Click here to download the transcript.
Disclaimer: The following is an actual transcript. We do our best to make sure the transcript is as accurate as possible, however, it may contain spelling or grammatical errors. We suggest you watch the video while reading the transcript.
Hello, and welcome to Empowering Women in Chiropractic. I’m your host, Dr. Cathy. And today, we’re going to talk about putting your oxygen mask on first, perhaps you’ve been on a plane and you’ve heard the flight attendants tell you if the air mask drop from the department above, be sure to put yours on first, before trying to help other people. Well, you know what? That lesson should apply to every aspect in life, because the reality is, if you don’t take care of yourself, you’re less capable of taking care of everybody else. And if you don’t put your needs first, you become less capable of taking care of everybody else’s needs. So let’s talk about the top five mistakes that women chiropractors make and how you can start to correct them. Now, listen, number one is not putting your healthcare needs first. Not making yourself the top of your priority.
And ladies I’ve been there. I know you’ve been there. We’ve all done it. We’ve got babies. We’ve got practices. We’ve got little kids who are growing up to be big. Kids are growing up to be preteens who are soon going to be teens. I get how it’s so easy to put everybody else’s needs first, but guess what? If you’re not taking care of yourself and making your health a priority, you become less and less capable of doing all the things that you’re able to do. Now, if you’ve listened to this show before, and I know that you have, and I thank you so much for joining us every week, right here with Kyra secure, then you know that I love to talk about sharpening your ax and sharpening your ax means if you’ve been out in the woods, chopping wood and chopping wood and chopping wood, eventually you start to get tired and your ax gets dull.
And most people, most entrepreneurs, most women chiropractors that I talked to, we don’t take the time to rest and sharpen our ax because in our mind, there are so many things that need to get done that we can’t stop. We can’t take a break. We certainly can’t rest. We just have to keep going because the list will just keep getting longer and longer. And if you have ever been in that situation, you know what I’m talking about, where the list just seems like you can never get it all done. And then there’s more on it the next day. So if you’ve been in that situation and you’re chopping wood and you’re chopping wood and you’re chopping wood, and the ax is getting dull and you’re getting tired, you’re actually going to have to work twice as hard to get half the results. This is a hard one ladies, but you’ve got to stop.
You’ve got to take arrest and you have to sharpen that act so that when you come back to it, you’re way more effective. You’re way more energized. Your ax is true, or your blade is sharper and your results are way greater than they would have been had you not taken arrest. So one of the things that I made a priority in my life is that Christmas new year’s every year I shut the practice down and I make that a time to recharge up here. I’ve got to be in the sun toes in the sand, right drink in my hand, because I have to reconnect to what makes me feel alive so that I can get back in January and serve when the people need it the most, because that’s when they’ve all created their new year’s resolutions. But the one year that I didn’t do that the whole next year suffered because I didn’t make my health and myself a priority.
So I know that there’s mornings where you’re going to be up all night, because you’ve been nursing or changing diapers or changing sheets. And who knows what else? And then those days you might feel like I just can’t go to the gym, or I just can’t make a healthy meal, or I just can’t get motivated to dance around the house. But you know what? Those are the days that it’s most important when we’re serving and serving and giving and giving and loving and loving and doing, and doing for everybody else. Those are the days that we really have to stop, make ourselves a priority. I recently stopped homeschooling my kids, which I’d done for seven years and let them let them start in going to public school. And the first Tuesday that I didn’t have to run around with my hair on fire and stressed out and trying to get it all done.
I really didn’t know what to do with myself. And so my staff has jokingly relabeled my Tuesdays as to me Tuesdays, because that’s the day that I give to me. That’s the day that I do things for me. That’s the day that I make all of the crazy wild experiences that I want just for me a priority. And I’m going to urge you to do that for yourself because when you make yourself and your health a priority, you have more energy, you’ve got more vitality. You feel better, you’re functioning better. You look better when you look at yourself in the mirror, which makes you want to do more. And don’t discount the fact that looking good makes you feel better about yourself. And I’m not talking about Barbie doll. I’m talking about when you’re able to make the time to put yourself together, you’re going to feel so much better.
