hello everybody and welcome back to the podcast. Welcome to the next episode of the Informed Chiropractor. This is Dr. Don MacDonald, your host, and we took a break for the summer. We wanted to take a little hiatus. If you've been following the podcast for any time, you realize that we've done this every year.
We like to do it for multiple different reasons. One is just to take a break. So we take a break from all of our seminars. We take a break from all of our coaching and we usually just like to relax golf. And just rejuvenate and we'll talk a little bit about that today. But it's just as far as the polyvagal theory goes part of it is we always need to look after our physiology and our nervous system so that we become as strong co regulators as possible.
And we I say this over and over again until I probably kill the message, but it is vitally important, and that is the, we call it the boring success. The boring consistency that just helps you to create that success in practice is it's just always being consistently regulated for your people so that you become predictable.
And when you're predictably, when you're predictable, people trust you because they know that you are a safe place for them to go to. Whether they're in a good state, whether they're in a bad state they can always know that you're going to have their best interest at heart and you are going to be in that calm state.
Sometimes if we're like not looking after ourselves or our health has been put on the back burner and we become a little bit short, a little bit less focused we might be. Worried about something else in the office, and they can tell that we're not 100% present. People pick up on that. I've talked to a lot of practice members that have come into my office, and the reason, one of the reasons they would leave the other chiropractor's office is that they know the adjustments were good.
They liked the chiropractor. They just felt like they were just starting to go through a routine and they were not present. With them in the adjustment, and then they just felt like it was just like a there. There was the lack of connection. And so we know from our work with the polyvagal theory that if we are in a state of threat.
Neurologically not consciously. What that does is that will automatically turn off our social engagement system. And when our social engagement systems off, we cannot connect with our people. And so that's why it's so vitally important for us to look after ourselves as chiropractors so that we can be always there, co regulator and be strong for them.
So that's one of the big reasons that we take the summer off. Unfortunately in Canada, our summer hasn't been that. Amazing. The last few summers, it's been warmer, but it's been super smoky. Eastern Canada has taken over all the smoke, so they've been on fire the whole year, but we've just been like really spotty weather.
I think we've only golfed about three or three times, I think in Alberta this year. We've golfed in bc which was amazing when we went there in July too. We love our place, predator Ridge. We love to go there. Every now we've moved it to the second week of July. And the weather was amazing. We also golfed in Palm Springs this year for our birthdays.
That's when we went down there and that was, the weather was amazing, but we haven't really golfed. Half the times we've canceled our our tea times and then the times we did go, it was rainy. So we feel a little bit chipped out from the fall weather, but that's just what happens when you live in Canada.
The other thing is that we've been we have a new chiropractor that has joined our team, which we're very excited about. Him and his fiance are going to be coming or his fiance is just finishing up school and she'll be joining in the practice as well. And many of you know that they'll be like taking over the practice, which means that in a couple years we will be, or a year we don't know exactly the timeline is that we will be transitioning out of.
A full-time practice in Edmonton. And then we are gonna go somewhere else. We don't know, so we'll put the word out there. We might go to a school we might go practice in Europe. We might go, we'll still practice, or I'm always gonna be practicing. But. We just might do it in a different area.
I think we've just had enough of the cold winters that we will be going somewhere else, so that will be, we're leaving that up to the universe. Brandy's been very good at teaching me that something will come. I'm always been like that chronic planner and so it stresses me out a little bit, but.
It's going to be good. So that's what we're looking forward to. And as we have a brand new grad in the office it brings me all back to the basics. So it's very cool because I've actually written down my whole flow of adjusting what are my priorities like? And then once you set that up we need to get our chiropractors to do that and then come back with questions or see what the feedback is from the practice members.
Because at this point we're just training him up so that he can be basically locum from yet first. Because we're still traveling quite a bit with seminars, but then also the more he gets to know our people as they purchase the practice, they can take over from us as well.
That's what's gone on in the summer, and so I'm very looking forward to getting back to the podcast and and we're also getting back out on the road. And so today I just wanted to talk a little bit about whether you're in Canada north America in uk we are heading into the fall.
And whether you're down in Australia or New Zealand, we're heading into the spring. And the funny thing is we always say we crave predictability. Like our nervous system craves predictability. But if every single thing in your whole life is predictable that also stagnates growth. And so we always have this conversation with people that don't fully understand.
The polyvagal theory, and I think we talked about this last time, is safety is neurological safety, which just means that your body feels like it's okay in the present moment. That doesn't necessarily mean we're always trying to. Predict everything in our life or have everything perfectly predicted in our life.
Because if everything's perf perfectly predicted, we don't have to like we have nothing to stretch ourselves with. So the nice thing about going into the fall or the spring, depending where you're at, is that the season automatically forces change. And whether we're in North America where people are on their summer holidays and now they're going into getting the kids going back to school and they're going from unstructured to structured that is a stressor on our practice members.
