January 2002

The Fear of Failure

by Mark Radermacher, D.C.

President of Total Practice Management

            Dr. Radermacher has been a chiropractor for 22 years and has been coaching some of the largest practices in the country for the last 14 years.

A significant scourge many chiropractors suffer is a fear they produce for themselves; this is the fear of failure. The fear of failure presents itself in a multitude of flavors. Regardless the type of fear a chiropractor produces, the end result is some type of failure in practice. Levels of failure range from persistently irritating to frighteningly devastating. The most popular fear today is fear of the truth.

            Truth be known, many chiropractors fear the responsibility they have to succeed; they fear telling patients the truth; they irresponsibly lie about managing money; and they fear change. Becoming a successful chiropractor requires more than being able to adjust patients well. The truth is, a chiropractor must be responsible enough to succeed. Every stage in practice requires different responsibilities. When first opening a practice, a novice chiropractor is responsible for meeting people. This can be done with lectures, screenings, advertisements in the newspaper and direct mail (just to name a few). A novice chiropractor is responsible for confidently expecting people to become patients. Instead, many chiropractors fear that people in “their” town don’t want chiropractic and don’t have any money to afford chiropractic even if they did want it. Initially, this fear is periodically irritating and then becomes persistently irritating. After a period of time, the fear of a chiropractor who has convinced himself that people neither want nor can afford chiropractic races to the level of frighteningly devastating. The chiropractor accelerates the level of devastation by counting the weeks of money he/she has left before the practice becomes insolvent.

            A veteran chiropractor, one who has been in practice for at least a few years, is in a different stage. His/Her responsibilities include “keeping the place going.” This chiropractor still has some patients tell him/her they don’t need and can’t afford chiropractic, but by and large, his/her problems are different. He/She has fatigue problems, boredom problems, staff problems and money problems. Levels of failure for him/her usually remain in the persistently irritating level. If he/she remains in this level long enough, he/she’ll burn out. Burn-out numbs a person to the point he isn’t really frightened, but he/she can still become devastated. Devastation doesn’t necessarily mean going out of business. Devastation can simply be defined as despising practice and all that goes with it.

            Many chiropractors fear telling patients the truth. A novice chiropractor fears that patients won’t believe the truth about their health and chiropractic. They also fear the truth of the law of financial fair exchange, and they often play “Let’s Make a Deal” with the patient. The truth is, a patient must understand health and chiropractic and must pay for the care in order to appreciate it. Starting bad habits in practice, like not telling the patient the truth, will develop a pathetic, free-for-all, energy-consuming practice that will ruin most chiropractors.

            A veteran chiropractor will sometimes fear telling patients the truth for different reasons. If a chiropractor has not developed his/her communication skills, he/she will replace skill with energy and attempt to develop friends instead of patients. He/She fears telling patients the truth because it simply requires too much effort. The veteran chiropractor will go through minor phases of dropping statistics to the point of threatening office profitability, but he/she is rarely sincerely worried about going out of business. He/She is more worried about quitting practice by consciously “forgetting” to come to the office one day. Fearing to tell the patients the truth can lead to devastation and a type of failure in practice. This occurs when a veteran chiropractor degrades him/herself to the level of a “chiro-actor;” he/she is then running a business just for financial gain.

