Ep032: Competition as a Mindset with Sachin Patel

Welcome to the Perfect Practice Podcast where we share the most innovative strategies to help you build a successful functional medicine business, attract your ideal patients, serve your community, and get paid what you're worth. Each episode is packed with practical steps that you can take to immediately grow your influence and serve more people. Our mission is to share golden nuggets from successful practitioners, technology experts and innovators from around the world. Your host, Sachin Patel is a functional medicine success coach, international speaker and best selling author. He's calling in all his favors to bring this information to you so you can create your perfect practice.

Hi and welcome to Perfect Practice. I'm excited for today's podcast topic because I'm going to be discussing something that really impacts many, many practitioners, especially starting out and you know, as somebody who's been in practice for almost a decade now in the functional medicine side of things, strictly running a functional medicine practice, I can see why somebody who might be coming in new to this space might view us as competition to their own success. Or in the past, I know I've viewed others as potentially being competition until I shifted my mindset. And so that's what I want to talk about today is competition is a personal viewpoint, Competition is a mindset. And so I want to shift today what that conversation in your own head surrounds around the word competition. Okay, so here's the thing. I don't view anyone as competition. I never have. I've always kind of hated that question. Because when you're competing with somebody, then that means you're trying to build exactly what they've built. So competing, in my opinion, is copying. And copying, in my opinion, is commoditizing. So the moment you start competing with somebody, you start commoditizing. What you have to offer and what you do at an unconscious level is you feel like you've got somebody else that you're competing against, when in reality, the only person you're ever gonna compete against in your whole life is you. So that's the only person you should be competing with. Are you a better version of yourself today than you were yesterday, this week, than you were last week, this month, and this year better than you were last month and last year. That's the only competitive mindset that you should have. The only amount of energy that you throw towards that word competition is to yourself. What you want to use is other people who are successful in your market, who are doing well, who are helping people get better. You should be happy about that. You want to use those people as inspiration because they demonstrate to you What. What is possible. They demonstrate to you opportunity. They demonstrate to you that they've done it, which means you can do it. And you can probably do it a little bit differently than they can, which I'll talk about in a second. But you might even be able to do it better than they can. And you can certainly coexist and reach the same levels of success as they can in the line of work that we do. And it's kind of unfortunate, but maybe we're all working towards changing that, is that there's no shortage of sick people. Okay? I pray for the day that I wake up and you wake up and we've run out of sick people to help get healthy again. And I also want you to understand the applications of lifestyle and functional medicine go far beyond unhealthy people or people who are struggling with their health challenges. You can apply the things that you know to healthy people as well. So really, you have 100% of people's attention, because everybody, to a certain degree, to varying degrees, cares about their health. Okay? So I want you to shift that competition mentality. Focus it on yourself. You're only competing with yourself. Use others in your market. Use others who have accomplished great things in your industry as inspiration. Now, your goal, ultimately, is to always focus on being the best and most authentic version of. Of yourself. So if you, let's say, work on thyroid patients and the person down the street works on thyroid patients, well, you know, some people who have thyroid conditions may not like working with that individual. They might like working with you better because they might relate to your story better. They might relate to your circumstances better. They might relate to your personality and your vibrational energy better. So don't feel like you have to compete with others and replicate what they're doing to. Because certainly I can assure you that not 100% of people who have the problem that that person solves and you might solve, not 100% of people of them are signing up with this individual and going under the care of this individual. There's people that go to this office and don't sign up for care or may not have cared for the practitioner or the process or the services that were offered. And so that's always important for you to know if somebody has great success in your community. There's also a lot more people that are framed and trained to think and look at things a certain way, but may not resonate with that person and not for anything personal. It just could be something about their energy. It could be something about the process. It could be something about, you know, anything, it doesn't really matter. Just be yourself, be your most authentic self and let people connect to you. You know, I asked this question quite often, which is in life you have to choo between wanting to be the bee or wanting to be the flower. And at first it's easy for us to get caught up in the bee mentality where we've got to buzz around. It's a lot of work and it's a very short lifespan versus being the flower. The flower is where all the bees are attracted to, right? The flower just has to be its beautiful self. So that's what I want all of you to focus on in your practices is how can you become the best version of yourself? How can you be inspired by the success of others? Because here's the thing, if you can feel inspired by other people's success, then when you achieve success, you will realize at least the capability of inspiring others. But if you view people who are successful as competition, then when you become successful, which you may not by the way because of that attitude, but if you do become successful, then you will view others as competition or you will view others as viewing you as competition and vice versa. So it's really important for you to recognize this pattern and break this pattern. It's a mindset pattern. It's a scarcity mindset pattern. And you know, use those who are successful, use them as inspiration. That's an