I have always been inspired by this man who stood up for what he believed in.

Click here to view the embedded video.

My question for myself and others today, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, is what is your dream?  What inspires you?  How do you wish the world to be?

What will you do in 2012 to realize your dream?

Many chiropractors out there want to make changes to both their personal lives and their practices.  At Rosen Coaching, our mission is to help chiropractors become the recognized leaders of true health care (where we help people get healthy, stay healthy and have the best life possible) worldwide!  To do so, we need chiropractors to become extremely successful in their practices and serve as many people in a true wellness model as they possibly can!

The reality, is that we are far from the mark of achieving this, so we have work to do!

Not only do I highly recommend that you read this book, I do believe that using these principles will help individual chiropractors make the changes that will help them be more successful!  This will result in our profession being stronger with many more people successfully practicing principled chiropractic, and truly helping humanity the best way we know how: through a clear functioning nerve system and making lifestyle choices to support greater health and not recreating their subluxations over and over.

Whether you choose to use these principles to make personal changes or changes in your practice, there are 3 components that we must address, for sustainable change:

1. We must direct the rational side  (The Rider) by looking for bright spots, scripting the critical moves and pointing to the destination.

2. We must motivate the emotional side (The Elephant) by finding the feeling behind change, shrinking the change, and growing the identity of the people.

3. We must Shape the Path (the environment) to support the change by tweaking the environment, building better habits, and rally the herd!

By applying these principles to any change, large or small, we can become more successful and save our profession!  That is our mission at Rosen Coaching!

A recent article in Entrepreneur, titled “Steve Jobs and the Seven Rules of Success” got me to thinking. We have just lost a true visionary, an entrepreneur who changed the world and left a legacy.  I’d like to see how the lessons from Steve Jobs can help save chiropractic.

Right now, our profession as we know it, is at a crossroads.  Will we go the way of the osteopaths, being swallowed up by medicine? Or will chiropractic remain a separate and distinct profession?  We must start taking action to save our profession immediately, and then start to embody Steve Job’s rules for success to have chiropractors be the recognized leaders of true health care and the wellness revolution.

To get in the mood for Steve Jobs Seven Rules of Success, if you have not seen the Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement speech, please watch before we begin.

1. Do What You Love.  Do you LOVE being a chiropractor?  If not, it’s time to move out of the profession and into something you do love, or do whatever it takes to fall in love with helping people get healthy, stay healthy and give them a chance at living the best life possible.

2. Put a Dent in the Universe. To do so, it is necessary to have a powerful vision.  Are you fixing low backs, or are you transforming people’s lives?  Do you truly understand the power of an adjustment, of clearing someone’s nerve system so that they can function and thrive at their optimum potential?  If you do not have a big vision, your practice and your ability to put a dent in the universe remains small.

3. Make Connections. While chiropractic hasn’t changed much since 1895, how can you evolve the profession? What connections can you make with the current global trends and how that might relate to a niche market? Are you connecting to your culture’s specific changing needs and wants?  We must connect a strong message of what people REALLY want to what chiropractic can REALLY do for them!

4. Say No to 1000 Things.  Much of our profession, in my opinion, has become a ‘jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none’.  Many office are chiropractic and and and….We must master the philosophy, science and art of chiropractic.  From Rosen Coaching’s perspective, a true wellness model of chiropractic means removing nerve interference AND showing them ways to not re-create their subluxations over and over again!  The public needs to understand what they can receive from a chiropractic service: remove nerve interference. Then whatever other techniques/approaches you do to help people to stop recreating nerve interference is up to you.  But we have to connect the dots so people ‘get’ what we can do for them.

5. Create Insanely Different Experiences.  What can you and your team to do make every interaction with your office an exceptional experience for your clients/customers/practice members/patients?  Are you giving them the Red Carpet VIP Experience?  If every interaction in with your office isn’t a WOW experience, we’ve got to improve it so it is.

6. Master the message.  Sadly, the chiropractic lifestyle is the best kept secret to getting healthy and staying healthy and having the best life possible!  We MUST as individual chiropractors and as a profession, learn how to communicate chiropractic if our profession is going to survive.  Our mission at Rosen Coaching is to help chiropractors become the recognized leaders of true health care worldwide!

7. Sell dreams, not products.  Get clear about who you want to serve, what their needs are and how you can help!  What is it they dream of? How big is your dream, for them, for your practice, for what legacy you want to leave in the world?

I am inspired by this group, in many ways, in which I hope to summarize (yet not oversimplify) here.  Despite each chiropractor in this group coming from a different part of North America, with different techniques and backgrounds, there were three common denominators that I observed:

1.Big Vision & Purpose ~ First and foremost, each chiropractor had a vision of what they wanted to achieve. Not just padding their bank accounts, but truly serving and bettering humanity.  Their purpose of why they do what they was very strong and guided their actions.

2. High Executors ~ When people ask me why some chiropractors are successful, and others are not… taking action is the answer.  It’s simple, but not easy.  Knowing your vision and purpose has to come first, but taking consistent action, literally doing what you say you will do, is the largest factor in success. Each person sitting in that room was a success because they took action (and continue to do so) to create the practices of their dreams.

3. Blur lines of work and play ~ Having fun at what they do, blurring the lines of work and play are essential to keep their energy high.  A Ferrari going with the pedal down to the floor will eventually burn out, and so will you!  These chiropractors understood this, and they know how to work hard, and to play hard. And they don’t need to be exclusive of one another!  How much fun can you have in your office?

Both Dr. Rosen and I are honoured to have been able to spend time with and share our insights to this group.  We know that these folks are on the path to help us achieve our mission, having chiropractors be the recognized leaders of True Health Care worldwide!

