How To Avoid “Rejection”

Hey, everyone, it's Chris again. And today I wanted to talk about dealing with rejection. How we handle it when a patient decides not to take up our care or decides to finish early or maybe decides just not to follow our advice. Now, this is based on some advice that I got personally from a coach recently in another area. And I really like the way they put it. It actually helped me to think about this differently. And the key lies with this word rejection. And I was using this in a different context, and the coach kind of challenged me to say, okay, can you think of a different word, different way of looking at this rather than you're being rejected because somebody's maybe not following the advice that I was giving them and challenged me. And I went away and I thought about it, and I was like, well, maybe maybe they're missing out, or maybe they're choosing not to. Maybe they're opting out. And we came back and had a little chat. He suggested something I thought was really, really great, where he said, look, when you have people that you're working with and they decide not to follow your advice, not to take you up on something or not to really make a change you think would be helpful for them. So instead of thinking of it as rejection, he said, here's what's actually going on. They're avoiding change, and they're avoiding change because change is difficult and change is challenging, and you're offering a change to somebody, and they're not ready for that. And that really struck all I thought, yeah, that's completely true. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized this really applies within chiropractic as well. When you make a recommendation to a patient and they don't take you up on it, it's because you're offering them a change. And change is new and change is scary. And a lot of the time, people would rather avoid change. And it's very easy for us as clinicians to go, oh, well, they just don't want to get better, you know, oh, they didn't do the exercises. They didn't stick with the plan. They just don't want to get better. And, you know, some of us will experience that as rejection, like, oh, they didn't trust me. And others will actually experience it as rejection of the patient and go, well, that's on them. And while there's an element of truth to both, depending on how you look at it, really think about it as, what's happening is they're deciding that right now what you're offering is. Is A bit too challenging for them, whether that is to come in for treatment, whether that is to increase the water they're drinking, start to exercise, start to change their diet, lose some weight, and before we start getting on our high horse and go, well, they just don't want to get better or beating ourselves up and going, oh, they don't trust me. I want you to think about a time that you had to make a change or you wanted to make a change, but you put it off for a while. Maybe that was a change in lifestyle. Maybe you knew that you should be tidying up your food or exercising a bit more or drinking a bit less, but you put it off for a little bit. Very few people I know have to make a lifestyle change and do it straight away. If any of you have ever smoked before, like, full confession, I used to smoke. You know that quitting smoking is the right move, but you put it off and put it off. So it can be things like that. It might be a relationship that wasn't working out, maybe it was an old job that you felt like you ready for a change or. But you put it off because making change is scary. So we have all done this and we've all avoided change. So when you have a patient who is avoiding change, I want you to think about that and just bear in mind that you've probably done the same as well. And it's not because the person who suggested it was wrong. You know, I didn't keep smoking for several years because I was rejecting people who told me that it was better. But equally, I wasn't smoking because I didn't want to be healthier. Yeah, anytime you've made a lifestyle change, you wanted to be healthy, but the change is scary. You've got to get over that barrier. So think about this with your patients. It will allow you to come at it from a more empathic point of view. That doesn't mean that you let them off or you have to like them. It just means you have a better understanding of what life is like in their shoes. And certainly don't take it personally as this person's rejecting you. They're really just looking at the offer of change you're providing them and offering them with and saying, no, I'm not ready for that. And if we take it personally, we'll beat ourselves up. That's the path to burnout. And if we reject them, what we actually do is take the opportunity back and remove the possibility for them to go, you know, what, few months down the line. I think I'm ready to explore that. If they feel that we've rejected them, then they won't come back. So avoiding rejection? Really, really think about this. It's about the person avoiding change. And maybe right now that's okay. Maybe that's not the right move for them at this moment. Maybe they're just not ready. And if we can show them that we understand they're not ready right now, without us feeling rejected or making them feel rejected, then we've opened the door to longer term change and possible improvement in the future that might not be there otherwise. So have a think about that. As always. Any questions, anything you're not sure about, just give me a shout, drop me an email. I'll be more than happy to chat. All right, Take care of.