abundance mindset. Okay? What I would also encourage you to do is if there's somebody who's highly successful in your community, develop a relationship with this person. Because guess what, there's people that they simply can't help. There's people that may say no to them and at least they have an alternative person that they could refer these individuals to and that person could be you. Okay? Develop a relationship with this individual. Find out what they're doing that's working. Give them ideas on how both of you can elevate the entire market and elevate your entire community. So unlike a donut shop who's selling coffee or donuts, you know, we're not competing for a commodity, we're competing for a service. If you and a relationship so very critical for you guys to recognize this, it's also important to realize that the people that are attracted to you, who come to see you, those people you want to build a healthy relationship with. Because practices are not really built on marketing. You can start a practice by marketing it, you have to, but you really build a practice, a long term business based on the relationships that you have with people. So you're going to connect with people on a different level than that other person might, the person who, who you may have been viewing as competition. But if you develop a relationship with them and you develop a healthy relationship with your patients because they're the right fit for you, because you're being your authentic self, then you have a practice, Then you've got an actual business, so to speak. Now, one other thing that happens is when you have a competitive mindset, you vibrate at the wrong frequency. You vibrate at a frequency that might be unattractive to patients who are trying to get healthy. Your space should be a place of healing and health and happiness. There shouldn't be any competitive vibration in your space, and you should not be emitting that either. You should be happy also to refer other people to other practitioners in your community if you truly feel like they're a much better fit for that person's practice process or their personality. And what I also want you to realize is that when you're studying your inspirations, so to speak, and studying people who have success, recognize that unless you have the full story, life isn't all sunshine and rainbows for people. I never want to give the clients that I coach the perception that what I do is easy or what they're going to have to do is easy. There's going to be situations that come up. It's all about how we handle these situations. And. But there are things that are gonna come up. So recognize that with the success that people have, they've probably overcome a lot more hardship than other people have. So you can pretty much rest assured that the people that have the greatest amount of success are the people that have overcome the most number of obstacles. So in order to want success and recognize success, you also have to recognize the challenges that this person may have faced. Okay, now, one thing that is super important to also recognize is that you don't want to study your competition. Like, don't try to replicate everything that they do. Don't try to replicate the copy that they write in their ads. Don't try to replicate the ads that they might be running in a magazine or the newspaper or their posters or their website. Like, be your authentic self. It's super, super huge. And the more energy you give to studying your competition, if we want to still call it that, then the more energy you take away from being the best version of yourself. You might be doing yourself and your community a huge disservice by using certain people as your inspirations. So you always have to question the whole picture. You have to look at the whole picture and actually ask yourself, what about this person inspires me? What about this person makes me want to replicate and be happy for their success, and then replicate it by being my best and most authentic self? So I hope this gives you some perspective. I hope that you're able to connect with local providers in your community. I hope that you build relationships with these individuals, and then you build healthy, amazing relationships with your patients so you can build a thriving practice. You know, really approach these individuals as inspirations. Instead of competition, change that mind frame. Go from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset. And if you've already done this, that's awesome. I hope that you can share some of the success that you've had as a result of that. But for those of you that are, you know, kind of concerned you're starting out your new practice, you might still be in that competitive mindset. Just eliminate it completely. What I want to leave you with is this understanding that, you know, we view nature as competitive, but nature is not competitive. Nature is continuously cooperative and transformational. So what we view as life and death is actually transformation taking place. So it's important for us to reposition things in our mind when we study nature. We don't want to take things for face value. And I'll share this really cool story with you. There's a tree by my house. It's a beautiful tree, and it's dying. So it's going to be, you know, it's probably a couple hundred years old, honestly. And I know it's dying because some of the branches are starting to create problems and they're falling off. And I also know it's dying because there's reishi growing on the trunk of it. And that's a sure sign that this immune system of the tree needs help. And the tree, you know, I use the word dying just so you have a frame of reference, but it's not dying. It's transforming. It's transforming to its highest self, and it's transforming to a higher vibrational frequency. It's transforming the tree into reishi, which is a healing medicine. And so amazing things happen when we get rid of this competitive nature, move to an inspirational nature, and we realize that, you know, nature is cooperative, nature is transformational. It's not, you know, all about death and decay. It's about transformation. So I hope that there's something in here that I said that helps you transform and elevate to your highest self. And I hope that you turn your competitors into your source of inspiration and elevate yourself to the highest, most authentic bar that you can. Once again, this is Satchin. I hope you're doing super awesome. I hope your practice is allowing you to treat yourself right and treat your patients with the utmost respect and authenticity and help them get the results that I know you're capable of and the results I know they deserve. Thank you and I'll see you on the next podcast.