172- Choosing Wisely: The Research of Performance and Association
11 Nov 2025 · 0 min
This podcast episode (hosted by Dr. Jeff Langmaid) explains research showing that who you spend time with—colleagues, mentors, and online contacts—can materially affect professional performance (claims of roughly +25% benefit or −30% detriment). The host gives practical advice for hiring and team composition, guidance for associates to choose nurturing practices, and recommends curating social media feeds to favor aspirational influences. The episode closes with brief health-related notes about loneliness and a promotional call-to-action for an in-person marketing event.
Welcome to the Evidence Based Chiropractor. Providing you with elegant and efficient research based content to help your practice prosper and succeed. Now get ready for a variety of dynamic communication tools designed for immediate growth. Courtesy of your host, Dr. Jeff Langmaid.
Hello and welcome to the Evidence Based Chiropractor. I AM your host, Dr. Jeff Langme. Today we are talking about research, but in a little bit of a different way. We are going to talk about the research behind performance and why it is so, so so crucially important for you to audit and monitor where you are spending your time and who you are spending your time with. And this is a fun topic. It's a good one. It applies to your personal life. It applies to your practice itself. Regardless of whether you have an experienced team underneath you, whether you are an associate or whether you in the process of growing your practice. This is information that I think can be really, really valuable to your growth and development. Before we get started, I'll say a few words about Rock Tape. Rock Tape is proud to be a sponsor of the Evidence Based Chiropractor and if you have not checked out Rock Blades Mohawk, be sure to do so. 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And as I said at the top, we are talking about the research behind performance today. And you probably heard the old Jim Rohn quote of you become the five people you associate with the most often. Not only is that true, but new research has started to showcase to us that you can have 25, 30% swings in your performance up or down, performance enhancement or performance detriment based upon who you are spending time with. So let's break this down in a few different ways. Cause I think it's really, really important to understand the concept from top to tail. Number one, this really, really matters. If you are in a practice, right? If you are growing a practice team members, the hiring that you do, the team members that you bring on, can have a dramatic impact on the other team members. Think about it. We spend eight hours a day at work. That's a lot of time. We're spending a significant portion of our day with the people that we work with. And if you have people on your team that are detrimental, that are negative, the research has shown that could affect the performance of your other employees by up to 30%. Pulling down their performance by 30%, that's staggering. Now let's take it the other way. What they've shown is that a great team can enhance performance by up to 25%. Now notice what happened there, right? There is more potential negative equity than upside. So you definitely don't want to be in that place. It is really, really important for all of us where we focus our time and our attention. And if you are searching out, spend time, time, you know, as they say, hire slow and fire quickly. I hate to even say the word fire, but it really, it's true. You want to make sure that you are picking out the people to have on your team. If you're growing a team and growing a practice very, very well. Because it can make a huge difference in the success of your practice whether you're able to keep your doors open. If Everybody's operating sub 30% of their ideal, you're just gonna have a tough time. Things aren't going to get done. But if you have everybody over and pushing each other by 25%, you're going to have just an absolute rock star office. And that's where I think all of us want to be. Now let's take that. If you're an associate, I know there's a lot of new docs that listen to this that might be in an associateship. This is really, really important for you as well. Those five people, who is the staff and who is that lead doctor in the practice you're in? Are they helping you? Are they guiding you? Are they providing a nurturing environment where you feel like you are growing both personally and professionally? Quite frankly, I know a lot of associates coming out, they might say, gosh, I didn't have a ton of options. I kind of went with this stock. I'm going to make a really, really bold statement and say, wait for the right place. Setting up those first few years of your practice, if you go into a negative situation and it stunts your growth early on, that that is a toxic place to be and you wanna do everything you can, even if it's taking side work outside a chiropractic to pay the bills, you wanna do everything you can to make sure that you are in a great position to grow, to grow personally, to grow professionally, to get a better understanding, to get fired up, but not just to get fired up for fired up sake, but getting fired up in a way that sets you up for success and gives you the tools and skills necessary to become the doctor and physician that you hope to be. If you're an associate who you spend your time with, and a lot of that time is gonna be spent in that practice is absolutely critical to your success later on in life. So keep that in mind, please. Even if you need to take hours in a different type of job, and even if you have to, I'm gonna go as far as to say, even if you need to volunteer or shadow in an absolute awesome clinic, get around those people, the people you'll meet through those people, the connections that you'll make, and ultimately the sk. The performance benefit will be far worth any hourly pay reduction or anything like that. As long as you can keep your lights on at home, get into a situation, get around people who help you grow and succeed. And finally, I think the lesson with this for all of us, regardless of whether you are a veteran chiropractor, whether you're an associate chiropractor, maybe you're even a student, doc right now is think about how much time you are spending online. So when we look at Jim Rohn and you know, the