And so the more we're prepared to to, to deal with our. Our stressors and our rejuvenation coming into the next season the better we're able to help our practice members. 'cause if you're anything like me talking to a lot of our parents in the practice right now, they're like, they can't wait for the kids to go back to school because they are tired of them being at home and they're looking forward to get back into routine.
They're looking forward to having that predictable routine. And so this also just brings us back to our practice and just making sure just as a practical tip for the practice, we want to make sure that, like I said, from the time they come into the door, to the time that they leave, that things are laid out in front of 'em.
There isn't things that surprise them things that startle them. We want to try to make sure that we're always upfront with all of our people. Basically making sure that, they're always introduced when they come in the front, they're always, they go through the same flow.
They're always greeted by the same presence as the, from the chiropractor. The care is fairly similar. Again, we don't want to just be rot and routine, but they know that they can fully trust you because they know that the. The nervous system is able to accept your adjustment. And so that's why it's really focused, important for us to focus on being regulated ourselves.
And we always gotta remember that the co-regulation happens without words. So that power of that co-regulation is all dependent on you. We are we are just getting ready to go to Amsterdam the first weekend of September, and we are putting on another Ignite Mastermind. And what the Ignite Mastermind is it's, we've done it more in a gr group format in one day.
And this is to go over a lot of the key points that we cover in our 90 day mentoring, the one-on-one, and, the 90 day mentoring, of course, it takes 90 days and it's like a quite of a process where we're talking to people, to chiropractors daily through Voxer, and we're trying to re reproduce this in a one day event.
And one of the key things is pruning, and this is also very important as we get into the next season, is that we have to kind, and again, I'm, I really need to do this because I always start to just think of ideas and I start adding things to my day and I start adding focuses and I read new books and I get new ideas.
And so I just keep adding all these ideas and. Then what that ha what that does is it actually blocks me out from doing the key foundational things that, that, that make my practice and life successful. And one of the big focuses we do at the beginning of the mastermind is just really go through and prune out the stuff that is not getting us to where we want to go.
So many times we've just started doing stuff because we thought it was a good idea or somebody else thought it was a good idea or we just stopped doing things because. We've had too many other things going on that's, that are irrelevant. And we always need to clear the clear space. The universe, hoards, abhors a vacuum.
And so if we create more space that allows more things to come in, into our in our world, which is like super helpful. That's always, I say too with our our young chiropractor who's oh, now that I'm, if I'm covering you, I have to see some higher volume, so I have to make sure I speed up.
And and so I was saying often we don't need to speed up, we just need to. Cut out the irrelevant stuff and we just get down to what is the most important adjustment I can do right now? What is the biggest thing I can do at this moment to help get that nervous system into regulated state? Am I being aware of the physiology of the person on the table so that I know that they're in a physiology state?
They're in a kind of a more of a state of ease and their physiology and and then. And then we know we've done a really good job, but if we like get distracted, I'm a Oilers fan in Edmonton, they start talking about the Oilers. I get off track, they start talking about stuff that I'm important.
I start to get off track. And so it's always just focus. Focus. I always laugh because the Rock used to always have on his Instagram page when he was training for some of his movies, he would always be doing the leg press or something, and then he'd just yell focus. Because I think just in general as chiropractors were so open and loving and love to like.
Think of all things and learn new information, that we just get so distracted that we just need that that something to pull us back into our focus. And coming into the September, that is very much important for us because we will know just our practice members will, sometimes they'll go on a holiday and they stop all their health routines and then all of a sudden it's two or three months later before they get back on track.
Our whole goal is we want to close that refractory period. And so we want to get back to doing the important things that are gonna move the needle in our practice right away. Just to give you a heads up we have I've already done the interview, but Dr. Kelly Holt from the New Zealand College of Chiropractic is gonna be on the next episode coming up.
That's gonna be very exciting. We talk a lot about this stuff that's going on at the New Zealand College and stuff with research and artificial intelligence, which is amazing. The next interview will be Dr. Peter Alinger, and he'll be joining us at our super conference in Toronto. On December 6th.
So you can find information on that on our website at theinformedchiropractor.com. And we only have, I think, six spots left, so it is filling up very fast. We had to actually make some more room 'cause it already sold out at the current state of affairs. So we'll be really looking forward to that. And then one thing we're gonna be doing new this year because we did put a post out and we got a lot of.
A, a feedback from is called Healing the chiropractor. And there's a lot of chiropractors out there that are suffering in silence. Every time we go to a seminar in different places, we find chiropractors that either have injuries, they have like stuff going on with their health. They're a little bit embarrassed to talk about it like that.
We again, we need to be healthy in our own right, in order to be good co-regulation. And so I think the 17th of January, we haven't had the information up. We're gonna do a program called Healing the Chiropractor in Phoenix. And it's basically a mastermind style. We do that kind of we do the Ignite where we just have a limited amount of chiropractors there, except the Ignite is more business and life focused. And then this is more health focused where, you can get adjusted whatever's going on for you. We have hope you had a great summer or winter in Australia and we look forward to seeing you on the next episode in a few weeks.
