The One Mistake I Keep on Making

Foreign. And today I'm going to share one of the biggest mistakes that I actually keep making in my career. This is not a mistake that I've made once. It's one that I've made many times in different contexts. And I wanted to share a lesson that I've had to keep consistently learning. So this is not me saying, hey, here's one thing, I did it and everything's great. This is me sharing an ongoing process and something I'm still working with. And really this all centers around a conversation I had with a coaching client I've been working with recently. And we were talking about how he was feeling quite overwhelmed. There's a lot of things he was trying to do. And it became very, very clear very quickly. He was trying to do way too much with his patients. And it reminded me and I shared with him my experience of going through a similar thing. And after I reflected and I thought, yeah, I've gone through this more than once and I continue to go through it sometimes. So I wanted to share the three sort of phases that this has happened to me so far and what I've learned through that. And this is relevant for whether you're a brand new graduate or you're a clinic owner with a whole bunch of associates or anywhere in between. So the first phase for me is really very early on when I graduated. You know, you know what it's like you have the imposter syndrome. You feel you've got to have all the answers and be an expert. Suddenly being paid a professional wage and you don't have the safety blanket of tutors. People don't know that you're a student, that you're new and you're trying to appear way more confident than you actually are. And the mistake I made there was that I thought I had to have all the answers no matter what came up. So if a patient brought up another health issue, I would jump in there with some sort of half formed opinion or if they asked me a question about something, I felt like I had to know it. And, and then if I said, you know what, I'm not sure they would suddenly realize, Chris is a fake. He doesn't know what's going on, he doesn't know what he's talking about, and you know that that imposter syndrome would come real. And fortunately, over a couple of years I learned that actually you can say you don't know and that's absolutely fine. Hopefully the problem they're coming to with you at least have some of the answers and if you're qualified as a chiropractor, you do, so don't worry about that. But if they come with another issue, it's perfectly fine. And I more and more say, you know what? I don't really know. That's not my area of expertise. I may have a bit of an opinion, but I will tell them, if I was in your shoes, this is probably what I would be thinking. This is what I might suggest if a friend or family brought that up. But really, this isn't my area. So not trying to have all the answers, trying to fix all the problems myself, actually became much more relaxing for me. I got to drop that imposter syndrome a little bit. The pressure wasn't on. And I saw that, if anything, patients respected me more and trusted me more for saying, I don't know. So feeling like you have to try and do everything yourself with every problem they bring up, you don't need to do that. So eventually I learned that lesson and, you know, I thought things were doing fine, and I was. I've learned it, and I don't have to worry about that. And then after a few years, I realized I kind of needed to learn it again in a different context because I then I'd started to feel like I was kind of overwhelming my patients sometimes with lifestyle advice or I was throwing too much at them in terms of technique. And realizing after a while I reflected, I'm trying to do everything about this problem, so I'm not trying to fix all the problems in their life. I focus down to the ones that I know I can help with. And they've asked for help, but I'm trying to do all the things. So I'm throwing a bunch of diet advice at them. I'm giving them advice on how to sleep, sleep better, on how to decompress, on how to exercise differently, how to change their routine, you know, all these different things. And probably doing way too much in terms of treatment, trying to do all the soft tissue and all the rehab in that session, whilst adjusting, whilst assessing, whilst giving advice, you know, and I was overwhelming a lot of patients. I realized one in particular, because I was giving a lot of this advice, she assumed I followed it perfectly. And she asked me once, she said, I've got to ask Chris, what's your advice? Because. Because you don't smoke, you don't drink, you don't eat sugar, you know, you don't have carbs or gluten, you know, you don't. You don't have any unhealthy Snacks, you exercise well, you don't have caffeine. And as she's saying this, I sat there going, I do nearly all of those things because I talked about them a lot. I'd seem like I was getting, you know, I'd obviously come across as a little bit preachy because she assumed I hadn't done any of those. So that was kind of a wake up call for me. But also realizing that I don't have to fix every patient's. The asp, Every aspect of every patient's issue. So realizing I don't have to do it all myself, I could then start to refer out. And I've actually found a lot of people worry with referring out. You refer to another practitioner or another clinician that, oh, the patient will leave, they'll go see them. My experience has been the more I refer out, the busier I have been, the more patients, trust me. I have several patients who I've referred to four or five different practitioners over the top working with them. And if anything, they're worried about me feeling like they can't come back to me. They will be checking like, you're still my chiropractor, right? Like, I can still come back and see you. And I'm