I was recently interviewing a “chiropractor of the month” for our On Purpose tape series. She is also a Total Solution graduate and runs a very successful practice in Georgia. We got on the topic of what it had taken to build her practice, and she communicated to me that she had gone from zero to 250 patient visits per week in her first week. After I picked my jaw back up, my reflex interrogation was, “What did you do? How did you make that happen?” I knew that these were the wrong questions as they were leaving my mouth. My experience, after consulting with thousands of chiropractors, tells me that success is a consciousness and not a procedure. Give me a room with one hundred chiropractors in it. Let me teach them all the same procedure. Have them all execute it the same way. They will get one hundred different results.
Don’t get me wrong, extraordinary procedures are vital to a successful practice. Without them, a practice has no staying power and the practitioner burns out. But, extraordinary procedures void of a consciousness of success and purpose will not build a dream practice. Incidentally, when I asked the chiropractor above who saw 250 visits her first week how she had done it, she replied, “ I worked as an associate for years in a practice that saw over 1,000 patient visits per week. When I started my own practice, I didn’t expect it to be any other way”. It wasn’t her procedures as much as it was her consciousness, which created her expectations, which created her reality. It is procedures that will continue to bring her consistent, rewarding, low stress results. It is consciousness that creates the practice in which the procedures can be used.
Chiropractic is a consciousness before it is anything else. It entails a critical philosophy that creates a mindset that directs thinking and actions and provides purpose—purpose being defined as the object for which something exists. This consciousness, which provides purpose, is the very foundation on which a human life is built. Mediocrity and failure come from an undefined, contradictory philosophy, which leads to a muddy consciousness (mudhead), which leads to a lack of purpose, which leads to a constant state of survival, no matter how good your procedures are. Success, wealth, and reward come from a well defined, non-contradictory philosophy, which leads to clear consciousness, which leads to a powerful sense of purpose, which leads to a constant state of success and perpetual, never ending improvement.
For the past several years, success consciousness has been a serious cultural trend. Companies like Nightengale-Conant, Successories, and so on, are testaments to this. Unfortunately, many self help gurus have their followers try to create a success consciousness through hype and psychological means. This leads to short term benefit and, indeed, the person applying such techniques may end up in a less desirable self-circumstance due to the roller coaster effect. When you try to improve yourself based on psychological hype, you typically end up with an “adrenalin high” which is short lived and drops you hard. This creates a phenomenon I refer to as the “self help junkie”. It is kind of like people who spend their whole lives going from diet to diet, always losing weight when they start the new diet, gaining it back, and then going to the new diet, hoping for a better result, and ending up having the same experience. In chiropractic terms, these types become seminar junkies. The signs and symptoms demonstrate that the afflicted go to seminar after seminar, get pumped after each, the practice goes up for a short while, and then drops, until the next program. Don’t get me wrong. I love seminars and lecture at over fifty a year. An appropriate experience, though, would be a continual qualitative and quantitative change in your practice and personal experience as a result of attending these programs. If you are not improving or, worse yet, if you’re burning out, you are working from the wrong model and wrong consciousness.
If you are trying to deal with issues on a psychological, rather than philosophical, level, you are dealing with effect, rather than cause. This creates the “junkie’s” dependency. Psychological emotions are secondary to interpreted perceptions, which are the primaries. In other words, it is your perceptions, filtered through your philosophical constructs, which result in your emotional responses. Many people share a common experience, yet may end up with very different emotional responses. A certain event may occur, and one person may be thrilled, another horrified, and a third indifferent. The event is the same. The perception of it, based on individual philosophies, may be different, thus, leading to different psychological experiences. Therefore, if we start developing ourselves on the psychological level, without first addressing the philosophical level, we may end up in a rat’s maze. I’ve consulted with a lot of chiropractors who find themselves there. Each new technique that gets them to “change their emotional state” just sends them down another blind alley.
In summary, in order to develop a success consciousness, one must start by clearly identifying ones philosophical premises without contradiction, develop a long-range conceptual purpose (which only humans can do), and then experience the psychological and spiritual results. The cleaner your philosophy, the greater your experience and rewards. There is a great trend toward self-improvement and expanded consciousness. Without philosophy, it’s all smoke!
A 1983 graduate of Life College, Patrick Gentempo, Jr., D.C., is co-founder and CEO of the Chiropractic Leadership Alliance, in Maywood, NJ, and co-creator of the Total Solution program. An internationally renowned chiropractor, lecturer, and consultant, he has helped thousands of chiropractors achieve success and balance in their lives. For information about CLA seminars, products, and services, call 800-285-2001, or visit www.subluxation.com.