            When money is brought to the table of discussion, all too often the truth is swept under the carpet. The novice chiropractor is often consumed with the fear of money. He/She regularly and thoroughly bathes him/herself with the fear of how much debt he/she is in. With the typical $100,000.00 in student loans and the mistake of having over-spent in opening the office, many novice chiropractors fear the truth of having to pay everything off while simultaneously meeting professional and personal overhead. The veteran chiropractor is quite different. He/She has feared the truth about money for so long, he/she develops a strategy to deal with it. The strategy is to lie about money. He/She lies to other people about how much money he/she earns and has. And, perhaps worse yet, he/she adds much more debt, perhaps attempting to make his/her original debt seem insignificant. Catapulting from $150,000.00 in debt, upon opening a practice, to $1,000,000.00 or more in debt only takes five to ten years for most chiropractors. The lie penetrates even deeper. The veteran chiropractor who ignores the truth about money buries him/herself in so much debt that he/she often charges more when a patient has insurance and hires associates to “work the practice” in order to earn more money. Whereas, not admitting to the truth about money is frighteningly devastating to many novice chiropractors, to the veteran chiropractor the journey is usually persistent irritation. And, as long as he/she doesn’t get caught doing something too far out of bounds in his/her billing games, the veteran chiropractor will sputter along. He/She’ll earn quite a bit of money, but because money is poorly managed, he/she’ll never have any of it. The majority of chiropractors could be debt-free and financially independent; unfortunately, only a few have and implement a plan that achieves this goal.

            The greatest fear of the truth also holds the key to the solution of most failure, this fear is change. The novice chiropractor quickly becomes paranoid to change. He/She is so fearful of making the wrong change, a change that could ultimately drive the last nail in the coffin of failure, that he/she continues to use organizational and communicative techniques that aren’t working. This chiropractor hears about or reads about practice success techniques and fearfully salivates over them. Ultimately, he/she collects a closet full of good ideas, but the closest he/she ever gets to using them is to dust them off in his/her dreams. All this novice chiropractor would have to understand is the concept that states that if a person does the same thing repetitively, then he/she can only expect the same end result. If, however, this person gets some help with practical ideas and a plan and implements the ideas, he/she can expect change.

            The veteran chiropractor fears the truth of change for other reasons. The main reason the veteran chiropractor thinks he/she won’t change is because he/she doesn’t want to exert the effort. Effort requires discipline and requires, in this instance, being in strong mental and physical shape. In reality, most veteran chiropractors can’t exert the effort required to change. Their state of mental and physical corpulence has progressed to the point of not being able to see their feet beyond their abdomen. The parsimonious argument they develop and cling to states that patients don’t notice that the doctor isn’t physically or mentally fit. Nothing could be farther from the truth. To expect a patient to believe the words that are coming out of your mouth while you stand in front of them presenting the antithesis to your words is a complete lie. Just as in the case of the novice chiropractor, change — not the fear of it — provides the solution to succeed. The veteran chiropractor knows there are better organizational and communicative skills he/she could develop. It is the extreme rut of bad old habits coupled with fear of expending too much effort to change that must be overcome. In most instances, a veteran chiropractor must first dramatically improve his/her physical and mental shape before changing much of anything in his/her practice. Once in shape, change can be enjoyed instead of tolerated. Getting in mental and physical shape requires incredible discipline and, the truth is, most chiropractors don’t possess this level of discipline. They will continue to plod along while contorting the truth masterfully, albeit to no productive end.

            The fear of failure is a scourge many chiropractors suffer. Fear is self-inflicted in most instances, but that doesn’t negate its potency. Novice chiropractors suffer the same types of fears veteran chiropractors suffer. Failure, of sorts, in practice is the end result for both novice and veteran chiropractors in many instances. The novice chiropractor often fails to stay in practice while the veteran chiropractor fails in practice by becoming numb while faking success. The truth is, the fear of failure is real but rectifiable. The fear of the responsibility to succeed, the fear of telling patients the truth, the fear of the responsibility of money and the fear of change can all be overcome. Understand that the fear you may be experiencing is self-inflicted. Instead of fearing the truth, face the truth. The truth is, you didn’t go to school to learn how to fail; you didn’t enter practice expecting to fail; and you can never attain a level of “veteran status” that precludes you from exerting the necessary effort to create change. Stop fearing the truth by realizing that the wheel of success need not be re-invented. Learn about better organizational skills and learn how to dramatically improve your communication skills. Then, be willing to change in order to live the truth that clearly exists. You can create the same opportunities to succeed that anyone else has. Whether a novice practitioner or a veteran in practice, truth and change-not fear and stagnation-rule the day.