“Chiropractors are so entitled these days…”

Are you entitled with your patients before you switch off? Because that's not a nice accusation I've thrown at you. Suddenly I was entitled with my patients for a number of years and I thought I'd talk about that a little bit today so you can see how that happened. Because I think most of us are. I think a lot of the conventional advice and wisdom that's given out to people when it comes to communication and handling certain situations makes us in entitled. It creates entitlement. Now, when I say that, I don't mean the kind of entitlement where I think I'm amazing, I'm God's gift to chiropractic. I'm the best chiropractor ever. You know that that's icky, that's just crap. So we can assume that it's not that because nobody needs me to talk to them and explain why that sucks. I'm talking about a much more subtle kind of entitlement, a little creeping subconscious, one that seems useful at the start but. But over time actually can be detrimental. Not just your patients, but your own self esteem and your own ability to feel confident in the work that you do. So how does this work? Well, disenfightment, it would often come from situations where patients didn't necessarily get the response we'd expect. You know, you'd treat them, you'd reassess, and most patients most of the time do well. You know, they come in, we review, I go, oh, that feels better to me. And they go, yeah, it feels better to me. Happy days. We're off to the races, you know, continue. And they're doing well. But as we all know, there's a decent percentage of patients where they don't respond exactly how we expected. No matter how experienced you are, no matter how great you are, some people just don't go the way you think. And that presents a little bit of a problem, especially when you're fairly new, because you go, oh, how am I going to explain this to them? And the fear would come, often quite subtly. What do they think, I'm not good enough? What if they think that I've wasted their money? What if it's been a waste of time? They're going to be mad at me, they're going to be really upset. How am I going to handle this situation? And some of the conventional wisdom that's given out there, that I was given and I used to give to other people before I realized this, was that if they weren't responding the way you expected, you would then start Asking them questions to try to find out what they were doing that could have got in the way. Like, well, have you been doing your exercises? Have you been drinking enough water? Have you been getting up from your desk more often? You know, have you been sleeping well? What's your diet been like? You know, we would start to ask them questions that essentially try to shift the blame from us onto them to get them to see that, well, maybe it's my fault I'm not better, because it couldn't possibly be the chiropractor's fault. You know, they've provided this treatment. There's no way whatsoever that maybe it's partly down to the chiropractor that I'm not better. Maybe they didn't do the right treatment. Maybe they didn't predict things accurately enough. Maybe they're just not as good as I thought they were. Couldn't possibly be our fault as practitioners, right? No, it has to be the patient's fault. And we've got to help them work out why it's their fault in the. Some of you may have heard of this world that, like, pickup artists, these kind of sleazy guys who, like, almost professionally go and, like, pick up women and they do it using all these psychological tricks and just icky stuff. They call this negging, which is where, like, you subtly insult somebody to try and position yourself as superior so they'd be attracted to you. That's kind of what we're doing to our patients here. We're basically trying to instill these, like, fearful or negative beliefs about themselves so they don't blame us. That's entitlement. We believe that we're entitled to respect from them. We're entitled to them value and appreciating us because on our terms, we did a good job. And yeah, I'm sure you did. You gave them the best treatment that you could. You tailored it to them. You did everything you thought you could do to help. But that doesn't mean that you're entitled to their appreciation, because that's your basis. Those are your values. That's your standard of whether you think you did a good enough job. It's not theirs. They are not paying you to do what you think is a good job. They're paying you to get better. And if they don't feel that, maybe they are, and maybe the symptoms haven't caught up, fine. But if they don't feel that, they're not necessarily going to appreciate it or they're not necessarily going to go, oh, great, thank you. I know I messed it up, but you did a great job. So we're expecting them to respect us on our terms. That is not patient centered, and that is entitlement. Now, I don't say this to upset people because like I say, I did this for years. I thought I was entitled to their respect because I did a good job and I trained really hard and I did all the work I could, therefore I deserve respect. And if it didn't get better, it didn't get the results. That's a shame, but not my problem. I wouldn't say it that way. I wouldn't have framed it that way. But when I examined myself, I realized that's kind of what I was thinking. So I'm sharing this because what I learned over time was essentially to stop doing that, to stop trying to make it their fault, to stop trying to instill these ideas that maybe it's down to you, that you're not better. Now, does that mean I accept all the blame? No. I may well still ask those questions. I may want to explore it, but I don't come at it from a place of entitlement. Now, I may come at it from a place of curiosity to see what else is going on. I may go, oh, this is interesting. It's feeling better to me, but obviously you're not feeling better. So something's not worked the way we expected. Let's work together and try and find out what that is. And I might examine things that they could do that may be different, but I would also examine myself. I'd also look and go, did I get the treatment right? Did I get the diagnosis right? You know, did I miss something? Is there something else I could do? Maybe they just didn't respond the way I expected and I need to do something that's outside of my standard thought process, my standard framework. That is what an experienced, mature and healthy practitioner does. Who isn't entitled. Now, I'm not saying this to trigger a bunch of people, and I'm sure many of us think that we're not entitled, that kind of thing, but. But I want you to have a little stop and think. When you have your next patient who doesn't respond the way you expected and is expressing some sort of disappointment or dissatisfaction or general unhappiness that they thought, oh, by now I thought I'd be here, and I'm not, I want you to just pause for a moment and just notice what's going on inside you. Are you looking for a way out? Are you looking for an easy way to end that conversation where you're not to blame, because that's where this entitlement comes from. It's usually a front for actually some sort of fear or anxiety or insecurity inside. I dealt with that for a long time. I still carry some of that now, but because I've acknowledged it, I can see where it's acting and I can catch myself before I start to act entitled and put it on the patient. So let me hear from you, though, because this is something that a journey I've been on, and certainly a lot of the chiropractors I've coached have been on similar ones. But that doesn't mean this is true for everybody. Have you caught yourself feeling entitled before? Do you think that I'm just being really unfair here and that's ridiculous? Do you think there's a good way to try and encourage patients to look at their own behaviors as to what might be contributing to it? Is there a way that you go about it that's maybe a bit different that doesn't put the blame on them? Let me know in the comments below. Hit reply to this email and I'll chat to you soon. Otherwise, I'll see you for another video next week. Take care.