The “Chiropractic Life-Cycle”: How new and experienced DC’s can avoid burnout & frustration

Hey, everyone, it's Chris. And today I'm going to talk about a really key concept for avoiding burnout and frustration and for helping develop the skills you need to succeed throughout your whole career. This is valid whether you're a new graduate just starting out, whether you're an experienced chiropractor with a few years under your belt, know what you're doing, or whether you're a clinic owner, particularly if you're looking to employ associates and employ new graduates. This is what I call the chiropractic life cycle. These are the steps that we all go through from graduation throughout our whole careers. The first two steps all of us will do, but often it's actually the later step that some of us don't do so well, and that can lead to bigger problems for the next generation of chiropractors as well. So with the life cycle, for those of you who've been out for a little while, you know, experienced chiropractors or new owners, I want you to cast your mind back to when you first graduated. You'd had your year at clinic at university, and you've come out into the big wide world and you're very aware that although you know how to be safe, that's what university is really good at training you to do. You don't actually have a huge amount of skills. Your skill set is pretty small. And you know, there's all these other things that you need to learn to do in order to become a competent and effective chiropractor. You need to diagnose, you need to know how to treat, you need to get better with your adjusting, you need to get better, even things like letter writing, obviously communication is a really key first step, being able to build trust with those patients. What hopefully happens over time is that as you get that experience, especially if you've got a good mentor, hopefully you start to build on these skills and your confidence grows and you expand out and you develop the skills necessary to become a competent chiropractor. Now that skill set has grown, you have those basic skills. We can always grow and develop further. I'm a big believer in lifelong learning, but after a few years out, hopefully you're in this stage here where you know you're getting results, you're seeing you can help patients and you're making a difference in their lives. The imposter syndrome's quieting down as well, because you're not freaking out, thinking at any moment they're going to see that I don't know what I'm doing, and For a lot of practitioners, this takes several years to develop and we're always growing this circle a bit more. But what will often then happen is you've been out a few years and you think, right, I've got this, I know what I'm doing. I, I might have been working for somebody else at the start, but now I'm going to set up on my own and I'm going to set up my own clinic, I'm going to set up my own business and, you know, take my life into my own hands. And what you rapidly then find out is that there's a whole other set of skills required to be an effective entrepreneur. So a whole other set of skills to being an effective business owner beyond just being a chiropractor. Now you've got to budget, you've got to deal with taxes, you've potentially got to deal with employment, training, staff, dealing with the back end of things, all the systems. You've got to find new patients because they're not being handed to you now. So being an effective entrepreneur, there's all these other skills that you don't get from being a good chiropractor, and that's a whole learning curve. And that can take years, sometimes even decades to really develop the skills to become an effective clinic owner, an effective business person and entrepreneur, as well as an effective chiropractor. There's some overlap. I'm a little biased, so of course I'm going to say this, but I think it's mainly communication skills. But there's a lot that you don't get from being a good chiropractor here. And this can be a bit of a shock when you start out and realize, oh, practice isn't as easy as I thought. Sometimes we look back and go, I had it quite good as an associate. Maybe I didn't give my last job quite as much credit, but over time you build that and hopefully what happens is you become an effective chiropractor, an effective entrepreneur. Now you have your own business. And for some people, that's where they want to stop. They want to do a lone wolf thing, they want to do their own show. Maybe they have a ca, maybe they don't, but they're quite happy with these two skills. And that may be you, that's absolutely fine. But for a lot of us, what often happens is once we've been doing this for a few years, suddenly we realize we're wearing all the hats in our business and it's quite tiring a lot of the time, especially when you're the one who's having to treat all the patients as well, maybe at this point, you've settled down, you've started a family, you want to have some more free time to engage with loved ones, friends, and family. So you start looking for people to help out. And this is where many of us then go and decide to hire a new graduate or decide to hire an associate, somebody who can help treat the patients to free up your time. And that's where we discover there's a whole other section that we didn't prepare about here. Because if you're taking on an associate especially, but not always if they're a new graduate, even if they've been out for a few years, you've got to help them to do this, to do this growing, because if they've got all these skills together, they're doing their own thing, they're not going to come and work for you. So this is where we often take on new graduates, and we learned that as clinic owners and as employers. Now there's a whole other set of skills of mentorship. Now we've got to learn to be an effective mentor, because being good at this does not mean you can teach it. You know, being able to teach this and help and foster all these skills, I would argue that's even more work than learning to do it yourself, because you remember what it's like, how many things were going on, how much time, effort, and money you wasted doing all these things. Here you. You probably find you wasted a bunch of time and effort learning to be an effective entrepreneur. That's okay because that's how we learn from our mistakes. But helping mentor a new graduate hold of the set of skills, because you've not only got to be able to be good at teaching and diagnosing and treating and communicating, you've got to know how to communicate, how to do that well to this new graduate, who may have a different communication style to you, who may have a different energy, you've got to help take them under your wing. That's a huge amount of work. Now, our new graduates need that, and they need that mentorship and that support. And I can tell you that I've trained lots and lots of associates with us in our practice, but also throughout the whole PLT scheme as well. I do all the communication