Are you Experiencing Patient Animosity: Interview with Alex Charfen [Ep #164]

Hey everyone! Welcome to another episode of the profitable practice podcast. I’m of course your host, Andrea Maxim. And I am thrilled to have my mentor on this show Alex Charfen. Now if you’ve listened to any episodes in the past, I talked about basically from March onwards of 2019 how I joined this program. It was the most expensive program I have joined today. But it single-handedly allowed me to restructure my entire business. It allowed me to create time freedom where I never had before. And it also allowed me to show up to my family so much better. Because before setting up the business the way that I had, I was supposed to be creating my own game.  Supposed to be putting my own pieces in place, supposed to create the lifestyle that I wanted to and I wasn’t. I felt shackled to my business, I was constantly thinking about my exit strategy, I was going through the motions. And we’ve all been there, you may be there right now. And I never thought what was possible, and Alex is going to say this later on in the interview. But the first realization that I needed to have was that I was not showing up to my business well. I was not showing up as the business CEO that I wanted to be, that maximized practitioner that I wanted to be. And I also had to realize that I’m not a unicorn. That I can be replaced, that I can teach someone the strategies that I’ve been putting together for the past three or four years into the gap protocol. And teach someone to be a carbon copy of me.

And all of the worries, all of the things that could’ve stopped me from making those changes from hiring the associate. From leaving an entire practice and letting it run on its own with the team that I’m managing. I could’ve come up with all of the reasons why it wasn’t going to work. But I just said ‘why not try it? What if it does work?’ and it did. And it’s been working now for over a year. And it is something that I’m teaching my students, I’m teaching my elite implementer members how they can stop doing at all, how they are not a unicorn and they can easily delegate probably almost all of the tasks, if not everything that you are doing to somebody else. And that was also why I had that podcast a couple weeks ago about buying my time freedom. But I stopped caring about making profits and doing all the work myself just to fill up my piggy bank and I bought my time freedom back. So that I could be present with my kids, that I could be a great partner to my husband. And I’m so thankful for the person that I grew because of going through all of that discomfort, and fear, and anxiety. And it also helped our team get through the shutdown. Usually, and as a team and united and continuing to serve our patients or clients. So without further ado, let’s jump into this interview with Alex. I know you’re going to love it, so I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed doing the interview. Here we go.

ANDREA: Hey Alex! Thank you so much for coming on to the profitable practice podcast today. You have basically been name dropped for the better part of 2019. And definitely into 2020, because you’ve been such an influential piece of my journey or part of my journey. So I am just so honored and excited that you are here.  And now you can boast about yourself and prove to everyone why you’re so fantastic and why you literally helped me, like the amount of growth that I had after working with you and your team. Has been the most monumental life changing part that I’ve ever experienced in my ten years of being in business. I know what we’re going to talk about today is going to be uncomfortable for people to hear but it is very important. And I’m thrilled that you’re going to be the one who’s delivering the message and I’ll just be the messenger.

ALEX: You can be an innocent by-stander.

ANDREA: Right. But for those who are listening that don’t know who you are. I would love for you to introduce what your business is about and why entrepreneurship is just such a driving force for you.

ALEX: Okay, I think the easiest way to introduce what our business is all about is –I had been working in some capacity as an entrepreneur for most of my career. I’m 47 years old and the biggest issue that I’ve seen in entrepreneurship and honestly Andrea, the biggest issue I faced was getting clear on ‘what did I really want, what systems instructions that I need to be able to get there and then how did I get a consistent result over and over again.’ And I think if you get what our business does today, I think it’s easier to explain the entrepreneur dilemma. The entrepreneur dilemma the way that I define it is that as entrepreneurs we need way more help than the average person to get the results we want. But any request for help leaves us feeling vulnerable and exposed and frustrated.

And especially in the practitioners basically. You have seen a lot of practitioners who try to do anything themselves because they don’t want to have to ask for help. And what our company does today is help break that down. And through structure, process and routine, show the entrepreneur running the business or show the practitioner entrepreneur running a practice how to systematically get the help that they need. But more importantly, install routine and structure so that they don’t feel like they’re doing everything themselves. And they don’t feel like there’s this foregone conclusion that they’re always going to be on the hook for all the deliverables. And they don’t feel like all the pressure is on them. And I think for the purposes of this podcast, it’s probably the best way to describe what we do and we do it in one of the three different coaching programs. We don’t sell implementation products because we don’t feel like it works. We only sell memberships, so either you join our early membership where we show you how to figure out a strategic plan and understand how to execute it. Or our second membership where we show you how to build up your initial team. Or our third membership where we show you how to take that team, break it into departments, and release scale your contribution.

