As I write this weeks’ blog article, I am looking out the window of my home in South Central Pennsylvania, and I don’t think I have ever seen this much snow on the ground as it continues to fall from the sky in blizzard-like conditions.
It seems as though it will never stop. Of course it always does. The first year I moved here was the winter of 1977. We were living in a small apartment with 3 small, but growing children. Using AMC practice management principles from Dr. Owen, I had gotten off to a great start, even though the practice had been set up just a few months ago.
We were seeing 70-80 patient visits a week by that time. Then the snows started in January. Have you ever noticed how snow storms, the really bad ones, seem to come in weekly “waves”? That is exactly how it happened that year. Just when the practice was up and running smoothly – WHAM!
It would have been easy to get very negative at that time, and I did for a while. The feeling was that God, or the elements, or someone, had it in for me and wanted to make sure my practice and my family suffered. Then I remembered something that Dr. Owen had taught me. He said that, in life, there is a universal principle of balance. When it is raining (or snowing,) in one part of the country, it is sunny in another. In general, things always seem to achieve a balance and equilibrium.
Yes, the snow did hurt my practice…temporarily. If I had gotten negative, and stayed that way, I could have made the situation even worse. I got to thinking about what Dr. Owen had said, and I figured out how that principle could apply to my practice in a positive way, and how it can apply to your practice too.
With an attitude of balance, I realized that the number of office visits I lost due to the snow could be replaced by extra visits which were a direct result of the bad weather. My patients, and potential patients, were out straining their backs removing snow. They were slipping, falling, and getting into car accidents. Without the snow, not nearly as much of this boost to my chiropractic practice would be happening. Armed with the tools I have learned from AMC, these seemingly negative events in my practice were transformed into strong positives.
This is just one example of literally thousands of attitude and success principles I have learned from Dr. Owen and AMC. Stay tuned for more.