going, yes, like, of course I can help with this aspect, but these people are experts. I might give you some basic advice here to signpost you, but if you really need some help with your diet, like, I'm not the guy to help with that, but I know somebody who is so building a network and not trying to address every element of the problem yourself, that made a big difference for me. So clinically, that was sort of the second phase. And often, if you've been out a few years, that's where you may find yourself. The last one, and this is something that relatively recent for me is we've been mentoring most of the chiropractors who nearly all, in fact, who join our practice start as new graduates. Many of you will know me from the PRT program leading the communication module. So I do a lot of work with new graduates. It's a passion of mine. And the mentoring aspect is something I really love. But something I learned only a handful of years ago is I came to realize, you know what, I'm not the best at teaching everything. Now, obviously, communication, that's my jam. That's my thing. That's what I put loads of effort into analyzing and deconstructing and working out. Why does this work? Why doesn't that work? What am I actually doing here? When the patient has that response. So I can teach that very, very well. And obviously I've put a lot of effort into doing that over the years for many other chiropractors as well. But certain things I'm not great, particularly adjusting. I'm not a very good adjusting tutor. I like to think I'm a good adjuster because all Cairos do, but I do it quite instinctively and it's not something that comes naturally to me, especially if I'm treating somebody who has a very different build to me. Their mechanics are different. It's very hard for me to know what they should be doing rather than me telling them, do it like I do it. So not trying to teach them everything, not trying to do it all myself. Now, when a new graduate comes to see us, one of the things we do straight away is we find an adjusting seminar for them to go on. And I will recap that with them and I'll help them where I can. But I will say I'm not an expert in teaching adjusting. These people are, instead of spending loads of time and energy not doing a very good job at that. I will outsource that. I will pay for you to go see this person. They'll learn way more. And frankly, the amount of time I could have spent doing that is worth so much more to me than the cost of a seminar or the accommodation or whatever the small relative amount it would cost me to do that. So for those of you who are clinic owners, have a real hard think about, are you doing too much and are you trying to do everything yourself when it comes to either training associates or running a practice? Do you need a practice manager? Do you need somebody who you can delegate more work to do. You need to bring somebody on to do the payroll. Heck, do you need cleaners? Like, it doesn't have to be a great big thing. It's just looking for areas where you think, I'm not great at teaching this, or I'm not great at doing this myself, or I don't particularly enjoy it. If there's any frustration, have a think about how you could maybe offload that, how you could find somebody else to do that. Something I do more and more now is going to clinics and working with clinic owners to train their associates in communication. Because it takes a lot of time. And if you don't have a curriculum and you don't know what you're doing and you know you haven't done a lot of that before, it's often very hard to know what that associate needs, needs so if that's something your associates are struggling with, we can have a chat. If it's a good fit, we might be able to do some help there. If it's other areas, maybe you love teaching them the patient management and communication, but like me, you struggle with adjusting or the assessment or the rehab. You know, there's plenty of experts out there who teach this stuff for a living. So for those of you who have a bigger team, who have your own practice, sit down and think, am I trying to do everything? Are there maybe some areas where I could outsource this or do delegate it, spend a little bit of money, but get a lot more energy back and get a lot more time back potentially as well. So to sum it all up, the lesson today is, are you trying to do everything yourself? And if so, is there a way you can try to outsource that? Whether it's with a patient, you can outsource to dietary advice, you can outsource the exercise, you know, whatever it might be? So don't try and do everything. So don't be like me, sort of recovering perfectionist and workaholic who's trying to do way too much, because trust me, it just leads to stress. And if I didn't recognize that when I did by now, I could quite easily be burned out. And I don't want that for you. The world needs way more chiropractors already. There's not enough of us. So I want us to have really long, fulfilling careers and be the best for every patient that we can be. So if you need some help, reach out. If you're struggling with something and it's not communication, but you just want some advice, you're not sure where to turn, just drop me a message. I've probably put more people who've reached out to me for help in contact with other coaches than I've taken on myself. If it's something else that you might need, there's plenty of people I may be able to signpost you to as well. Or if it's just you just need some advice. There's plenty of us out there. Colleagues and chiropractors generally love helping each other. So that's today's message. Do reach out if you need anything. Don't try and do everything yourself. So hope that's helpful. Hope that resonates for you wherever you're at. And as always, anything you need, just drop me an email. Take care, guys.