ANDREA: Yeah. And I think I was in the middle one and it was phenomenal for me. So let’s just get right into it. So guys, the biggest piece that we’re going to be talking about today is how we as practitioners like to be our own worst enemies. That we tend to make our lives worst in order to help other people’s lives get better. And it just can’t be that way. So Alex, with regards to the practitioner businesses, the medical companies you’ve worked with what you find is consistently the biggest thing that you need to break them down in order to build them back up again.

ALEX: The easiest thing to say is that and this might sound judgmental, but it comes from just a place of experience. I’ve worked with hundreds of doctors across from different discipline. So chiropractors, functional medicine doctors, MD’s, a lot of surgeons. Last week I was just in a retreat for a 50 million dollar medical company, a dental company. So across the gambit, there’s this consistency in the practitioner run space where the practitioner doesn’t take care of themselves. And then there’s all types of issues that happen in the practice. And then here’s how I describe it. There’s this almost this level of murder dumbing practitioner and I understand where it comes from. There’s a very factual and real place that it comes from. Every practitioner that I’ve worked with has this belief system that is real in some way. That if they don’t get everything right, somebody’s going to die. Like in the end of the day, that’s the belief especially with the surgeons and people that were opening people up. But across the board, it really doesn’t matter. Even chiropractors, kind of have that little bit of fear like if I don’t do everything right, somebody’s going to get hurt, somebody’s going to have a problem, somebody’s going to have this issue. And so there’s this massive amount of pressure on their practice. And then since in medical school, you were taught everything you need to know how to successfully run a practice. And you just forgot them. Kidding. There is no instruction how it’s yeah, zero. Right. It’s just like becoming a real estate agent, only you real estate examine six weeks and then you’re ready to sell real estate. But you don’t have a clue, you’re absolutely dangerous. With doctors, it’s the same thing, it’s the number of years. And when you get out and start trying to run that practice, there’s a number of cascading that happen.

There’s new pressures on the practitioner, there’s things that you never thought you’d have to deal with. There’s relationships that are challenging, and here’s the equation that I see is that you go from someone who genuinely wants to help people. And genuinely wants to go into this career that let’s get real, it’s not a simple career, it’s not easy career, it’s not even an easy career to get into to qualify to be a part of. And then what happens is little by little starts breaking down. And what I’ve seen is it goes from wanting to help everybody around you to being somewhat frustrated with the people around you, to being frustrated and angry and then just straight up animosity. And almost every practitioner that I’ve ever talked to has gotten to the place where they go from caring about every person walking in the door to having animosity where negative feelings towards both team members and patients. And kind of bringing and baring it and talking through gritted teeth and putting up with the experience and feeling like–depending on the practitioner it’s a number of things. Nobody would really listen, nobody really cares, and nobody’s taking the advice. Nobody’s doing what they needed to do to move forwards. And so what ends up happening is all about feels like pressure for the practitioner and it’s hard to get out from under.

ANDREA: Yeah. I’ve been there. I was there at your three, and it took me at least 2 years to get out of that loop. And then I’ve gone through that back and forth over the past two years, for sure. So I can completely understand everything that you’re saying.

ALEX: Well, Andrea I think one of the biggest issues that I’ve seen in working with the practitioners that I’ve had is that no one brings this up. No one actually talks about it, there’s no discussion around like ‘hey, are you at the point where you experience patient animosity?’ I’m one of the few coaches or consultants out there that has the conversations and it’s interesting. When I talk to a new practitioner, sometimes in an event– I don’t do a lot of sales calls these days so I don’t have a lot of one on one interaction. But often one will go to an event or in a party or somewhere. And I’ll say to a practitioner ‘are you at the place where you developed patient animosity? And are you aware of it or are you still not aware of it and you need to work through it?’ And they’ll look at me, funny and be like ‘what are you talking about?’ then I give a brief explanation and what’s interesting is it’s always like a relief ‘oh’. Everyone feels that way? Is that what how you felt when I brought it up?

ANDREA: Yeah. Honestly I went through my whole ten year journey and I was like ‘Oh. That’s what that was.’ So I’m reliving it all over again.

