The 5 Dangerous Assumptions You’re Making Every Day [Ep #189]

On this episode I’m going to talk about the five dangerous assumptions that you are making every single day. And you need to snap out of it. Stay tuned. 

Hey what’s up guys! I have this idea; my word for 2021 is manifest. And so, one of the things that I’ve been doing to help manifest things, to help work on manifestation, to help work on the energy side of my business which is the place that I have wanted to be for the past 10 years and finally am. Because I’ve been doing muse meditations every single night for 10 min. right before I go to bed and during those sessions, I will do my 3 gratitudes so I’m grateful for $50k a month, grateful for my $500k a year, I’m grateful that I attracted 360 new patients into my business. And so I say that every single night at the beginning of my meditation and the rest of the time I’m trying to silence my talking mind and allowing this to be a place of inspiration. And you all know exactly what I’m talking about; when you silence the talking mind or the thinking mind. Like when you’re in the shower, when you’re out for a walk with your dog or your kids. Probably not your kids, let’s use the dog example. When you’re sitting on the toilet, you have your best ideas. I will often have my best ideas when I wake up in the middle of the night, I have a hard time falling back to sleep right away it usually takes me about a half an hour. And so I will just lie there in bed and my brain will be empty and then I’ll have all these crazy ideas. So I always keep my phone next to me so that if in the middle of the night I will just keep a reminder to myself. But at the end of meditations, I always have my journal in front of me for when this ideas come. Because the ideas that you need, the ideas that you’re looking for, the support that you’re looking for were always come in the silence. 

So this idea came in the silence for me yesterday and I did a reel on it on my Instagram @andreamaximnd and immediately I was getting comments from people. So you always know you’re doing something right when people not only like but actually comment. Despite the fact that it didn’t get a huge amount of use in a short period of time it got 9 likes, it got 4 comments. People were really leaning into the messaging behind it. So I’m going to do a more elaborate spiel on the same topic and that topic are the 5 assumptions that I know you are making in your practice every single day, and you need to stop it. You need to stop it right now, because it is not serving you and most importantly it is not serving your patients or clients because when we make assumptions, you are either taking away the ability for someone to make an educated decision on their own. Immediately you are, because you’re assuming things about their results or about their ability to take action to get their results. So when you make assumptions; one you’re taking away their ability to make an informed decision. Two, you’re taking away perhaps the treatment plan or test or option for them that actually will give them the results they want. That they’re the most aligned that you’re resonating with, and if you don’t present it, you are not doing your job as a healer, as a practitioner, as a teacher as, as a guide, as a motivator. Because you are keeping that information to yourself, because of these assumptions that you’re making. So we’re going to go over all 5 of them and I’m going to elaborate on each of them. 

The first one of course is the most common one that we make is ‘I don’t think that this person can afford my treatment’. They can’t afford my business, I want to raise my rate but I don’t think people can afford me. I want to offer them a program but if it isn’t covered in insurance I don’t think they’ll going to be able to afford my program. I want to do more group support, but then it can’t be charged to insurance. That’s something that a lot of the Canadian docs specifically struggle with is we think we’re covered by insurance is an easier sell, which is true. But we also know people like Michel Paris that are putting together community programs that aren’t covered by insurance and women are loving it. That’s why she’s able to franchise this out. 

So we make these assumptions that people aren’t going to be able afford our services; one that forces us to devalue our rate. One of my favourite elite members over the three months that we’re working together she not only raised her rates once but actually twice. And the second time happened in like a four week period. So she went from charging what most docs to now saying my initials are going to be 350 and that’s just what it’s going to be. And I followed up with her a few weeks later and she’s like no one’s getting me any flack and no one’s getting me any trouble, we’re good. And now she’s raised it to even $500 for an initial to include her unique branded protocol that we developed together inside the elite membership and now she’s starting $500 for the initial. So when you start to lose this assumption that I know that you are making about your rates. Then you are going to lose that potential connection with someone. Because it is not your job to determine where they value their health, how much they value their health and how much they’re willing to spend for their health. 

The counterexample I was going to give is people have money to spend things that don’t serve them at all the time. People were spending thousands of dollars back from the day on vacations that lasted a week. And most of the time they came back more stressed out more than they left. People are spending hundreds of dollars on a pair of pants. They are spending hundreds of dollars on ordering food into their house. I think there was something like people are spending $150 over the shutdown on Uber eats a month. People will find ways to spend their money, and more often than not especially now, they are looking for ways to spend their money. They’re buying $3,000 for Peloton bikes just because they are now exercising from home and that just seems like the next logical step in losing weight. And we all know that it’s not, it’s the luxury way of doing it. People are buying technology like apple, I think quadrupled their profits over the shutdown because people were buying more tech. people were finding ways to spend their money. And if they value health, they will spend it with you if you create that connection with them, they will happily spend it with you. So don’t make assumptions on what people can afford unless they genuinely talk to you and say ‘is there any way that we can work this out? Can we do an X,Y or Z payment plan? Can we put this on a bit of a sliding scale?’ for sure, then it’s on the table. But don’t make that assumption until they bring that up. 

