By Freddie Ulan, DC, CCN
Know your basics, whether it’s your administrative basics, your nutritional product basics, your nutritional analysis or follow-up technique basics. You need to know your basics and know them cold so that you are totally competent.
I know that no matter who walks into my office—I don’t care who they are, what condition they have, how long they’ve had it—I know that I’m going to know what to do. I know whether I’m going to be taking this patient on or not, I’m going to have a good idea whether I can help them or not before I accept them as a patient.
The one thing I am not doing is auditioning for any patients. How many of you have ever found yourself in the position of kind of auditioning for the patient? Kind of hoping the patient will accept you and your recommendations. Hoping, and kind of almost having to do a little dance. You know, you should have come in and worn your tap shoes. You say, “Well, I’m gonna do a little thing here and I hope that you accept me.”
When you have your basics down cold, when you know what you’re doing, when you know what your scope is, when you know how to determine who is right for you and who isn’t, you have a competence level that cannot be shaken. And the patient picks up your competence level. They know it.
How do you do that? Because we all have to start somewhere, that’s the bottom line. You acknowledge what your current level is and put yourself on a program to improve whatever it is that needs to be improved.
I’ll tell you how I learned the products that we use. When I saw the huge amount of information that was available on the Standard Process products, I almost died! I thought, “How am I ever going to learn this?!” First of all, I didn’t understand most of it. Trying to read Royal Lee’s book, his product manual, his therapeutic manual was like, “Oh my god, I don’t think I could have understood this when I was back in school!”
I found the earliest version of their clinical reference guide. It was actually written for new guys to get a grasp. And I found that even this was rough for me. But every day I read a little bit and I just gave myself a target of learning one new thing every day about these products that I was looking at utilizing. I found that after about three years there really wasn’t much more to know. I still haven’t learned everything about this particular product line, and I have several other product lines that I deal with, but I applied the same principle to those.
In other words, I gradually improved my competence level. I didn’t whip myself or punish myself for not being as smart as I needed to be. I just acknowledged what level I was at, and then put myself on a program of increasing that. I went from that to finally being able to utilize some of the more technical material. They’re still not written in the way I like to read things. But there is incredible information available. You see, you can actually learn every day.
But whatever system you use, you need to have a system so that every day you’re making some improvement in getting a better grasp of your basics.
If it’s a technique that you’re using for analyzing the patient, you need to continue to improve your abilities in that technique. Whether that be going to seminars, getting whatever materials are available, audio, visual, whatever. The biggest mistake I’ve ever seen people make is thinking that they already know everything. And once you reach that point, you’re actually dead. And you don’t know it. It’s a horrible state to be in. Somebody has to kind of knock on your head and remind you. Hey, wake up, come back to life with us.
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