Habits. Routines. It's how you get through most of your day.
When you stop to think about it, you will quickly realize that 90% of what you do each day is the result of an earlier formed habit.
From the moment you wake up until you go to bed.
Habits. Routines.
You brush your teeth using the same brand of toothpaste basically the same way day after day. Habit.
If you have breakfast, what and when you eat, for the most part, is the same as yesterday. Habit.
When you get dressed. How you dress. Habit.
The roads you drive to reach your office. The same day after day. Habit.
How you go about your workday from the smallest detail to the larger events. Habit. Habit. Habit.
You have hard-wired your brain to stay in the routine. Stay in the known comfort zone. No thinking out of the box.
What did you do differently yesterday, that was difficult, from every other time? Think hard. Bet you'll have trouble coming up with something.
We want to play it safe. We are lazy. We want to stay in our comfort zone. Why drive to work a new way when the existing way gets you to where you need to be?
Why put your left shoe on first when you've been putting the right one on first for the last 20, 30 or 40 years?
It's not easy to change even if you want to. Don't believe me? Well try it.
Try to change anything that has become a hard-wired habit to your brain.
So what? Why should you care and what do hard-wired habits have to do with your chiropractic practice anyway?
See if you agree with this statement.
If you do this week what you did last week, the results from this week should be similar to the results from last week.
Okay, do more of the same and you'll get more of the same.
Now that could be very, very good or very, very bad depending on where your chiropractic practice is in relation to where you want it to be.
Annual billing. Collection rate. Number of weekly patient visits. Number of new first time patients in the last 30 days. The list is endless.
If you are happy with the number of new patients you saw last month, do more of what you did to get them and the odds are pretty good you will see approximately the same number of new patients this month.
The problem is many of us wait for divine intervention to right the sinking ship.
But if the truth be told, if you change the effort the results will change as well.
Turn the steering wheel on the car and the car heads off in a new direction.
The same is true about every aspect of your life including your chiropractic practice.
Where do you start?
It's truly quite simple.
You need to sit down with a legal pad and pen in hand and make two lists.
Everything you are happy and satisfied with and those things that you are not happy or satisfied with.
Happy with the way your teeth look? Then why bother changing the toothpaste, the brush or the way you go about brushing.
When the two lists are done (personal and business lists) set the happy list aside for now.
We can always improve upon the happy list but we'll save that for another day.
We have an unhappy list to tackle first.
Now take the unhappy list and rank the items in order of the unhappiness/satisfied factor.
Most unhappy about goes on the list first. Then rank them till you ranked them all.
Remember, everything on the list has been happening because of habits or routine, procedures that you have refused to change.
To get you warmed up you may want to start with changing a small habit first. This will start to get your hard-wired brain unplugged and free to create new ideas.
Maybe start by driving to work a new way tomorrow. Think it's easy. Try it. And then try it again the next day.
Studies have shown that any action you repeat for 30 consecutive days has an excellent chance of becoming a new habit. Out with the old – in with the new.
After you've tackled some of the easier ones on your unhappy list, you may want to move on to the bigger projects like the size and profitability of your practice.
Again, the concept and procedures are the same – same action, same results, different action, different results. Will the different results be better or what you want? We don't know until we try but they will be different.
If different effort produces unacceptable different results, we move on to different effort # 3 and so forth.
Thomas Edison had over 1400 “failures” while inventing the light bulb. So you have a long way to go before you can throw in the towel.
So if you realize and agree that 90% of your day is doing things that are hard-wired in your brain and that for the most part we are all lazy, comfortable and afraid to fail, then you are well on your way to changing your life to whatever you want it to be.
And remember, as hard as it is to start a new habit, it's just as hard to break an old one.
So when you get it right, and you will get it right, if you don't quit before the ‘Thomas Edison 1400 attempts', then your new habits, your new results, your new life will be with you forever.
Happy teeth brushing.
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Are Hard to Break 