ALEX: And here’s the equation that I think hap it. As a practitioner, the more difficult things get. And it’s like an easy bounce for every entrepreneur to I don’t want to just point out practitioners. But I think there’s an extra layer of pressure from practitioners. Because let’s get real, if run an Ads agency you can just shut the doors when they walk away. Tell everybody you’re not going to do anything. And yes there are ramifications and there are issues that happen. But with most practitioners, they’ve feel like if they shut their doors and walk away, people are going to be more damaged. And that is a much higher level of pressure. And the pattern that I see is, get into practice, get overwhelmed, stop taking care of yourself. And really kind of impaling yourself on the practice. And that impaling yourself on the practice, there’s a natural conclusion that you develop patient animosity. I always show it to entrepreneurs; if you do not defend and protect yourself. Sorry, if you do not take care of yourself, you will not defend and protect yourself. And so the lesser you take care of yourself, the more you will tolerate in your life. And when you get into a clinical practice, what happens to far too many practitioners is they tolerate themselves into either a multi-six figure or a low million dollar practice that they hate.

ANDREA: Yeah. And the first question that’s coming to my mind is. Well, we graduate as healers, we just want to nourish everybody around us and therefore were left completely devoid of any nourishment. And so how do you walk these practitioners through that? How do we start developing that balance where we are starting to now take some of that energy inward or create those boundaries where we can still show up for our patients but also have some energy left over for us?

ALEX: Well I think there’s a series of things Andrea, I think first and foremost what’s interesting is the least likely person to get chiropractic adjustment is the chiropractor. But it’s true, right? The least likely person to be seeing upon a functional medicine practitioner is the functional medicine doctor. And so I think first things’ first leaning into your discipline and finding somebody who can help you on that other side. So that you actually put yourself in a patient-practitioner relationship and you are conscious of that patient-practitioner relationship. Like one of the biggest issues I see is that most practitioners do not see someone. And that goes for across the board. The only exception is dentists, dentist do tend to still see other dentist because it’s visible and they’re scared of the bad advertising. But even that, and they kind of it half-heartedly and not really putting yourself in that patient mindset. And I think the other part is being conscious of the fact that the most important person in the practice is ‘you’. And when I go out and speak I’ll often ask ‘who’s the most important person in your business?’ and whether it’s a practitioner room or an entrepreneur room I get the same types of answers. I hear my wife, my assistant, the customer, the patient, the person who delivers the stuff that we need every day. I’m saying the most important person in the business, and there’s this whole list of answers and then finally somebody answers and says is it ‘me’? And the fact is the faster we recognize, whether you’re in the business or in practice the most important person there is the person running it. And if that’s you that means we need to start taking care of you in a way that you can show up to run the practice the way that you want to. Because here’s what does not work. This is a foregone conclusion. Taking less and less care of yourself, adding more and more pressure and then feeling bad about it. That is only an equation that only goes in one direction and ends up in really challenging places. It ends up in burnout, it ends up in wanting to dump the practice, it ends up to wanting to run away. And you actually see that in the medical profession. It’s again, it’s something that we don’t talk about but you see the doctor that builds up 1.5 million dollar practice and then all of a sudden just leaves one day. And sells it to somebody else or you see the dentist that builds 5 or 6 locations and they’re going like crazy and things are really going forward with them and then they just sell out overnight and then don’t want to do it anymore. And like I said, we tolerate ourselves into a position we don’t want to be in.

ANDREA: Do you also think that ‘that’ mentality taking the wrong way that ‘I am the most important person’ could also potentiate a lot of these issues where we also believe that we can’t be replaced. That we have to do all the things that we have to see all of the patients that we could never step away from the business. We’re constantly tethered to the business, because I think that is a catalyst as well if you take those words literally. Where it just potentiates this burnout piece, because then you never leave. You’re always available, you’re constantly at everyone else’s back and call. And I’ve also been there too. Where I couldn’t separate myself from the business. Because I felt like I was the most important person in it.

ALEX: Definitely Andrea, in the case of a practitioner it’s kind of a big, double argument. One is, you need to recognize that you’re the most important person in the business. So that person must needs to be taking care of, needs to show up, present anywhere and can’t be burned out. We want to make sure that their hydrated, they’re eating the right foods. Which again, ironically how often in medicine those are the things that fall away first from the practitioner standpoint. But then also there’s the second side of that, if we admit that we’re the most important person in the practice, then we also have to develop a system or structure or process where offloading where you’re uncomfortable.

