Continuing on our theme of sustainability in practice today I wanted to address the issue of education. A well-educated group of chiropractic consumers are a delight to work with and they set the scene for a stress free, enjoyable and sustainable practice that produces great results and significant shifts in humanity.
In order to educate anyone on anything there are some fundamental pre-requisites. Firstly, your primary thought needs to be that the person already knows the answers and your job is to drag them out of them. You must know what want the person to get and you must know where you and they are at right now. To use and extreme example, if you know that you want a person to learn about your latest holiday you first need to find out if they speak your language. If you speak English and they don’t then you will have to plan an appropriate way to convey your message. This requires that you go into a language and means of expression that they understand, not only what you understand. This is where many chiropractors come undone in their quest to educate their practice members. This leads to assumptions being made as to the uneducatability (sp) of their people – “they just don’t get it” is the usual reply.
Remember that if you desire to move people across the chasm of paradigms from an allopathic mindset which may include the notion that something is broken and it needs to be fixed to a way of thinking that we have all the resources within and it’s a matter of regaining appropriate structure for function to resume under the guidance of the innate drivers then there are some huge leaps in logic that are required.
Education of practice members must be conducted in a well thought out and strategic way. The internal marketing design is critical in this context so make sure that you layer the chiropractic message in for your people in a drip feed way. They can only accept small amounts of information of the type that doesn’t fit with their current paradigm at one time.
Go easy on the information dumping and use pattern interrupts and challenges to their thinking so that they go away and mull over the issue and come back with what is a new idea for them.
Always shoot for an expanded viewpoint of what chiropractic is and how it can be applied to their circle of influence.