So number one, I think of the top five mistakes that most women Chiros, chiropractors make is not making your health a priority. If you’re not doing that right now, then think about the five aspects of health. And most of us have talked to patients for years about the five aspects of health. And I call these the dream lifestyle that’s D for diet or for rest E for exercise, a for attitude and, and for mental impulse. And that should be the base. It’s a big triangle. And I want you to make these things a priority in your life daily exercise. You’ve got to move your body quality nutrition, making sure that you are eating good foods that grow to fuel your body so that you can go out and serve others. And making sure that you get that positive mental attitude so that you can get through your day, minimize your stress, have a good quality restful night of sleep, and then make sure that you yourself are getting adjusted.
And that brings me to the second one. And the second mistake that most women make is that improper posture during their adjustments. So when you’re delivering the M for your other patients, right, that foundation of that triangle, when you’re delivering your adjustments, not using proper posture is going to set you up for a lifetime of discomfort. Eventually dis-ease eventually crazy symptoms, pain things that may prevent you from being able to practice. So think about how you’re doing your cervical adjusting. Are you rounding your spine and hunching over to bend down to patients? Do you need to use a stool or do you need to elevate your table for the cervical adjustments? Or could you just get down into a really good, really powerful, effective squat position? Me personally, I like to get down and squat because I want to use the muscles and I want to get down there low.
And I want to keep my spine in a great position while I’m putting their spine in a great position. So think about the techniques that you’re using. If you’re doing side posture and you’re using your wrist in some weird abnormal position that I know you were taught in school, but maybe isn’t the most effective way for women to adjust. Then rethink your adjusting position, because I don’t want you in this weird position. That’s going to blow out your shoulders, blow out your elbow, blow out your wrist puts you in pain and eventually shorten your career. I want you to use a position that utilizes the body of your patient, utilizes their size, their mass, their body, to get them into a better position so that you could do minimal stress on your body. And when you learn how to start adjusting in ways that protect you guess what?
You can adjust bigger patients, you can adjust more patients. You can adjust for more years and you can continue to function for a long time. One of the things I’ve always said to my female students and the female doctors that I’m very privileged to mentor is that you are going to adjust patients that are twice your size every day for the rest of your life. Now, whether you practice with a spouse or a male partner, or, you know, some male chiropractors, the majority of them are not adjusting patients that are twice their size because they’re typically bigger than we are. And so when they’re adjusting big patients, they may be equal size. They may be a little bit bigger, but for women chiropractors, the majority of our patients may be twice our size. So we’re not using our body properly and using better ergonomics and using our joints in a way that’s going to protect them and maintain them for the long haul, rather than putting our bodies in a position that’s going to injure us.
Then we’re setting ourselves up for a shorter career, greater levels of pain, more discomfort, possible disability. And we don’t want to do that. So that brings me to number three. And that is, you’ve probably seen people do it. Hopefully you have it. That is trying to muscle through an adjustment. And if you know what I mean by that, that’s where you’re trying to force an adjustment. And you’re trying to push all your muscle to try to get something to go rather than lining it up and letting it go with these. I use the example of a child trying to bang the square peg into the square hole. And for women, if we line that square peg up into that square hole, it goes every time the adjustment slips through every time the bone can go back into its position. Every time if you’re using proper line of drive, you don’t have to use a lot of force line of drive speed, not too much force that bone is going to go where it needs to go every time into its natural set point.
However, if you’re that big bully of a kid and you’re trying to take the square peg and put it into the round hole, it’s not going to fit unless you bang the living daylights out of it and try to force it in. You’ve had an adjustment like that. I know you have, I have to. And that’s the person who doesn’t use line of drive. Doesn’t use proper speed, uses a lot of force. It hurts your body’s going to guard, or the patient’s body is going to guard. And they’re going to muscle that adjustment in which isn’t necessarily going to give the patient the relief that they’re seeking. And it’s definitely not going to be a positive impact on their nervous system. It’s going to be an, an insult on their nervous system. So don’t try to muscle that bone and get really specific with the adjustment that you’re delivering.