Because here’s almost 100% commonality with practitioners. Is that practitioners are amazing at tolerating pain. And we can see where it comes from. Just go back to any practitioner’s background. First, typically for a practitioner to get into practice, there is this some level of trauma or anxiety or challenges. Or something that happened when they were younger that turned them just like robots. And that bright you into this world, and then depending on what your discipline is. Typical medical school or pre-med, residency, those are not trauma-free times. These are very difficult, very traumatic, very challenging day to day high pressure situations. And so, as a practitioner you are trained that if you tolerate pain you will get the result you want. You are trained, if you put up with stuff you will be able to move forward. And in some cases of residency, you’re trained; if you destroy yourself you will succeed. And all of that creates this operant conditioning where it’s literally like Pavlov ringing the bell. Where I need to tolerate more in order to succeed. I need to put up more in order to succeed. And so what happens is, there’s no point in your career where you don’t ‘okay, wait, time-out. Do I still need to do that? Am I still needing to tolerate it? Do I still need all of this pain around? Do I still need to put up with the frustrations and the irritations that I have?’ And in my experience, 100% of the practitioners that I have been able to sit down with are tolerating way too much. And I don’t mean like 10% or 20% more than they need to, I mean exponentially more than they need to. But Andrea I just want to make it clear, so as every entrepreneur I’ve ever sat down with. Because as entrepreneurs, I just assume anybody listening to your practice who’s a practitioner is really an entrepreneur who happens to be a practitioner, that’s how I look at it.

ANDREA: We’re trying to teach them to think that way that is the reality of the situation. Yes.

ALEX: But if they’re showing up here, here’s what I give off. Here in this audience, you’re probably an entrepreneur. And if you’re listening to this, you’re different than any practitioners around you. And what that means to me is that we need to give you some of the tools that entrepreneurs use to successfully move through things. And one of those is, sitting down on a daily basis and understanding what made you uncomfortable. Here’s what’s interesting about practitioners, when I can finally get one to sit down and say ‘okay let’s start from the beginning of the day to the end of the day.’ This is something that I used to do when I’m in one on one consulting. I would sit down and say ‘okay, I want to know everything that was uncomfortable yesterday.’ And honestly I would sometimes get a laugh ‘there’s no way, we don’t have enough time.’ This is something I used to do when I didn’t want consulting; I would sit down and say ‘Okay I want to know everything that was uncomfortable yesterday.” And honestly what I would sometimes get is a laugh “Hahaha there’s no way, we don’t have enough time.” I’d say “No, I want you to start, I want you to make a list, I want to know everything that was uncomfortable yesterday.” And we break it down literally like minute by minute so you’d get into the office, where you were uncomfortable, what was the receptionist like, “Okay let’s write down the receptions, what else was wrong?” Well the cards were on the right place and when the door flap tells me if we’re in the room or not, we’re in the right place, when you start going through it and what you realize is, you probably created an environment of business where you are tolerating more than anybody else and when you get into that realization, here’s what we also need to realize; you created that environment. That you know whether it was through the lack of decisions or through proactive decisions, you have landed yourself in a place where you’re tolerating more than the people around you are, and so here’s what’s amazing about that you can now uncreate it and recreate it in a different way, you can start declaring where you’re uncomfortable and moving those things along. You can just by the realization that you start riding down where you are uncomfortable just by realizing what those things are, you will start to see your day and your practice shift.

Andrea: Yeah, and I’m even thinking about it again every time I interview someone, I immediately put into my own world, and I’m thinking about all those things as well, so here’s the thing that’s coming up for me. It’s all great when we hear it, we get inspired when we hear it and yet doing the work is also the source of frustration and putting pen to paper is a source of frustration and checking ourselves out of like our day to day so we can do the writing is a source of frustration and that was probably one of the biggest things that I had to work through, when I was going through your program was all of this stuff that we had to now start documenting and actually see in front of us took me like weeks to like just build up the courage to power through it. So how do you get people to just get through that unease and that discomfort and break them out of the routine so they can start to become woke to this reality that they created?

