Here’s a 10 Step Plan

We’ve covered lots of ground in the last 5 articles and we’ve received more than one request for what we did the month or months before.  So, this month is a simple synthesis of the high points from the previous articles in this series.

What could you do today that will help you improve your life, your business and your practice tomorrow?

Apply this to your patients…what could they do today that will help them improve their quality of life, health, happiness and productivity tomorrow.  It is for these reasons that many doctors have become coaching clients.

Why bring up coaching?  To a large degree, you are coaching your patients.  A good coach can hear what people are not saying and can see more in their client than the client can see in themselves…even if just for the moment.  You do this in your practice every single day.  So, when it comes to your patient’s health and well being or your business and practice, it is critical to focus clearly on what is wanted and why it is wanted.  What I continually find is that most people don’t have what they want because they don’t know what they want.  Practitioners, like patients, are clear about what they don’t want but you can’t create what you do want by trying to get away from what you don’t want.

We become stuck here because we lack clarity, skills and/or the willingness or ability to execute our plans.  Many are not wired neurologically for their own success, their own abundance, their own happiness…but, again, that’s what coaching is for.

If you’re clear about the parallels between coaching for you and how you coach your patients then you understand how important it is to be clear about what you want, where you want to go and, perhaps most importantly, why you want to go there.

The next step is in knowing the system to create what you want that is equally applicable to helping your patients create what they want. Generically, here it is…

1. Vision:  what you are really trying to create?
2. Skills and Abilities:  what you need to be, do and have to know that you can “do it.”
3. Motivation:  the drive needed to overcome inertia, procrastination and complacency.
4. Resources:  what human/material resources will you need to accomplish your vision?
5. Information:  what needs to be done and how to do it?
6. Systems:  the process and procedures through which that information is implemented in the practice to produce practical and quantifiable results.
7. Identification of key concerns:  to establish priorities for correction.
8. A Plan:  to establish in time, what needs to be done, who needs to do it and by when?
9. Desire:  without a willingness to have what it is you say you want, the discipline to do what it takes to get it is often missing…what will it take to get you to follow your plan?
10. Determining your Strengths:  why not ride a horse in the direction that it is going in?  Everyone focuses on fixing weaknesses.  This is in violation the Law of Attraction.  Let’s find your strengths and capitalize on them…on purpose, and by design.

 

Now, let’s apply these 10 steps to your practice so that you may identify the missing piece or pieces for yourself and your patients.  Here are some simple questions to ask, tips and strategies to employ:

1. Vision is a consultation question that asks, “What would perfect health look like to you?”
2. To have the patient understand what they must bring to the equation in the way of skills, in the consultation the chiropractor would ask the question, “What do you think you will have to do to attain that level of health?”
3. Motivation asks the question, “What would be so good about it if we could help you create the level of health you say you want?”  This allows the doctor to elicit specific, patient centered benefits of care thus raising the value of the chiropractor’s services in the patient’s mind.
4. Resources is where technology would also fit into the equation.  Here the questions would include, “What do you have at your disposal that would help you accomplish this?”
5. Information is your patient education system.  The best patient education systems place the nervous system at the center of the world of understanding for the chiropractic patient and here is also where technology shines.  Wouldn’t it be great if patients truly grasped the importance of their nervous system in health and disease?
6. Systems include communication systems, patient education systems, technic systems and numerous other systems for us.  The question is in your ability to help the patient create systems for their own health development.
7. Identification of key concerns also is a consultation questions but it also comes up largely on a visit to visit basis.  I was always taught to move patients away from discussions of their symptoms but wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could use their symptoms as an education tool and a way to enroll and activate the patient in their own healing process?  Again if we ask the patient when they present a key concern, “what would be so good about it if I could help you with that?”  Here, you will begin to layer benefit after benefit for that patient in that patient’s mind about how you are contributing to their life.  And, if the patient can understand the spinal-neurological CAUSE of their key concern, then they can fully comprehend the relationship between stress and their health.
8. The plan is your set of recommendations for that patient’s care.  Part and parcel within those recommendations should be periodic re-assessments to insure their nervous system is properly responding to your care.  If you are basing your recommendations on the patient’s symptom picture, then why blame the patient when they discontinue care based on their symptoms or lack of symptoms.  If we want patients to understand it is more about function than how they feel, we must base our recommendations on documentation of functional changes.
9. Desire comes for the patient to get rid of what they have but do not want.  Wellness and family practices have mastered the art of patient communication so that the original intent shifts to using chiropractic to gain what they want and do not have…health for them and their family!  The transformation from symptom care to function care is taking root when patients begin making lifestyle changes on their own and want to see, the impact of those lifestyle changes on their function and health status.
10. When it comes to your strengths, focus on what you may have said or done to produce ideal patients in your practice.  If you knew what you said, what ideal patients heard or what they experienced that contributed to them becoming great patients, you would duplicate that experience for every patient who came through your doors.

Most practitioners are paying dearly for the absence of the “essentials” in the only way they can…by working much too hard for much too little.  If you can embrace change, then you have two choices.  You can create your own systems, strategies and procedures or you can embrace today’s modern technology and let me help you create systems, strategies and procedures with you…not for you.  I pride myself in actually knowing my clients as people…not just another client and, in doing so, we both get to develop a renewed sense of clarity, direction and momentum…the three pre- requisites for the development of your life, business and practice…on purpose and by design.