five people you associate with, it's who you become. It's 100% true. The research bears it out. That's what we've seen time and time again. The interesting thing is over the last 10 years, with the rise of social media, we're probably all spending an hour, two hours. Check your data usage on your iPhone and see how much screen time you've had. A lot of people probably plus one hour, plus two hours, perhaps even plus three hours per day on their phone. If you're in an elevator, if you're taking the stairs, whatever the case may be, a lot of times you pull out the phone, look at Instagram and look at Facebook. My question to you would be curate or statement would be please curate your feed if you are seeing negative content, content that's downing other people, other professions, other docs for that matter, all day, every day. That is not a place of growth. Just as the people that you surround yourself in your personal life, physical interaction day to day are crucial. Just as crucial is the ability to curate and understand what's going on in your feed. Are you going with, you know, perhaps. And it's up to you, right, whether you have your feed with people. Perhaps you admire or respect somebody like a, like a Gary V, like a Zig Ziglar, like a Z, I don't know, you know, it could be anybody depending upon your personality and what you're looking for. But when you're looking for, I would recommend look for those top five or six individuals. Maybe it's Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos. Follow the people that you would love to be around. Start understand how are they using the tools, how are they using social media, how are they looking at the world? Putting those positive vibes and those positive thoughts into your day will pay huge dividends as you go down throughout your career. Remember, we're talking about hours per day. At the end of the week, you could very conservatively be at six hours on your phone. That's just, you know, that'd be less than an hour a day. For many of us, that could be two to three hours per day if that's where our business resides as well. For, for the most part, we could be looking at 14 or 15 hours. Who are you spending those 14 or 15 hours with? What groups are you spending that time with? What individuals are you following? Because who follow in how you see the world through that feed will dictate how you interact with it for the most part. So if you have positive vibes only, so to speak, and you have inspirational things, you have people who you admire, people who you look up to, people who you think are doing a great job, and you surround yourself with that, it's far more likely is what we see that you will start mirroring those behaviors and you will be able to do that for somebody else. Whereas if all you see is starkey comments, all you see is negativity, all you see is destruction, all you see is discord, then that's going to feed into how you see the world and how you go about things. So I don't want this episode to be so frou frou, but it really, really, it's pragmatic and it's practical. Audit who you're spending time with in your life. Make sure they are positive influences. Make sure the people you are Hiring in your practice. If you're an associate, make sure the doctor's practice that you are currently in is helping you grow and succeed. Cause you're spending a lot of time and it's going to make a far bigger impact than you probably. And then the second component to that is be sure to look at your social feeds online. I don't care whether it's YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, whatever the case may be, check out all the platforms where you spend time on and audit it. Get people out of there that are bringing you down or who are not going to help you grow and succeed. Because what we see through the literature, what we see through the research is that there could be a performance swing of really up to 60% if you look at it from a positive aspect of it could improve your performance, the people you spend time with by 25% or, or it can detract from your performance by 30%. Those are the really the key take home messages for today. And now if we wanna go medical with it on just the tail end the last minute here as well. You know, feelings of loneliness as we've seen, can increase blood pressure, weaken immune system function, poor sleeping habits, ultimately shorter life expectancy and having a strong social circle can support positive mental health and reduce stress. That's what we're all about, right? We wanna be positive people, we wanna reduce the stress in our lives to make a bigger impact with our communities. I think one of the best ways that we can all do that, a proactive step we can all take, is to audit the people we're spending time with. Make sure that they are supporting your vision. They don't have to be clones of you, but look for people that are inspirational and aspirational to you. Get out, connect with them, follow them, and then see and watch as your life starts to take that slow, twist that direction. So be careful who you're surrounding yourselves with. And I hope that if you want to surround yourself with a bunch of really cool docs on this topic, come on down to Tampa June 7 through June 9 for adjust yout Marketing. This is gonna be an awesome event. This is about putting the right people in a room together, getting a lot of stuff done on marketing, building a marketing plan, building content, building assets, getting it all done. Not just the theory, but the actual things produced. And get it out there so you can build and grow your practice and also build an awesome network of super cool docs who are looking to do great things in their communities and in their practice. If that sounds like you, check us out the EvidenceBasedChiroPractor.com events. Again, the EvidenceBasedChiroPractor dot com events. I hope you have a great week in practice and I will talk to you soon.
We appreciate you joining us for this episode of the Evidence Based Chiropractor. Learn more tips for explosive practice development@the evidencebasedchiropractor.com youm can also join the Premier MD monthly membership, enabling you to use what you just heard to maximize results in your office. We look forward to providing you with more dynamic communication tools for immediate growth right here on the Evidence Based Chiropractor.
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