In the last article, Mindfulness for Chiropractors, I introduced and defined the concept of Mindfulness. I also discussed several ways to establish a practice of Mindfulness in your life. I hope you got a lot out of it. I also hope that you’ve started to meditate on a daily basis and that these practices are helping you function better in your life.
In this article I want to zero in on specific tools and exercises to help you bring a state of Mindfulness to your daily experiences in your practice. The goal with this article is to help you utilize your Mindfulness practice so you can be as effective as possible in your Chiropractic practice. Let’s jump in.
Be Your Best Self, Everyday
Being skilled at accessing a state of Mindfulness will help you be more effective in Chiropractic practice, in two broad ways.
They are:
- Optimizing your mental and emotional state for high performance.
- Calibrating your emotional reactions to adverse events.
Let’s briefly look at each one.
1. Optimizing Your State
Mindfulness is an extremely effective state of consciousness for peak performance in your practice. Training your mind and your spirit to calmly engage in the present moment will allow you to be in a very resourceful state for adjusting, teaching, consulting, public speaking, and leading your team.
Maximize Your Confidence
By cultivating a state of inner stillness, where you quiet your mental chatter and turn down your self-judgements, you will prime your ability to give your all to serving your patients and leading your team. Worry, negative self-talk, fear of looking a certain way will snuff out your confidence and can cripple your ability to be the leader you are meant to be. The more energy you give to your doubts and worries, the smaller you will play in your practice—and the less people you will help with your care.
When you start to doubt yourself or you negatively judge yourself, observe what is happening inside of you. Take a deep, slow breath to create distance from the judgment and just observe it. Don’t give any energy to it. Cultivate curiosity for why you are letting this negativity fester inside of you and then let it dissipate.
From there, move on to what matters: serving the person in front of you in whatever context is present. Your Purpose and your Vision for your practice are bigger than your self-judgments and internal worries. Optimize your inner state to rise above your obstacles.
A regular meditation practice allows you to readily tap into this skill in the face of challenges and optimize your performance. Observe your self-sabotaging patterns, acknowledge them, let them go, and put your energy into more constructive pursuits.
Be Ready to Act
Being in a state of Mindfulness in practice is not always about being calm, quiet, and serene. In fact, one can be fully engaged in the present moment in a grounded, open state, and at the same time be physically, mentally, and emotionally energized and activated. In many cases this combination of stillness and activation is ideal for excelling at your activities in practice.
Consider the following formula:
Inner Stillness + Activation (mental and physical) = Optimal State for Performance
The best performances come from a place of calm, centered activation. Regularly connect to your breath to ensure that you are activated, but not over-activated for your interactions in practice.
Let’s look at a few specific examples.
- It is particularly important to be in present-time consciousness for your adjusting performance. Tapping in to a state of inner stillness, ease, and flow will allow you to be fully present for the specific moment you deliver your adjustment. Your patients will feel the difference. They will connect deeply with you and experience profound breakthroughs—all because you have trained yourself to be fully present with them.
- Before you jump into a busy adjusting set, do a few repetitions of box breathing to slow your heart rate and center yourself. Get fully present in the moment. Combine a slow breathing technique with body scanning to ground yourself, connect to your internal flow of energy, allowing you to receive more information from your palpation. Drop-in to your body especially when you are making physical contact with your patients.
- Do a short meditation during your lunch breaks. Set up a quiet location in your practice to meditate before you start your afternoon/ evening shifts to generate an optimal state for a great shift ahead. Make this a habit. Possibly, make pre-shift lunchtime meditation a team activity.
- Train yourself to breathe deeply with your diaphragm and do slow breathing repetitions as you shift gears from one type of appointment to another. Calm your mind by connecting to your breath as you finish adjusting and initiate a Report of Findings or First Visit, for example. Transition points between different types of appointments are great opportunities to optimize your internal state by tapping into your Mindfulness practice.
- Establish a morning meditation practice so you can tap into a state of Mindfulness throughout your regular activities in practice, and watch your practice grow.
In general, when you’re “dropped in” and fully engaged in the present moment, in a state of inner stillness, you’ll be primed for performing at your best. In many cases, you’ll automatically know what to say. Your message will flow through you. You often will become the message. In may sound odd, but in these moments of full engagement, your message becomes so important that you ‘disappear’ and your message becomes all that matters. This will lead to deep connection with your audience (which will often be one person) so they fully get what you’re saying.
2. Calibrating Your Emotional Reactions
One of the key aspects of sustaining high performance in your practice is managing the quality of your mind. Your success flows from the inside out; being successful is largely a mindset skill. It is important that you develop the internal discipline to take charge of your thoughts, emotions, and ultimately, how you act. Leadership needs to begin with yourself and then extend to the people you influence.
Daily meditation will help you to foster a skill known as Mental and Emotional Agility. Mental and Emotional Agility refers to your ability to calibrate your mental and emotional reactions in the face of adverse events in real-time. It is a way of fine-tuning how well you exert volition over your thoughts and emotions in order to act in effective ways in your practice.
Your thoughts determine your feelings. Your feelings drive your actions. Your actions determine your results. Get your mind right and your results will follow.
Negative external events will happen. As a result, you’ll experience challenging thoughts and emotions, like:
- disappointment,
- frustration,
- self-doubt,
- sadness,
- anger,
- fear,
- stress and anxiety,
- prejudice,
- judgment,
- guilt,
- worry,
- depression.
There is nothing wrong in experiencing the emotions above. It is part of being a human being in the world. I’m not saying that you if you adopt a meditation practice you will completely eliminate the negative thoughts and emotions. But you’ll be better equipped to not be controlled by these thoughts and feelings. Through regular meditation and bringing Mindfulness to the day-to-day moments of your life, you can be less reactive to these challenging thoughts and emotions, and forge a more resourceful path in the face of adverse events.