Get really specific on your line of dry. If you haven’t worked on your line of driving, you just taken it for granted. And you’ve noticed that lately upper thoracics are getting harder to move lower thoracics. You’re, you’re having challenges with some of your patients, cervical. Sometimes they’re not going, it’s probably your line of drive. And if you, if you want that BJ picture, that, that great, great picture where he shows the line of drive of every segment and you don’t have it, or you can’t find it, just reach out to me and I’ll send it to you because I think it’s a great teaching tool. And what I do is use straws with my students and aplastic spine to show them those lines of drive. Because if you get that right, the bone goes and you don’t have to muscle your adjustment and muscling the adjustment.
If you’re a hundred and a hundred and fifty, a hundred eighty two hundred pound woman trying to move at two hundred and fifty two hundred eighty three hundred pound patient muscling, it is going to set you up for failure in the long haul. It’s not going to make you stronger necessarily. It’s going to make you overuse muscles and joints and set you up for failure. So I love for you to get more specific on your line of drive and do you use proper body positioning for yourselves so that you can deliver a great, great adjustment now, number four, on the top five mistakes that so many of us make is saying, yes, when you should say, no, it’s taking on too many objects or opportunities or charitable events or voluntary events. When in reality, you should be saying no or delegating tasks for many, many years. I okay. Everything in the office and by oversaw, I should actually say I did everything in the office.
I know you’re there or have been because we’ve all gone through that phase where every single thing that went on, we assume that if it needed to, to be done, it needed to be done, right, right. If it needed to be done right, then we needed to do it. And there’s a time period where you do need to do it because you need to create your own systems and policies and procedures in your office. So you need a hand and in that, but you also need to hand it off. And when you hand it off, it might be a little bit scary because now you have to wonder, are they going to do it exactly the way I want it done? And if not, then I’m just going to have to do it anyway. So it’s double the work. So I might as well just do it.
But the longer you hold onto that mindset, the longer you will continue to do, do everything and not delegate to the people that you’ve brought in as part of that, your team to help you out so that you could focus on what you need. You do best and allow other people to learn, learn how to do things to the standard you want them done so that they can do those things the best. Right? And delegating can seem hard for a lot of, a lot of people, a lot of driven people, a lot of type a leaders. We still want to do it, even though we want to lead other people, we want to do it because we want to make sure it’s done, right. But let me tell you something, the minute you learn to let go and delegate to other people, you freed yourself up to do the more important things or the more meaningful things or the things that really make your heart sing.
So learn how to let go. And, and one of the exercises that I’ve shown a lot of my students is grip as hard as you can, whether that’s the steering wheel or a pen or a water bottle or a book or whatever it is that you’re holding onto the checkbook or the billing software disc or whatever it is that you’re holding onto. So hard grip it so hard to the point where you start to tremble and then learn how to let go. And that freeing feeling is just amazing. It’s kind of like, do you remember being a child and standing in a doorway where you’d kind of like push your arms against the doorway as hard as you could, and you’d count to 30 and then you’d walk out of the doorway and your arms would just effortlessly float up. That’s the feeling when you learn how to say no or delegate tasks to other people, it is freeing.
It is releasing all that tension and that stress and that effort and that hard work that you’re doing that you may not need to do because the minute you need to learn to let go, there’s a saying, let go or get dragged. And sometimes when we hold on to every single task in our office and we don’t let go, and we don’t delegate, we get dragged down by the paperwork or by the, the insurance or by the billing or by the things that we don’t want to do. Maybe that’s exams. Maybe you want to hire an exam doctor, but learn to delegate the things that are not top on your priority and allow someone else to do those for you so that you can accelerate and do the things that you want to do to grow your practice and improve your quality of life. That brings us to number five and number five, ladies, I want to tell you, I’ve been there.
I’ve worked with women who’ve been there and that is not investing for your future and not developing a practice that is worth selling. And what that means is you look at what’s in front of you today. You look at the bills today, you look at what you want to pay off today. You look at what you want to have financially or materialistically in your life today. And you forget to look at 5, 10, 25 years down the line, and you may not be setting your practice up as one that somebody would want to come in and buy, because if it’s completely based on your personality and it’s not based on any kind of systems, or it’s not established in the community where somebody would say, well, that would be a valuable business to own. If it’s just based on what you like. And that’s good, I’m okay with that.
