Are You Choosing Sexy Over Solid

Choosing sexy over solid. Now, having coached hundreds of clinicians over the years, this is a trap that I see almost all of us fall into at various points through our career. And when it happens, it can end up leading to a lot of frustration, even contributes to burnout. So here's what I mean by that. Choosing sexy over solid is what happens to many of us when we want to try and become better practitioners, become better chiropractors. And, and in order to do that, there's loads of different things you go out and learn. There's loads of seminars, loads of techniques, loads of courses. The sexy stuff is the stuff at the top of this pyramid. That's the stuff that really appeals. Well, so it's the kind of things we see the courses advertiser finally learn the missing piece to getting all your patients better, or understand the one thing that is stopping you from getting the results you dream of, right? It's a really good way to market something. It's really sexy, it's really appealing. It sounds like, oh, if I just learn this one thing, I'll finally have the knowledge that I've been missing all this time. It's just that one missing piece there, and that sells really, really well. The problem is, though, most of the time, life doesn't work that way. And if you haven't built the solid skills that you need, then what happens is you go on these courses and I did this for a number of years, and you learn this stuff, you get all excited, you go, oh, I'm going to finally be able to use this, that the other, and finally get people better. And then you go into practice and you try it and you find it doesn't work as well as you thought. But that's all right, because a few months later, you go on another sexy course and you keep chasing this sexy, appealing, alluring stuff. And without the solid foundation, that doesn't work. So I use this pyramid to explain this. So the top stuff here, this is the tough. This is sexy, right? This is the stuff that really, really appeals. It's the bits that make you feel like, oh, wow, that's like, if I master that, I'm going to be a master of chiropractic. I'm going to be an amazing clinician. It's the top of the pyramid stuff. But if you don't have the more solid skills lower down, then it doesn't work so well because there's this spectrum between the sexy stuff and the solid stuff. The solid stuff is a little bit harder to sell, to be honest. It's not as appealing. It's more important because it's a solid foundation. And if you don't have that, the sexy stuff doesn't work. If you imagine for a moment this pyramid actually looked like that, that's what most of us do, is that we have a small foundation. We don't build the solid stuff. We have this big sexy bit we try and plug on top. And because of that, the sexy stuff doesn't really work. Now, this can be important and it is worth doing, but you've got to have the solid skills first. I use the exact same diagram to explain to my patients the exercise pyramid. You know, if you think of what's sexy in exercise, the stuff that really appeals, that's like HIIT training, right? Or like kickbox classes. Below that, you've got less sexy, a little bit sexy, more solid stuff, like weightlifting, Olympic lifts, for example, where it's not quite as sexy as the HIIT class, but it's okay. Below that, you've got stuff that's not sexy at all, like aerobic exercise, swimming, walking, cross trainer, that kind of stuff. You know, you need to build a solid foundation of one before you go up to the next level. So this is one of the reasons why I never. I haven't really taught technique or gone into this. And that was not something I was really passionate about, because if you're not somebody who's really got solidity in these skills, that won't work so well. So what I started doing is I started teaching communication, right? And communication is great because when you learn how to communicate with your patients really well, you can build sexy skills. On top of that, you can get your alt, your DNS, your sot, all the abbreviations, all the letters. You can do that, and you've got it on a solid foundation. But one of the things I found, having taught communication for years, is that's not the really solid stuff. Like, it definitely makes a difference. And between the two, you want to make sure you've got your communication dialed down before you go for the sexier stuff. But there's this level below that that's resilience, your mental resilience. Essentially. This is your mindset. Because if you don't get this right, this is what I fell into pretty quickly. I thought teaching people communication was just teaching them a few skills. And what I found over time was that people who had a solid mindset, they build the communication on that. That worked really well, but people who didn't, it was a lot. Like, if you just remove this bit. So now we have this big pyramid on top. They've learned the communication, they can learn the sexy skills. They didn't have their mindset dialed in. They still had imposter syndrome, they still had certain anxieties, they still didn't feel very confident with patients, it was still unstable. So because of that, that's why it's really, really important. I've learned this over time and I now coach people around the mindset side of things. If you don't build the solid skills first and give yourself that really good foundation, it might not be as sexy. Like, you know, overcoming imposter syndrome, that's not particularly sexy. Getting confident, becoming resilient doesn't really sell that well. But without that, this stuff doesn't work. When you get that, you can build this a lot easier. When you've got that solid foundation, the communication stuff just works a lot better. And when you've got a great mindset and you can communicate really well, those sexy techniques really do work and you'll get far more out of them. So I wanted to share that with you because I wanted to share that concept of sexy versus solid. This applies to many other things. Obviously it applies to exercise, like I've talked about there as well, applies to many things to do with business. If you have a clinic you're setting up, don't just go for the sexy, cool looking ideas, you know, solid foundation of like a business plan and a marketing strategy. The less appealing but more important stuff, that's what you want to look at. If you would like some help with this, this is what I'm going to be launching very, very soon. So if you. In the next week or so, I'm going to be launching a brand new course, really focusing on this solid level here. This is about building a bulletproof healthcare mindset. It's called professional resilience. It's about making sure you have the confidence, you have the mindset and the internal strategies and foundation right? So that then if you want to go and learn communication or maybe you've got that dialed in, you want to learn some of the sexier techniques, it will work a lot better, it will last a lot more. You won't be frustrated, you won't get jaded and you won't be like these people that I see more and more on social media these days say no. CPD excites me. What are you guys doing for cpd? None of it really appeals. It all looks like it's more the same. I'm just not interested anymore. Those are people who kept trying to build the sexy without building the solid, and this kept falling over. And over time they get bored and they get jaded and they get frustrated and practice isn't enjoyable anymore. I want to make sure that never happens for you because I've been heading down that path myself in the past and it's not a fun place to be. So keep an eye out for that. If you want some more help with that. However else you can apply this. So think about it. In your life, don't be chasing sexy all the time. Make sure you've got solid first, then the sexy stuff will work a lot better. So I hope that's been helpful for you and I'll see you soon for another video.