"Chiropractic Stand-Up" - Lessons from a Comedy Legend

How is a chiropractor like a stand up comedian? Now, I realize that sounds like a setup to a bad joke. I'm not about to stop practicing rubbish. Stand up here. Don't worry about that. But this question popped in my head recently when I was listening to an interview the chap called Judd Apatow. Now, if you're my age, if you're a millennial or older, you probably remember Judd Apatow from your teens. Judd Apatow directed some of the biggest, most successful comedy films of my teenage years ever. I mean, John C. Reilly, Will Ferrell, Paul Rudd, they all became really big through Judd Apatow's movies. Things like Anchorman is the absolute classic. People know Talladega Nights, Walk Hard, Blades of Glory, all these films. Basically, for about an 8 to 10 year period, whenever a Judd Apatow movie came out, I knew I was gonna go and see it. And then I was probably gonna buy it on DVD as well. They actually, I found this out in the interview. They made more money on DVD sales than they did through cinema because you'd see it in the cinema once, but you'd want to watch it again and again with your friends. Now Netflix has come along, it's kind of killed the DVD industry and it's killed big comedy movies because people, they watch it and then they stream it and there's no money in it as well. But anyway, Jed Aptow was, was talking about his career in this and I didn't know that, although he was a director and I'd seemed like behind the scenes, he seemed a pretty funny guy. He actually got started in stand up as well. And he said this thing about stand up that really hit home and it made me think about what we do as practitioners as well. And he talked about how brutal stand up comedy is, like how emotionally just, just overwhelming and how really difficult and how crushing it could be at times. You know why so many stand up comedians, they try it and they quit. And he said, well, here's the thing with stand up comedy is like most things, if you wanted to go and perform it, you'd practice. Like if you were going to perform guitar on stage, you'd go and you'd practice over and over and over and over on your own. Even if it's like juggling, you go and do that over and over on your own. Yes. When you get on stage, the nerves might get to you, but you at least walk on stage going, I know how to do this. He goes, stand up comedy, you learn in front of people like you only get to learn and practice in a crowd of people. You can't do stand up on your own and work out if it's any good. So he's like, so you are constantly failing in front of a crowd of people. And you know, he would talk about like how soul crushing it was to go out and completely bomb, have none of your jokes lined and you're just there on stage being stared at people and you know, they are judging me and they think I'm not very good and you know, think about how terrifying that would be. And the other thing he said that I think was really, really insightful is he talked about, he said there's a reason why most stand up comedians have really awful childhoods. They have really traumatic stories. Not all of them, but most of them have some deep seated psychological pain rooted in childhood. Comedians as a whole are not happy people. You know, they often have really, really difficult stories about their early lives there. And he said, well, I reckon this is part of it because you imagine how soul crushing it is to get up there on stage and to bomb and you bomb night after night after night. And you know, it's, you don't actually get a lot of jokes land when you're starting out in your career a lot of the time and you keep doing that, you keep experiencing this rejection and this fear and this feeling of, you know, it's never going to work, it's never going to be good enough because a psychologically healthy person quits, they go, this is not worth it, I'm not going to do that. But the reason that some of these people is this kind of like difficult childhood or these difficult early experiences set up this massive imposter syndrome. But there's also this feeling like they have to succeed to feel worthy. And he says the ones who make it, they only did that because their need to be successful, they need to feel good enough, they need to be good at this thing, outweighed the repeated fear and soul crushing nature of learning to be a stand up comedian. And when I was at school I had a friend who tried to do this. He did it, he was so excited he did it. He did it once, bombed, never did it again, never talked about it again. So most people would avoid that entirely because why would you want to learn in front of other people? But actually it's the ones who, they have that real drive. It's not that they're not afraid of bombing, it still feels awful. But their need to be successful, their desire outweighs their fear and that's what allowed them to get going and become really, really successful. Now what's this got to do with chiropractic? I'm not suggesting that every single chiropractor has deep seated psychological trauma or terrible childhoods. I know for a fact that's not true. But his point, there was two things here that I think were really, really key. Number one, practicing and learning in front of people. I mean, thank goodness we don't do it on a stage in front of, you know, like 20, 30, 40, 100 people. But as chiropractors, we learn in front of people, we learn in front of our patient. You know, we practice with the patient. There is always somebody there when we see does this work or not. And you know, we don't really practice on our own very much. We don't practice and practice, particularly after we graduate. We very rarely practice in a safe environment though. Yeah, that was one thing. The other thing is that, you know, of course chiropractors, there's loads of us with low confidence, low self esteem, no imposter syndrome. Of course that stuff's common because we have to learn in front of people and that's naturally scary. That's naturally quite a terrifying thing to do. So of course we struggle with that. The ones who become really, really great, it's not that they just have total confidence. They always know what they're doing. There are people like that. But I don't think that necessarily makes you great. I think that makes you confident. Not always the same thing. But the ones who really succeed are ones who, they wanted it more than they were scared of failure. Their desire for success, their desire being the best they could be outweighed their fear of what happens when it goes wrong, because it regularly does. You know, and like I showed in my show don't tell video series, I regularly have things. I do something, it doesn't work the way I wanted, doesn't mean that I don't care. But my desire to do better outweighs the fear of what if I do this and it doesn't work. So there's two things I wanted to say here. First of all, if you are struggling with something, find a way to practice when it's not in front of the patient. It boggles my mind how many times I have worked with a chiropractor. I've helped them out, they've given them some advice and you know, I've shown that, let's say I've shown a much better way of giving a reporter findings. That is much Easier for them and makes a lot of sense. And first time they try it, you know, they're like, ah, yeah, it was okay. It kind of didn't go this well that well. They struggle with it a little bit. And I go, okay, well how much did you practice? And they go, oh, I didn't. And this is what so many of us do. We sit down in front of the patient first time, we're going to try something new and we wing it. You don't need to do that. You don't need to be a stand up comedian. Sit in a room on your own, practice it. I have practiced report findings to an empty chair more times than I could ever possibly like hundreds and hundreds of times. Same with particular bits of advice I end up giving off and how can I say this better? How can I say it more effectively, how can I say it more confidently? Or tricky questions patients often ask, what's a good way of answering this? I sit down and work out and I literally practice it out loud to an empty chair or I do it to a colleague or I do it to a friend or a family member or a ca. Early in my career I had a CA literally like coach me on. Here's how to come out and greet the patient. Here's where you stand. Let them stand up before you go and shake their hand. Because I was enthusiastically going to shake when they were halfway up. It sounds silly, but practice this stuff. It makes it so much less scary than it needs to be. And the other thing is that don't feel like if you want to be great, you have to banish the fear. You don't have to banish the fear. You know, great comedians still worry about bombing, but they care more about being the best they can be and succeeding than they do worry about these things. So it's not about not having fear, it's not about not having imposter syndrome. It's just about wanting it badly enough that you don't let that get in the way. So I thought I'd share that because I've had a lot of conversations with chiropractors who struggle with confidence and that kind of thing. If you want some more help with this around how you actually go about assessing patients, I've got something really, really exciting. I'm not ready to announce it yet because I, I'm still fine tuning things. I know I've been teasing this for a bit, but I promise you, I'm so excited for what I've got coming up in the next couple of weeks and I promise you, if you, if you want to really level up your care to that level, this is going to massively, massively help you and feel a lot more confident and really feel like you love what you do. So keep an eye out for that coming very, very soon. But in the meantime, you don't have to practice in front of people all the time. You can practice on your own. And don't worry about the fear, just want it more than you're afraid of it and you will get there.