But it’s not based on how do I grow this practice for the long haul so that it becomes a saleable practice. Then you’re not setting yourself up with a retirement or an exit strategy. So maybe that means working toward eventually owning your own building. Maybe that means working toward eventually bringing in other associates that or independent contractors that can help establish the practice, or maybe it just means bringing in people that can keep the practice running while you go off on vacations or go take care of family issues or go take care of personal desires, but something that sets the practice up where you are not dependent on bending over the table every day, every just to be able to afford your lifestyle. So set yourselves up in such a way that you can step back and breathe or take a little time away from the practice or minimize your hours, or be able to go and travel and do the things that you love, or spend time with your family set yourselves up in a way that allows you to live an extraordinary life.
And if you’re not already investing in yourself, then take a little bit of money. It may not be a lot in the beginning, but take a little bit and put it away. And the more regularly you do that, just a little bit, all the time is way better than throwing one big chunk. Once in a blue moon, just a little bit, learn how to invest in yourself, seek out people who can teach you how to do the things that you don’t know so that you can really, and truly produce the life that you really want. Because reality is if we put our oxygen masks on first, if we make ourselves and our needs a priority, we’re more willing to make other people a priority when we feel fulfilled. And I’m talking about self fulfilled. When we feel fulfilled in our role, as women, as leaders, as doctors, as mothers, or spouses or daughters, or aunts or nieces, whatever roles that we fulfill, when we feel truly valued in those roles, then we feel a desire to go out and serve other people.
And we feel more on fire for life, more energized to go out and share the abundance that we’re so blessed with. So make sure that you’re making yourself a priority and make sure that you care for yourself so that you can and do want to care for others. Now, I’m going to give you three quick tips, because I want you to have a self care routine that really works for you. And those three quick tips are when you start your day, start your day with something that matters to you, it may be yoga. It may be cardio. It may be meditation. It may be reading. It may be gratitude. It may be just going in the shower and singing out loud with the music going and the water going. And nobody coming in, whatever makes you feel alive. Start your day with that every day, make it a non-negotiable make sure first and foremost, you start your day in a way that honors you second tip mid day, stop.
What you’re doing. Find time to reach out to someone, speak to someone, compliment someone, share something of value with someone, motivate, inspire, educate, or empower someone else. Because if you make that a daily habit in the middle of your day, guess what it refreshes that for you. It reinforces that for you, and it keeps you in that mindset. And my third tip, cause you only need three tips to get through the day, morning, noon, and night. And my third tip is end the day in a way that honors you, whether that’s cardio, whether that’s relaxation, whether that’s sitting outside under the stars and just gazing out at the universe and dreaming about all the possibility and potential, whether that’s raising a glass to the sunset or dancing away in the late night hours with your kids, like I love to do. And the music’s blasting all over the kitchen, whatever it is that honors you to celebrate the day you just had because every day is a cause for celebration.
Trust me yesterday, I turned 50 and fabulous and I am so excited and on fire and invigorated for everything that the world, the holes that I’m going to go out and grab. And I want you to feel the same way. I want you to enjoy your career change lives and make a positive impact on your community and all that. You are blessed to speak, to touch and reach in your lifetime and be able to do it with the grace, the strength, the power, the health, the energy, the vitality, and the vibrancy to go on and face every single day. Like it is a party and a celebration that you have been invited to every day. So ladies go make this a fabulous day, go celebrate life. And I thank you so much for joining us. And I look forward to seeing you the next time that I get to host this wonderful show, empowering women in chiropractic, and we’ll see you next time.
Join us each week as we bring you the best in business growth, practice management, social media, marketing, networking leadership, and lots more. If it’s about women in practice and business, you’ll hear it here. We hope you enjoy this week’s Facebook live event. Please like us on Facebook comment and share. We look forward to seeing all of you next week for another episode of empowering women in chiropractic. Now go ahead and hit the share button and tell your friends and colleagues about the show. Thank you for watching. Have a beautiful day. This has been a ChiroSecure production.