Cultivate Mental and Emotional Agility
A great way to do this is by cultivating Mental and Emotional Agility. Here’s an introduction to the five-step process of developing improved Mental and Emotional Agility:
- Notice or experience the adverse event.
- Observe your physiological stress response, negative emotion, and/or disempowering thought. Be curious.
- Create space by utilizing a breathing technique or a Mindfulness practice.
- Redirect to a positive emotion and empowering thought.
- Respond to the event in a resourceful way.
Mental and Emotional Agility is a key element of ADIO Chiropractic Coaching’s Core Identity model. You can review the Core Identity diagram in Article One.
Let’s look at an example on how this five-step process can be used in a Chiropractic practice
Step One: Notice the Adverse Event
You enter your consultation room to have a consultation with a patient, who told your front desk CA that they are having a serious setback with their care.
As you enter the room, you immediately observe that the patient is demonstrating agitated, closed-off body language. They are scowling; they look upset and borderline emotional.
As soon as they realize that you have entered the room they blurt out, “You hurt me! After my last adjustment, the right side of my neck completely stiffened up. I’m much worse than before…”
In this example, it is very easy to notice the adverse event. Your patient is practically yelling at you.
Step Two: Observe Your Internal Response
What do you do? How you respond to this difficult moment will determine a lot about the course of care for this patient. Your response is determined by the process unfolding inside of you; your internal thoughts, and your feelings, as well as your associated physiological response. It is important that you can recognize the stress response happening inside of you, so that it does not overwhelm you.
Your heart rate and respiratory rate will likely increase. You may get flushed and a little shaky. You may reactively feel anger and frustration, and let that color your thoughts and ultimately what you do in response to this situation.
You may think, “Oh, here we go again. This patient is nothing but trouble. They complain constantly and they don’t appreciate anything that we have been trying do for them…”
In that moment, if you act reactively without tapping into Mindfulness, you may respond with a curt, “Well that can’t be possible…” and then jump into a defense of your care, and an argument may ensue. You can see how this scenario won’t turn out positively for anyone. There is a much more intentional way of managing yourself in moments like this. Choose a different path. I recommend adopting an attitude of detached curiosity toward your internal response to the adverse event you are encountering.
Step Three: Create Space
Notice the thoughts and feelings above, be aware of them, but create distance before reflexively acting on them. Connect to your breath. Do a Mindfulness exercise like a few box breathing repetitions, slow exhalations, or physiological sighs. Couple the breathing exercise with the body scanning technique to ground yourself.
Inhibit your fight-or-flight response and activate your parasympathetic nerve system with slow, intentional inhalations and especially slow exhalations. It is critical to do this in the confronting moment to create space from saying or doing something you may regret out of reactive emotion. The more you practice this technique the more automatic it will become.
Step Four: Redirect to the Positive
Now that you have recognized that you are in a challenging situation, you are aware of your negative thoughts and emotions. You have pumped the breaks on your reflexive response by creating space, and it is now time to redirect your thoughts and emotions to more empowering and resourceful ones.
In this example, you may engage in positive self-talk like, “I have this under control. I got this. We are going to really help this person.” Generate empathy by telling yourself, “I understand that this patient is in pain and is scared. Let’s do our best to help them. I may respond the same way if I were in his shoes. Let’s get to the bottom of what is happening.” Tell yourself, “This is a great opportunity for this patient to learn about how they are healing. They really need our care.”
Step Five: Respond Resourcefully
From that positive mental space, do what needs to be done to best serve this patient. It may be tough love. It may still be an uncomfortable conversation, but come from a place of service for the patient. Make the interaction about helping them, not your emotional gratification.
Creating space in step three will hopefully prevent you from emotionally lashing out to feed your frustration, anger, or insecurity. Lashing out may feel good in the fleeting moment, but it does not accomplish anything productive in the long run. And expressing anger or frustration in your practice can lead to significantly negative outcomes.
This five-step process allows you to wield your skill of Mindfulness in the challenging moments of your practice. With an established Mindfulness practice, you’ll be able to process steps one through four fast enough to be able to land at step five most effectively to respond to your patient in the most resourceful way.
Use Mindfulness to start thinking about what you’re thinking about in order to effectively calibrate your emotional reactions, so you can help the people you are meant to help.
Meditation and Revitalization Strategies
A committed meditation practice can also be a foundational aspect of your Revitalization Strategies. I touched upon this in the article on Pillar Four: Revitalization Strategies. For many high-achieving Chiropractors, morning meditations are an essential way to start their days of service. Meditation sessions can be a crucial part of priming your body, mind, and spirit for an explosive day of meaningful contribution. I know that if I skip my morning meditation session, I feel a little off-kilter.
Start Today!
The only way to experience the many benefits of a Mindfulness practice is to actually practice. You have to do it. If you do not meditate, give it a try. Establish rhythm and repetition to this important personal habit. I know you won’t regret it.
Mindfulness and the Four Pillars
Mindfulness holds its own unique position in ADIO Chiropractic Coaching’s Four Pillars of Sustained Success in Practice model. It binds you and every aspect of your practice together. With practice and repetition, this ‘connective tissue’ will strengthen and grow, further bolstering your professional life.
Here’s to your future success!
-DZ
Recommended Resources
Wherever You Go There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life by Jon Kabat Zinn
Mindfulness for Beginners: Reclaiming the Present Moment—and Your Life by Jon Kabat Zinn
Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor
The Wim Hof Method: Activate Your Full Human Potential by Wim Hof
Dr. Michael Gervais PhD; Finding Mastery Podcast, findingmastery.net
Dr. Joe Dispenza; drjoedispenza.com
Dr Andrew Huberman PhD; Huberman Lab Podcast, hubermanlab.com
