The majority of people come to see you initially driven by what they WANT. It may be pain or disease of some other ‘problem’ that is impinging on their life and giving them pain or distress of some sort. As we have discussed previously the apparent WANT (symptom, sign, annoyance etc.) is not the real reason – it’s usually got something to do with the inconvenience factor associated with that issue and their life’s activities.
Anyway, the fact is that the person WANTS you to get them back into their normal life so they can keep doing what they have always been doing.
You, on the other hand, have a burning desire based on what you LOVE. This usually takes the form of your passion for chiropractic and its benefits. It may be a vision for the person living a life that incorporates chiropractic as part of their healthy lifestyle. It may even be humanity living free of subluxations contributing to a world full of people expressing their optimum potential.
So, there’s a pretty big gap between these two scenarios.
The bridge between what they WANT and what you would LOVE for them based on your vision for them isn’t really that difficult to navigate. Although your vision for them and what you can deliver is often far bigger than the limited expectations that they have for themselves.
There is a step-by-step approach to navigating this.
Let’s firstly state what it isn’t. It isn’t about educating the person about what you do and what chiropractic is. Often chiropractors find themselves in front of their people shooting themselves in the foot because they are trying to educate the person to a ‘better’ way, the chiropractor’s way, the way that they LOVE. They waste time and energy in talking about their favourite topic – Chiropractic and usually venture into all sorts of technical details on the spine and nervous system and their favourite techniques, just to confuse things even further.
This is not what people NEED.
They don’t care about how much you know or how your way is better than what they have done before.
There are some key concepts that a person NEEDS before you get to lather them with the topics of your LOVE. The process of supplying what they need is a simple but profound process.
When your practice member really gets that everything that has happened to him/her in their history has a direct effect on their present state things start to change. If they get that the journey of their life so far has produced everything that they now have then their question starts to shift from what they WANT in the moment to what they NEED to do in the future.
From this point on they will then be in a position to reason that unless they do something different they will continue to get what they are currently getting. Based on this viewpoint they will be open to entertaining a plan to go beyond their immediate WANT and consider what they NEED to do to get them engaged in the next stage of their journey of life in a different way – a way that incidentally includes chiropractic.
This model is what we have termed the ‘Journey’. It is simple, it is elegant and it is effective. It helps you communicate to your practice members the concept that they come from a place of health and they can return to a place of health as long as they do something different in the future to what they have always done in the past.
Have a look at the Journey Resource Pack if you are interested in your practice members getting what they NEED.