training for all the new graduates in the PLT now, and I love that. But I'm the first to tell you, I've gotten really good at the communication side of this mentorship. I'm not Particularly good at teaching how to adjust. Now, like most chiropractors, I, I like to think I'm a pretty good adjuster. I think my adjustments are pretty good. We all think that. Of course, I think it's true for me, but that doesn't mean I'm very good at teaching it. And I say to all our associates now, when they join us especially they come as new grads. I'm not the best at teaching how to adjust because I do it fairly subconsciously. I'm at that unconscious competence level where I'm good but I can't necessarily spell out how I'm doing it because of that. What I do, instead of trying to teach them that myself and giving them second rate mentorship is I've decided to remove a piece of this pie off my shoulders and essentially outsource that. So now when a new graduate joins us, I tell them we're going to send you on an adjusting seminar and we're going to pay for that to invest in you. Because the time I could be spending trying to mentor them and adjusting is worth a lot more than it cost me to send them on that seminar. Now, we are doing some as well and I'm actually learning to mentor them. It's quite nice. I'm getting together with my new graduates now and, and we're doing some technique practice. But they know that I'm learning how to teach them whilst they're learning how to do it themselves, which is nice, but it's not going to get them there very quickly. That's why I outsource that now. The communication is another huge piece of this pie as well. I would argue it's one of the biggest. It's probably 40% of what you need to learn in the first year to become a competent chiropractor, if not more. And it's something the new graduates really struggle with because they're on the spot when they communicate and you know what it's like. You've got all these skills, you're trying to manage all of them whilst you're trying to appear confident to the patient. That's a lot. And communicating that is really difficult. And mentoring, that is a challenge. So you've got a couple of options. You can try and do all of this yourself, try and take on that whole pie and spend a lot of time and effort investing in new graduates, doing all the mentoring yourself, that's absolutely fine. However, it does take up a lot of your time, which is one of the things you were probably hoping to get more of. When you took on an associate. So there is another option. If you would like some help with that, you can outsource that with the communication. Now, I'm going to be launching the Happy Patient project very shortly. It's an online course, a set of online learning for chiropractors, both new graduates, but experienced ones as well, to help them grow quicker, to develop more competent skills and to help them become more effective leaders for their patients. So that's something that you can do if you'd like to invest in them that way is rather than you do all the work here, I've done that work for you, I can deliver that to you. So that's an option that you have. I will very soon as well be opening up a few mentorship slots where I can actually take your new graduates under my wing and I can treat them as one of my own, as well as giving them access to the course, giving them that one to one support which new graduates often need to not just keep them accountable, but give them that support that then frees up your time. So you're not having to take on all of this work here. You're actually able to start enjoying all that free time as well. So of course the choice is up to you. Many people decide they want to do all this work, mentor them in every way, that's absolutely fine. But if you'd like some help with that, then get in touch. I'll be launching this very shortly and I can provide you with some more details. But whether you are a new graduate, whether you're a clinic owner, whether you're an experienced chiropractor or somewhere in between, hopefully that life cycle makes sense to you and you can see where the next step would be, where if you're a new graduate, it's just about growing these skills right now, it's about practicing them. And it will take you a few years to really get confident and competent, but it gets easier along the way. If you're an experienced chiropractor and you're thinking about setting up on your own one day, be aware that all the business acumen and all the entrepreneurial skills are not covered by being a chiropractor, there's a lot of things you'll have to learn and you want to try and learn that before you go and set up on your own. Because often we don't realize how difficult it is until we actually do it ourselves. And if you're a clinic owner, whether you have associates now or you're looking, looking to employ them, be aware that this mentorship section is huge. Because if that goes wrong, what often happens is the new graduates don't feel supported and they don't get the best start they want. I'm really passionate about new graduates and them having the best start possible. That's why I do all the work with the prt. That's why I create these online courses. But as well as that, the danger of the clinic owner is that if they don't feel supported and they don't feel like you're helping them and they don't feel like they're building as quick as they thought, they may leave. And you don't need me to tell you how much of a disaster it is when you take on somebody new and you invest a lot of time and effort in them and then they leave. If they leave within that first year, that's a lot of your effort and time down the drain. You've then got to start again and you know you've lost all that time, you've lost that year or whatever it was of trying to build up the clinic to get that help and support. So you have the freedom. So it's really important that you're aware of that, that the mentorship skills are not the same thing as the clinical technical skills. Being good here does not equal being good there. It takes more effort, it takes more time. If you'd like some support with that, with the communication, I'm here to help. If you'd like to do that yourself, absolutely. That's great. I think we should all be becoming effective mentors for our new graduates because that will help to grow the profession as a whole. So hopefully, wherever you are in that cycle, that's been helpful for you. As always. If you've got any questions, you can reach out. The Happy Patient project will be launching very soon, so if you're on my email list, you'll be getting an email about that next week. Week how you can take part with an exclusive pre launch discount. Otherwise, keep an eye on my Facebook page or join the Patient Centres Chiropractors Facebook group. That's the best place to find out more. That's where I launch. Lots of new exclusive content in there and you'll be the first to hear about the discounts as well. So I hope you're all keeping well. Take care and we'll chat soon.