Alex: I think one of the first things is getting real about why this happens, so there is a tremendous amount of certainty in tolerating as much as you are around you. Let me show you what I mean by that, there’s certainty you’re going to be mad when you get to your office in the morning, there’s certainly one of your staff members are going to really irritate you and make you mad, there’s certainty that a process is going to break and you’re going to find it and you’re going to be the one saying “Oh, if I didn’t find this, somebody could’ve died.” Let’s not necessarily but I know that’s where the equation goes on the practitioner’s side. And so we have to get real about the fact that there’s a reason why you’re doing this and it’s because it creates a tremendous amount of certainty it creates a tremendous amount of consistency and it kind of keeps things the same. And so first, admitting to yourself that there is a consistency and certainty in the frustration and in the irritation and in the animosity that you’re feeling towards your team, your practice and your patients and then backing down from there. And here’s how I’ve seen it work with practitioners: adding one discipline at a time to lower the noise, like the first one I’d like to work is the morning routine, most practitioners, most entrepreneurs don’t have morning routines. If you can come up with a simple written morning routine, here’s mine I use it every day, it’s a graph so that can do each day at a time and I can see that I’ve done it and sometimes I don’t get a hundred percent of a done like this morning, there were two, three things because my kids needed help I didn’t check those boxes, so I’ll go check them later in the day, I’ll do those things later. Morning routine lowers a tremendous amount of noise, the reason I’d like to start with, I actually start with two things: hydration and morning routine. Here’s why; something as simple as hydrating and staying hydrated all day will raise your presence, raise your awareness, will shift your mood, actually if you’re a practitioner you know that drinking a bunch of water can give you a little serotonin, dopamine release, gets you out of a fight or flight syndrome, a lot of the time will get you out of those negative patterns and these impositive patterns and then having a morning routine where you show up every day and you’d get everything that you need to in the first hour of the day is your best hour of the day and start shifting things and just those things will help you start moving in the direction of realizing what you’re tolerating and seeing what’s going on. I think the biggest issue that I see with specifically practitioners not all entrepreneurs but specifically practitioners is that when you’re presented with the system or structure or something to do. The answer is “Okay, Great I want it done today, and then tomorrow everything is going to be better and the same time and energy took you to get to this place. It’s going to take some level of that time and energy to walk out of this place. So there’s actually a comfort in knowing that it’s going to take a little bit, there’s going to be a process and there’s some steps here that if we can start to lower the noise on a day to day basis, your days will be easier and your weeks getting easier and your life gets easier. 

Andrea: And that’s something that I’m so thankful that you talked about this because it is, that’s exactly it, it’s just sort of like “Well, I don’t want my day disrupted, I don’t want to like now I have to start a whole new routine and it’s just becoming that identity of the person who does that and that’s really what’s the journey that’s for me was I hated data, I hated tracking, I hated metrics and now it’s something that I look forward to in commanding my business, I’m showing up in a different way but it took me a while to develop that identity where now it’s autopilot, I don’t have to force myself into it and so for anybody who is listening the reason why people keep telling you to do this is because there’s a reason why people keep telling you to do this and you just have to step up. 

Alex: Well I think that there’s another thing that I want to share and this again just having a lot of experience a lot of friends who are practitioners, a lot of members, you know you also have to let go of the fact that medical school will not tell you everything that you needed to know and because it’s this irritation that every practitioner have 

Andrea: What are you saying, like my six figure education didn’t teach me everything?

Alex: Right! And you know it’s an admission we all have to make like, ‘hey the piece of paper on the wall didn’t cut it, it wasn’t enough it’s not enough. And you know I think, I remember, I have a client on the West Coast who is a double board certified surgeon and ballerina so that tells you a little bit of personality, like how do you do both of those things in one lifetime like a professional ballerina and then afterwards became a double board certified surgeon. And I remember how many conversations with her saying, well you know we need to be very clear that what you learn in school did not prepare you from what you’re doing now and she’s not a very emotional person, she doesn’t get like sad emotion she gets more intense emotion, but in that moment she got tears in her eyes and she’s like “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever really come to that realization that, I’m still irritated with the medical school, I’m so irritated that I wasn’t set up for success, I’m still frustrated that once I was, once I had the diploma and I graduated, the next day I felt like the learning curve have started over. And so, one of the realizations I think for practitioners is like “Hey you know what, take a walk, breathe in to that and understand that that’s real”. The irritation you probably feel is very real the faster you stop denying it and really feel it fully, it will then start to work through you and we can start creating solutions.

Andrea: The other thing that’s coming up for me for having this conversation is and I don’t know if there is something you can say to this follow up question but the majority of the practitioners that I personally work with that are in the space that I’m kind of like part of my tribe are predominantly female versus male, do you also find that there’s, because of that emotional feels that we carry, again that nurturing piece that we carry, do you find that female practitioners have to work through things more or we tolerate more or if there’s any level of discomfort across the genders? 

