Your practice as your teacher
By Angelica Redleaf, DC

If you want to be a successful chiropractor (and who doesn’t?), you have to have a good philosophical foundation and become a master technician. But success also requires you to be a student of life, people, and yourself.

And what can teach you these things? Your practice.

Here are a few things you can learn from your practice:

• The buck stops here. This is a major lesson around responsibility. Employees can blame someone — the boss, co-workers, or company policy — instead of accepting accountability themselves. But when you are in business for yourself, you don’t have that option. The buck truly stops with YOU.

For example: The only person who can stop a slow down in your practice is you. You are also the person who is responsible for the slow down. You have the responsibility to identify the cause and then to do something to correct it. It usually involves something to do with YOU.

• What happens, needs to happen. Only when “stuff happens” does learning occur. Instead of blaming others and feeling angry, look within and identify the “opportunities” for growth and change in yourself.

For example: If you seem to attract a certain type of difficult patient, ask yourself why. What can those difficult patients teach you about yourself, and what can you change or develop in yourself to make dealing with them easier?

• Patients give help as much as they receive it. Help is not a one-way street. You help your patients, but sometimes the tables can turn and they can help you, too.

For example: You may have a patient who has a health problem you are experiencing also. They may be more accepting of this health problem than you are and dealing with the health problem in a creative and more useful way than you had thought of.

Working with that patient can teach you how to accept things you cannot change.

• Good intentions are not enough. It’s what people perceive that’s the bottom line.

For example: You may believe you are putting your patients first, but if they perceive you as being greedy or self-serving, that is a reality that will affect your success.

Your practice can be your teacher, and each of us can be a better student of life if we keep that in mind! What is your practice teaching you these days?

Angelica Redleaf, DC, has been in practice in Providence, R.I., since 1978. She is the author of Behind Closed Doors: Gender, Sexuality & Touch in the Doctor/Patient Relationship (1998) and is an instructor on boundary training for ChiroEcoCE.com. She is also a consultant to state licensing boards and individual chiropractors and lectures around the world on the topics of sexual boundaries, ethics, and addiction issues.

Dr. Redleaf welcomes questions that may be appropriate to answer in this column. She can be contacted at angelchiro@aol.com.