tendencies and habits that we've developed over our lifetime are the results of most of it is the results of early childhood experience and probably a little pass early childhood experience when we didn't have really any emotional boundaries whatsoever. And so we absorbed all the emotions from our environment, which whatever those emotions might've been, and a lot of those emotions were not necessarily helpful or beneficial or in the long run healthy. Now that being said, I'm a firm believer in this concept of complete ownership and so I take ownership of the fact that I chose two, insert myself into the environment that I came into and to be exposed to the emotions that I was exposed to so that I could then learn how to strengthen those parts of myself that would allow me to then transcend those emotional hindrances [inaudible] in my life.
21:08 And by taking ownership of that, then I empower myself and I no longer blame other people or blame circumstances for my limitations. And when we look at growth, what we have to learn how to do is we have to realize that the fears that we have, frustrations that we have, the anger that we have, the shame and the guilt, all these things that hold us back from growth, all these things that are gonna keep us from making that next step and from expanding into a bigger and more powerful role in the world and to serve our purpose. All of those emotions are things that we must learn how to reconcile. We must learn how to look at those emotions, not hide from them, not pretend they're not. They're not just like forcefully shut them down and push them away, but to be present to those emotions and be able to look at them and go, okay, so you know I'm like freaking out about doing this video online.
22:15 Where's that coming from? Why am I ashamed? What am I ashamed of? Or what am I afraid of? Or what is it that I'm trying to avoid? Right? Why is it that I'm doing that? And to just have honesty and insight into it, right? So that allows us that reflective capacity that I was talking about at the very beginning that we'll go ahead and kind of wrap up on that, but the ability to reflect on those emotional patterns and not be sucked into them, that's the key. That's the key, and we can call it mindfulness. We can call it whatever we want to call it. At the end of the day, it just boils down to being aware who we are and being aware of the things of the ways that we are holding ourselves back. Because let me tell you something. Right now, the only thing that holds us back [inaudible] is ourselves.
23:12 That's the only thing that holds us back. And until we realize that, until we make peace with that, until we're able to own that and not beat ourselves up over it, because it's not a fault, it's not shortcoming, it's not a a a flaw. It's just the way that we challenge ourselves [inaudible] the resistance that we put in front of ourselves. It's like the gym or the the workout that we choose. So give ourselves on spiritual level just like we would choose to go to the gym to get in shape. Know we chose to come here too. Get into spiritual shape and to learn how to build ourselves as people and as you know, spiritual beings and so by taking ownership of that and just accepting that that struggle is going to be there and not running away from it, that is going to be the biggest differentiator in terms of how are going to evolve as business owners and also then with that, how our businesses are going to evolve to serve people in the way that we feel we want to serve people.
24:28 And so does that mean more and more patients maybe doesn't mean less patients but more time with those patients. Maybe it doesn't matter. The point is does it align with where you are evolving to? Does it align with that next phase that you are feeling drawn into? And again, when you start to feel those things, it's really important to be patient, keep an eye on it, build, stay where you are. Okay. Again with growth. I think it's just so important. Those those plateaus where we really are just kind of [inaudible] coasting. That's part of growth and I think people don't even allow themselves to do that sometimes, but you know, they almost feel guilty a lot of times are we as humans, we have this tendency to feel guilty sometimes if we're not always pushing, pushing, pushing and more and more and more and we feel guilty if we're just kind of kicking back and just coasting.
25:32 But sometimes that's what we need to be doing as we're assessing what's going on. It gives us time and it gives us the space to be able to make conscious decisions, intentional decisions about our growth. Okay, so in a nutshell, just to sum up what I, what I talked about, I think the three things, the three biggest takeaways that I have for you guys today is number one, just be cool with where you're at for right now. Okay. You're not going to grow if you can't [inaudible] kickback and enjoy where you are. That's kind of the paradox of growth. Well, it isn't going to happen without accepting where we are now. Right? The second thing is that growth is a process of allowing, it's not going to come by force. I'm sure there, there are actions that we have to take and there are actions. You know, we can't just expect to real our practice without taking certain actions without, you know, being an active participant in that process.
26:38 But the other side of that coin is we also can't expect to just force everything to be a certain way. Growth is organic and it's gonna. There's part of that process that is it's just gonna lead us, right? We're not gonna be able to lead that process of growth all the way. We have to also be willing to be led by a part of ourselves that we're not quite familiar with yet. Finally, the third takeaway I think would be that the nature of growth is that you're going to have discomfort and to push discomfort away too. To always seek comfort [inaudible] is to definitely stunt your growth. That doesn't mean that you see discomfort, but it just means that when you're not comfortable, when you're noticing things aren't the way that you hoped that they would be or that things aren't the way you thought they were.
27:37 So just be able to sit with that and not feel the need to runaway from it or you know, immediately change it or, you know, feel guilty about it or whatever. But just to be able to say, okay, well, you know what, I'm seeing some things now that I wasn't aware of before and I don't really like it. I know that I could do better. I know that there's a a better way or a more efficient way or more in a way that's, I'm gonna have more integrity around this, so that's cool. But I'm not going to allow that feeling of discomfort to derail where I am now. Okay. I think that's all we got for today. This is the podcast factory.com