Alex: No, I definitely do especially when you have kids. Because so and there’s a major difference between when men have kids and when women have kids. I actually have a Podcast, I started calling it ‘Mom Guilt is Real’ and you know I learned this when I was younger, like I said I’m 47, 10 years of my career I was a consultant and I had a lot of female clients and I could see this dramatic difference between the women I work with and the men I work with after they had kids. The women went into self-destruction mode. It was like “I’m not good enough, I’m not enough, I feel guilty, I feel terrible.” And rarely would they admit any of those things they just, they were reacting to those things but it was hard to know that they were even there and so in the practitioners space, you know the realization that Men, and I don’t feel the same chemical feelings that Katie feels with Mom, I don’t. We talked about it we’ve examined it, I’ve looked it with my members, in most business masterminds they’re like 90% Men, 10% Women in some business Masterminds it’s 99% Men, 1% Women there’s always like the token Woman there and ours is like 60% Women. And so I’ve speak with this from levels of experience and understanding with working with women sometimes just admitting that there’s a chemical makeup of Mom guilt there’s a reality to the chemical feeling well I hope you can let go to some of those things and then, I think that there is Andrea, the sense of being nurture, the sense of feeling like you have to be there, you know you said it a little bit earlier about feeling like you’re the only one like you have to be there. We have this phrase in our membership where we say ‘You’re not a Unicorn’ and it’s not an insult, we feel like every one of our members is extraordinary but none of them are Unicorn, somebody else can do anything that you’re doing. The day that you get it in your head you’re the only person who can do it is the day that you’re really doomed and we proved that over and over again. It doesn’t matter what somebody is doing we can get them replaced in their business. Like you know Andrea when you came to us, that was one of the big things for you was like “Can I Really do this, where I’m not the person who’s doing everything?” and in the medical space there’s this belief system that that just can’t happen, the sooner that you release yourself from that, the quicker you see solutions that are there and start moving things forward where you don’t feel it’s all on you. 

Andrea: And this was actually one of the reasons why I signed up with you is that you talk about the business and your knowledge about entrepreneurship is so fantastic but you also tap into the personal growth of the Entrepreneur as well as the relationship that they’re having at home. And I know you have a number of really great Podcasts about you know how much we also tolerate these Entrepreneurs, how eternally optimistic and we think everything’s going to get better. And I would love to just kind of close out this conversation just also reflecting on and reminding the listeners that if there’s also tension and things that you’re tolerating at home of course that’s going to filter in to how you’re showing up to your business too. So what are some of those big relationship things that you see, practitioners or Entrepreneurs like really struggling to get to work through.