Many people are excited about the Ask vs. Tell, socratic questions of our Rosen Coaching Communications! We’ve just finished our Wellness Practice Blueprint program and people around the world are implementing and changing their communication and having massive effects in their practices already!

As a chiropractic coach, when I listen to live recordings of patient interactions, or are talking down the concept of socratic questions with clients, I find a big piece of the puzzle is not JUST the skillful questions we are asking, but also the “tone” of voice or intention of the question.

From my perspective, the two opposing ways to approach a question are either: an intent of confrontation or an intent of clarification.

Our goal with our tone is not to be condescending but curious!  Our intent is to clarify, not be confrontational!  Truly our intent, our tone, our body language, our facial expressions all communicate a message to the person in front of us. We all know the same question, asked either way, can mean entirely different things!

I personally have heard chiropractors, who are thinking they are doing a good thing by asking questions, speaking down to people, asking rhetorical questions, and making the entire interaction awkward. I have also heard very skillful communicators ask questions to clarify what’s really going on, in a conversationally curious way to have successful interactions and build long term relationships.

If you would like to learn more about how to ask socratic questions in a way that builds relationships over time (as opposed to ruining them) we’d love to send you a free training module called our LAASR Orientation!  Please go to our website and enter in your name and email. In addition to that, we will send you hundreds of dollars of free products from our store as a gift!.

Recently, while speaking at an EPOC group in Ottawa, and day in and day out in our coaching conversations with our clients, how deep this concept is embedded in the chiropractic profession really sunk in.

With each interaction in your office, you have a choice: To inspire others to action or to try and manipulate them.  This shows up initially during Visit 1 and 2, but will continue on through your daily interactions, and show up strongly again in your re-evaluations and re-reports, and especially how you handle difficult questions!

Inspiring others requires communicating the ‘why‘ behind chiropractic care and why you do it.  It requires a conversation of finding out where they are at, what they think and teaching under the radar to help them see there is another way. It means empowering people, giving them truth and consequences and leading them to choose what is right for them.  It doesn’t mean sugar-coating the truth, or not talking about consequences, but the intention is to inspire action and empower people.

Manipulating others uses scare tactics to coerce and strong arm people to choosing what you think is right for them.  It means a harsh tone and over-dramatizing the negative, making assumptions, painting people into a corner, giving them one good choice.  Yes this can work in the short term, but it’s not a good way to build strong relationships over the long run, in our opinion.  The intention is to manipulate people to do what you want.

The trick is to REALLY find out what is going on with them, and how we might be able to help them.  Then simply find out what they really want and show them how they can have it!

If you are up for it, I’d like to challenge you to see where in your practice and in your community you can inspire others more.  Will you take me up on it?

In this video, Simon Sinek explains that, “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it”.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It explains why chiropractors who download information about what chiropractic can do for patients and how they are different from other doctors, may get a few people on board.  But those chiropractors who lead through inspiration, allowing people to connect to their purpose, beliefs and motivation, the ‘WHY’ of their messages, can build big practices.

At Rosen Coaching, it is our mission to have chiropractors step up to their rightful place as the recognized leaders of true healthcare worldwide!  We know that every human being deserves the chance to get healthy and stay healthy and have the best life possible.  Are you sharing that message in your community?

Most of us were taught to communicate by telling, teaching, and downloading information with a one-way monologue.  This method can be frustrating as people don’t seem to ‘get’ what we are trying to get across, therefore the chiropractic practice results we are seeking (retention, referrals etc.) don’t seem to follow.  Eventually we start to doubt our ability and our certainty waivers.

Instead, how about opening up a human-to-human, two-way dialogue?  It will take time to learn to communicate this way, to literally re-wire your chiropractic brain to ask instead of tell, but it is worth it.  The dialogue instead of the download is the way to help people really understand your message, and also be empowered to take action from it.  It will generate the practice results you desire when you master your communication starting with Visit 1, and Visit 2 all the way through your Daily Interactions, Re-exams, Re-reports and how you handle Difficult Questions.

Rather than just downloading and telling them what you think and getting them to ‘YES’ you, how about having a conversational dialogue so that you can also find out what they think, what they want and find ways to show them how to have it?

This dialogue approach leads to greater practice success and being able to help more people, as well as less frustration and less burnout.  Do you want to master the dialogue?  Check out our training materials or send us an email for a free 30 minute consult.

I often have a discussion with our Rosen Chiropractic Coaching clients about a Magic Wand. I often ask our coaching clients if they’d rather have a Crystal Ball or a Magic Wand?  (We have a poll right now on Facebook if you’d like to vote!)

Many people say right away, “A crystal ball, of course!  Then I could see into the future of what will happen.”  After discussing the value of seeing what is going to happen to adapt or prepare for it, up comes the discussion of the Magic Wand.

What if you held, in the power of your heart and hand, the ability to create the future?  What if  you could waive your Magic Wand and, voila!

The reality is, you do hold the power in your head, heart and hands of a Magic Wand.  But instead of just waiving it, you have to get clear on what you want, set objectives and take consistent action and do the work to achieve it!

Sometimes when our Rosen Coaching clients get stumped by an obstacle or a roadblock, I love to come back to the Magic Wand.  I say, “IF you had a Magic Wand right now, what would you create, what would you do?” It opens up a world of possibility that wasn’t there before.  It’s not a stroke of coaching genius, just a simple way to see what is possible.

Oh, how I truly wish I had a real Magic Wand!  I’d waive it and make the world a happy, peaceful place where chiropractors are the recognized leaders of true health care and the wellness revolution.  A world where people trust in their bodies, and in life itself.  I’d make every chiropractor’s office as busy as they could handle!

The reality is, I have the power of a Magic Wand to envision what I want to create and the dedication and drive to do what it takes to get there.

Do you want to borrow my Magic Wand? It’s simple, but not easy.

What will you create for your future next quarter?