In my seminars, I am often telling clients, "What you say is more important than what you do." Those words really surprise (and sometimes upset) newcomers. After all, didn't we spend all that time and money in chiropractic college to DO things for patients? Well, yes and no.

Adjustments by themselves have never led to a lifetime of adjustments, but the proper communication nearly always does.

I can't tell you how often I hear chiropractors say, "If my patients just stayed long enough, they would understand what I'm trying to do and really value the long term benefit from care." As long as your approach is to rely on what you do to create more doing, your practice will experience tremendous let down.

You have to remember your patients are coming in with many different experiences, opinions and beliefs about life, health and healing. What you do has less to do with changing those opinions and beliefs than what you say to them.

However, I just skipped right by one of the most important missing keys in your practice. You are still not sure that changing people's beliefs is your primary role, so that adjusting patients for life can be what you do.

Think back to a time when someone you highly respected created an environment for you to radically change your beliefs.

Maybe it was in a big audience at a seminar or at a place of worship filled with tremendous energy. It might have been in a small gathering that felt safe and intimate or perhaps it was one-on-one and you cried your eyes out. Do you not agree that the biggest changes you have made in your own life have come about due to one or more profound shifts in the way you think and feel about something?

Getting patients ready to receive a lifetime of chiropractic care requires nothing short of a profound shift in the way they think and feel about something.

Just like the newly found habits of great exercise or super healthy eating, those habits must be regularly reconditioned to insure they hold the same or more value in the future. You cannot condition a habit that hasn't been established in the first place.

When you begin adjusting a patient three times per week, you may actually mistake that for a habit. That's nothing more than a patient fulfilling your "chiropractic prescription." Don't forget, your patients are taking what you do and plugging it into the current beliefs they have of getting – and staying – healthy.

How do you know if a patient has experienced a paradigm shift to the living principle of chiropractic? Maybe the answer is easier than you think.

All you have to do is remember what went on inside of you when your own belief system dramatically changed and you realized you are responsible for creating that in others. Great habits are not formed by what people do, but rather by what has changed deep inside them.

When you really think about it, 98% of the time the patients that drop from care never really bought into the living principle of chiropractic. Sure they got adjusted, and were pleased with the results they received, but the idea that the nervous system should always be working at 100% to have the maximum expression of life and that chiropractic adjustments are NECESSARY in that process, just never took root. What that really means is, they would not have dropped out.

How valuable is the greatest adjustment technique to the patient who is no longer under care? I am fully convinced that if you have the right intent and right communication skills, then what you do will have the potential to maximize the expression of life for others. If not, you will continue to experience patients cycling in and out of your practice and excusing it with reasons like, they "couldn't afford it."

It may very well be that you require another significant change in belief so your patients can do the same. The words you choose and how you express them may be the greatest breakthrough in your practice.

For example, if you believe the body heals itself from inside out, then you will never use the words "treatment" or "relief." Chiropractors have never done either of those things and yet, those are two very dangerous and incongruent words in a chiropractic practice.

First day procedures, report of findings, workshops, table talk, re-exams, pre-reports, re- signs, front desk flow, office tours, policy consults – these are just specialized terms that refer to opportunities for you to communicate with patients for the purpose of changing old beliefs ana empowering new ones. It's not until you see it this way that your practice will begin to explode.

Team WLP trains on performance and delivery of care harder than anyone in this profession. But, performance includes and begins with what you say to your patients. Patient education is obsolete! You must create paradigm shifts, and that doesn't happen by simply handing out pamphlets. Twenty-first century chiropractic includes master communicators who know the right things to say and are able to say them from the heart with the right intent.

This is not a gift. Everyone can learn to help his or her patients in this way. You can do it! Your community is counting an it, and so is chiropractic. Be patient, but take action today to begin seeing and feeling the difference tomorrow.

(Dr. C.J. Mertz is founder and head coach of the prestigious Waiting List Practice chiropractic training organization. WLP has clients – in all 50 U.S. states and 22 countries – who are speaking WLP-trademarked communications in eight different languages. If you would like more information on WLP services and products, call Mark at 877/TEAM-WLP.)