The 4 Biggest Problems Women In Chiropractic Face – Part 1
This blog post is the first in a four part series all about the four biggest problems women in chiropractic face.
After 11 years of consulting with other chiropractors on their lives and practices, and almost 4 years specifically coaching female chiropractors, I’ve identified the 4 biggest problems women in chiropractic face.
If you’d like to proactively do your best to avoid these problems (which you can)…
Or, you’re dying to make life and practice as a working mama easier, what you’ll read here will help you.
In this series of 4 posts, you’ll learn what these 4 big problems are and what you can do about them.
First, I want to make sure we’re clear on how I’m defining “big problems” here.
I mean, when I think of big problems, I think of medical kidnapping, the broken healthcare industry, corruption in government and politics, poverty, homicide….
You know, real light and fluffy topics, right?
Those are truly BIG problems.
But for our purposes, I’m not talking about those kinds of really big problems.
Other big problems like:
Your baby was born at 30 weeks and is in the NICU…
Your mom has rapidly-progressing MS and can no longer live independently….
You have cancer…
Yeah, these are really big problems.
But again, we’re not going to be focusing on these types of life challenges.
Those problems can affect anyone, not just a woman who’s a chiropractor.
And we’re going to focus here on the unique problems that you and I face in life and in practice.
Clear? Good!
Let’s dive in.
Problem #1: We don’t make enough money.
Now, I know….. There are lots of people–especially women–who are overworked and underpaid. And there are lots of people living in poverty.
The reason I’m clearly pointing out “not enough money” as a problem unique to women in chiropractic is because there are very (very) few other professions or careers today in which a person takes on $200,000+ of student loan debt to have said career.
For many of us, we finish chiropractic school and get licensed, already carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt.
The weight of it can feel crushing.
It’s literally kept me awake at night at times–I’ve lost hours of sleep worrying about how I’ll ever pay off so much student debt.
While a lot of chiropractors will say they didn’t choose this profession for the money, the truth is… you also didn’t choose this profession to be broke.
To worry about how you’ll feed your family.
To not be able to afford repairs to your car when it breaks down.
To have money be a constant issue in your marriage.
Furthermore, you became a chiropractor because you believed in health, wellness and helping people reach their optimal potential.
You didn’t become a chiropractor because you thought everyone else should be living optimally while you’re struggling.
Well-meaning people will tell you that if you want to make more money, that you should just work harder.
(beware of this sneaky little limiting belief–we’ve been conditioned for a very long time to believe that money only comes from lots of hard work)
But you working harder and harder–seeing more and more patients–just takes you away from your family more and more and leaves you with less and less time to rest, recover, recuperate, rejuvenate and be congruent with the values you hope to instill in your chiropractic patients of living optimally.
Can you really live optimally if you can’t afford to buy healthy food and you’re losing sleep over worrying about how you’ll make your student loan payments?
It feels like a catch-22, doesn’t it?!
Work harder to make more money, but decrease the quality of your life.
OR, work less so you have time to enjoy life…. Sorta, because you’re still always worried about money.
There is a third option, Doc.
Hardly anyone in our profession talks about it (Why? Another topic for another day).
The third option is that you have both–time freedom AND financial freedom.
The third option is in alignment with the values of chiropractic.
The third option allows you to truly live and work in your optimal potential.
To learn more about how to put this third option into action, go get Aligned Women’s free Present & Profitable Audio Training at www.presentandprofitableaudio.com
And if you’re not sure where your relationship with money stands right now–and particularly how it relates to the growth of your practice–go take the Aligned Practice Quiz at www.alignedpracticequiz.com
Let’s keep talking about money, shall we?!
At the Aligned Practice Workshop in Minneapolis in September 2019, I accidentally discovered something really interesting.
The doctors in attendance took the Aligned Practice Quiz–some of them taking this quiz for the second, third or fourth time.
When everyone in the room had finished, we discussed their scores.
There’s a section on the quiz that evaluates how you’re handling the finances of your chiropractic practice.
We simply refer to it as the Money section.
The other sections are Time & Energy, Ideal Patients, Community & Relationships, and Marketing.
After nearly two years of implementing this assessment in our program, I have seen that most new members take the quiz and find that Money is one of their lowest scores.
This indicates to our coaching team that there’s some work that needs to be done in the practice–but especially inside the practice owner–around money.
At this event, however, with doctors who’ve been in the Aligned Women program for a year or longer, Money was now one of their two highest scores (with the Ideal Patients section being the other top score).
Now, in full transparency, the Aligned Practice Quiz is a completely subjective assessment so that may be a limitation of the observations that I’m drawing here.
But…. I believe that subjective assessments are often just as important as our objective assessments.
I mean, do you question a patient who says her headaches are gone after two weeks of chiropractic care, even though her range of motion still sucks???
Probably not.
So, the conclusion that I drew from this observation was that the Aligned Women program helps women in chiropractic feel more at ease with the financial aspects of life and practice.
And that they feel more at ease because they’re making more money.
If you’re not making the money you want to be making so that you comfortably pay all the bills in your chiropractic practice and you can confidently answer YES when your kiddos are begging for a trip to Disney World, then be sure to take the Aligned Practice Quiz now.
Also, you’ll learn about the next big problem that women in chiropractic face in Part 2 of this series!