Alex: So I think if we first take a step back at that question and say as an Entrepreneur, anywhere in your life where you can lower the noise and lower pressure, it gives you more to be able to show up as an Entrepreneur and I would say in practice even more. I think every practitioner has the experience of having a really bad morning or really bad day and you go in if you’re vulnerable or soft you will admit that the patients you saw that day got less everything from you and they didn’t get what they probably should’ve gotten from you. And so when I look at the conversation of alignment at home or personal life or who you are, the reason why we take holistic approach to helping people grow businesses is I’ve been doing this for over 20 years and in my mid 20’s, I cracked the code and I don’t say that to brag but there is a clear set of principles when properly grown into business, we can grow any business. You have a viable business model we can grow any business, we prove that every day of the week and we prove over and over again we’re in the middle of one of the greatest pandemics we’ve ever had crazy, huge economic issues and last reportedly got 78% or 79% of our members are growing right now and the growth rate is 30% per year. So it’s like so far ahead of any Entrepreneurial members that you would ever hear, and the reason that we get those growth rates is we don’t just look into the business we also look at how the people grow and so for Entrepreneurs or Practitioners who are in a relationship, the key is aligning the relationships that you have so you can show up the best way you can for your business, for your practice, and we have a very simple process. Actually I have my momentum planner sitting in front of me and we have this protocol called a momentum planner and we plan our members to go through a daily basis and then align with their spouse and spouse alignment takes about 10 minutes. It’s basically sitting down and saying, here’s my intention for the day, here’s where I was uncomfortable yesterday, here are the things I wanted to accomplish for today and having that check in the morning which creates this cadence of now you understand what’s going on with each other in near a hundred percent of cases when we start with a new member who’s married, we ask what time of alignment or communication process that you have in your marriage there isn’t one. We don’t think about a structure or process or a routine. Now I’m going to tell you something upfront, when you start your marriage alignment it is exceptionally uncomfortable, it’s just weird, it’s awkward to sit down through this process, some members we have are like by the third day who has the greatest thing we’ve ever done, that’s the rare exception most of them are like ‘Okay we’ve been doing this for two weeks, it still feels awkward and uncomfortable’ and we always say ‘Yes, it’s going to feel awkward and uncomfortable for a little while’ and they will quit. And here’s what happens, when it clicks people come back to us and say ‘I can’t believe we never did this, and how are we communicating before and now that we have this alignment the argument and the frustration is near gone. And I know I’m going to sit down with him or her tomorrow morning, when there’s something in the moment that’s irritating we handle it in a different way and it’s just that the daily check in of marriage alignment has caused incredible changes in people’s businesses but let’s get real it’s not just your business it’s about your life. But I think the biggest challenges that I see in the Entrepreneurial World today is that Entrepreneurs tolerate themselves into a business that they want, and if we sit down and align with our spouse and we declare where we’re uncomfortable and we let them know what’s going in for us and we have a quick conversation of really 8 to 25 minutes, we create this new pattern of our lives off loading discomfort and understanding what’s going on for us of communicating to the person that should be the most important person in our world and by doing that you create an entirely different level of personal development and awareness. I am a huge fan of personal development; I’m not a huge fan of most personal development industry because it’s a lot of stories and a lot of sharing of concepts and theories and they’re so ethereal that it’s hard to say how do I make all these concepts and theories, you know I’ve heard Allison Nickle Speak 10 times and I love her and she’s amazing, every time I get a tear in my eye afterwards I’m like what’s the first step? What are you going to do with what she said? It was an hour and a half and I have no idea what I should even do other that I feel better. And I love listening to her speech but for me almost every personal development presentation feels the same way. At the end I’m like wait a second, Where’s the checklist? Where’s the process document? What do I do with this next? And what we do as a company is we feel like the highest level of personal development is the creation of daily success so if we can make daily success and daily achievement part of your routine, you will develop faster than any personal development program we’ll put you into. But if you’re not looking into daily process and daily structure that’s going to develop you as a human being, you are not going to the direction that you want and so sitting down and going to this simple alignment process, I think it’s one of the fastest ways to develop who you are as an Entrepreneur and the fastest ways to develop who you are as a human being. 

Andrea: And I’m going to add another layer into that, and that’s also confronting all of the things that you’ve been denying about.  Can you do that daily?

Alex: Yeah, so we have this concept we call loops and spirals and you know a loop is when you feel this temporary loss of momentum and we make the decision to go get it in the way that maybe isn’t the right way in the moment and there’s all kinds of stuff that we do, some people use alcohol, some people use drugs, some people go get in a fight with somebody, literally they have gone Social Media and pick a fight with somebody, what I see most often in today’s world is when we lose momentum we start to consume unintentionally. Practitioner or Entrepreneur loses momentum, I can hear it into discussions people have at events where they’re like ‘Oh yeah, you don’t have a quarter, but I signed up for this event’ you know I do this thing where I listen to a Podcast or I’m reading a hundred books this year and that loop of I’m going to start consuming without really understanding why so that it feels like momentum can be incredibly destructive and only makes things noisier. So when we start to actually confront where we have been in denial about, we drop loops and spirals, we stop the behaviors that are repeating over and over again that are not moving us forward.  

Andrea: Any final statements other than the amazing pearls that you’ve just delivered that you would give to the practitioners that are listening, and please close with the best way to get in touch with you. 

Alex: Yeah, Andrea I think that in general if you’re in the medical industry you actually know what’s going on for us. And you understand what’s going on for most Entrepreneurs, and the longer you been in the patterns that you are, the longer in the loops that you are, we call them loops when it starts it’s just a loop and when it gets out of control it becomes spiral, and so if you’re one of those spirals, the reality is we all get there it’s all the natural part of human condition. In fact, the latest research shows the higher performer you are, the more capacity you have, and the more capability you have the more you are subject to getting into spirals, the more you are actually vulnerable to loops, vulnerable to addictive behavior and others that are not that positive. And so understanding those things, yeah I think for practitioners the way we look at this is one day at a time, and I know that’s like an alcoholics anonymous sane, but it really works, if you can start the morning routine today and then repeat it in the second day and then do it again on the third day you start to see, differences within yourself. I used to joke with people that water is a gateway drug to success, but water really is a gateway drug to self-care. You start drinking more water. You will have realizations about your body, about your awareness, about how you are feeling, about how you show up. So you know if there’s, if you’ve listen to what we said like I want to start going into this direction, here’s what I would say don’t try and do it once and right away. Start drinking more water we have a program for this you can go to getthirstynow.com we have a 10-day natural thirst program that actually uses operating conditioning and the body is on instincts, to hope you drink more water than how you’re capable of and it works nearly for a 100% of people we had one person that didn’t work for but they were on a lot of antidepressants medications so I think that was that not me. But, anyway they had to do it 3 times, and after the third time it finally worked but we always say it worked for everybody in the first time, and start drinking more water, start taking care of yourself at a time, the caution that I have is don’t try and do it once and right away, it only increases pressure and noise. Start some self-care routine, get a morning routine in place and then start moving in the direction of getting yourself out where you feel yourself in pain. The best place to follow up with me, there’s actually 2 Andrea, one is the Momentum Podcast I think that’s where most people hear about us, we have about 6 something episodes and we just hit 2.3 million downloads. This is so cool Andrea we didn’t even notice this till recently 1,000 out of 8,000 Podcasts worldwide. But it’s so cool I’m actually paying a lot more attention to the podcasts now that I know where we are Top 1,000 worldwide. So it is momentumpodcast.com and then also there’s a pretty unique experience that’s coming up, on October 6th, 7th, and 8th, I’m doing a training called Momentum Masterclass where I’m sharing a lot more core materials and I’m doing it live and recording a content behind our paywall, but if you come live on October 6th, 7th, and 8th, you can actually watch me teach our content, you can ask questions, after that it’s going to our Paywall there’s no replays but if you want to go to momentummasterclass.com we’ll send you some Emails to prompt for you to jump on.

Andrea: Awesome! Thank you so much Alex for being here. 

Alex: My pleasure Andrea, I’ve been looking forward to this, and I’m excited to have you on my new podcast on Entrepreneurs and Momentum, I can’t wait to record that. Just for everybody listening in a few weeks we are going to release a new Podcast, and one of the first people who are going to be on it is Andrea, because you have this amazing story of coming to us thinking you always going to be in the same situation you were in and you’ve overcome it, you got where you wanted to be, and I want to be able to share that story to everybody.

Andrea: It was the hardest thing that I have ever gone to but I’m such a different person now and even my marriage is different because of it too because I’m showing up better to my family.

Alex: I can’t wait to draw that out; I’m looking forward to that interview. And by the way maybe in a few months we will come back and do it again.

Andrea: Sure absolutely! Oh my goodness guys that was a lot and he said a lot of things that I don’t think you’re ready to hear, the feelings that you are feeling doesn’t have the words for it even Alex asked after the interview was done, he said do you think that was good, do you think that people are going to take away from this, do you think that this is something that’s new to practitioners and I said look, we are all feeling the feels but we never had someone put it into words in a way we understand why we’re feeling the feels, and I believe is what I said to Alex is I said I believe that a lot of practitioners that are listening are going to get very emotional by what we talked about today we are going to reassess how they are showing up to their business, we are going to reassess the type of business structure that they are in, even if they want to be doing what they’re doing right now I think it’s going to get really make people be very uncomfortable but it is something that you cannot unhear and everything he’s saying is absolutely valid. So if you need to take a few moments after listening to this episode please do. But I would also really really want to hear from you so does Alex, so please leave your comments, please leave a direct message @AndreaMaximND about how you responded to what we talked about today, how you’re feeling, do you need that support, do you need someone to guide you through those steps to help set up those routines, to start off loading so you can get rid of that guilt that you are harboring towards your business, your family, as a side effect of that. Reach out to me as soon as you are done listening to this podcast because we want to hear about your feedback, positive or negative. We want to hear how you are taking this information. So go to @AndreaMaximND on Instagram and Drop me a DM and let me know how you kind of took this podcast episode and of course, what you need more of, what you need help with then let’s have some real talk about things that have to change to make your life better. If you want to watch this episode you can always visit on https://maximizedbusiness.ca/  you can watch the entire video and of course if there’s any way I can support you just reach out to me personally, I’m Andrea Maxim your host and I’m Out!