The second one is testing. So that was a hard blocker for me to even overcome for the first couple of years in my business because again, I didn’t value myself, I didn’t value my ability to treat people well and I knew that the testing was going to get us there faster. But I didn’t feel confident to pitch that type of testing and we’re talking like $300 sometimes as high as $650 for one tech. it comes easily to me now because I have taken my ego out of the conversation and we had a really great strategy to lay everything out. So with the GAT protocol which is our unique branded methodology which is something that I strongly encourage my MPP members to do to create to stand out. We’ve documented all of the steps in each pillar that gut adrenal thyroid pillar and with each of those pillars we have the prices clearly laid out. So when we’re in front of a patient we say ‘look this is the comprehensive GAT protocol. Here’s where the pricing is coming from.’ We just check all the little boxes, people can clearly see where the investment is coming from. And when you present it in a place of empathy, this test will give us the answer that you’re looking for. So you don’t have to waste time, you don’t have to take around, you don’t have to spend more on guessing with more visits with me, supplements and the like. This is going to get you there like give you the answers that you’re looking for. 

When you take yourself out of that conversation and you just transparently show people what it’s going to cost to get to go faster. They’re less likely to have resistance. And sometimes it’s a full no, and that’s okay. But it is your job to show them what the tests are, that you think would be the most beneficial to them and tell them what the cause is. And don’t tell it to them in a timid way, don’t tell it to them in a very voice shaky way. It’s just ‘this is what it is’. If you want to do the dry mouth test with us, its $640 bucks. It’s just what it is. You want to do Mormon testing, it’s going to be anywhere from 395 to 475, that’s just the way that it is. And then people were like ok cool, I get it. If we can get it covered through insurance, amazing. If we can’t more and more are paying out of pocket gladly because they want the answers and that is so fine. 

So now we’re going to talk about follow ups. So this is the third assumption that a lot of people make and I’ve caught a lot of newer practitioners doing this and it is ok that you’re doing this. But I’m going to try to wake you up out of this as quickly as I can. And that is, when you have a conversation about a treatment plan, a protocol, a program that you’re creating, a lab testing, and supplements you name it. And they say no in that initial conversation, then you just assumed that it’s a no forever and that is never the case. So what we do, is we don’t push, we don’t force, we don’t make it a mandatory thing that they have to commit now or their health will never get better. But we’ll just say ‘ok, I’m so fine with that. Can I put it down as a follow up conversation we can have in a month or 2.’ 

Maybe their month or 2 things will change, you will have seen whether this treatment plan that we’re working on works or not. And then maybe you’ll want to lean into this testing, or maybe your financial issues will be resolved by that time. We don’t know what’s going to happen in a couple of weeks, a couple months. So I just gently say I’m just going to put this down as a future plan and we’re going to revisit this later. And more often than not, when you position it that way. They’re like ‘ok cool, it’s not off the table, it’s just not going to happen today, that’s fine.’ But then it’s my job to follow up with them and say ‘hey, do you remember when we talked about the hormone test in our initial visit. What do you think about doing that now?’ or ‘do you remember we talked about that whole gut healing program and it’s about $150 -$200. What do you think about doing that now? Based on where you’re at on your journey at this point’. And then often times are like yeah, I think it’s time everything is good now or whatever the case may be let’s do it.

And if it’s still a no, it’s still a no, but it is still your job to continue to remind people about what their options are. It is never ever up to the patient or client to remember everything that you talked about. Because they’re usually overwhelmed by the end of your visits, and it’s your job to always remind them of what their options are. 

So this comes to assumption number 4, which is being afraid to email and a very common worry. But again you’re losing this massive form of communication, this massive ability to mind people about what your services are, what promos are going on, what you’re launching, what’s new about the office. Reminding them about seasonal things like we just did one single email on Sunday which was 6 days ago about allergy season. And we have had so many people comment in the book, asking us about how we support allergies naturally. You have to email your audience, you have to email your patients. And that email has to be structured in such a way that it’s not a generic newsletter email. Those are such a waste of everyone’s time quite frankly when you have 4 or 5 different rows of new things that are going on in the office it’s overwhelming, people glaze over. Those emails seem to be very focused on particular outcome so if you have to send out 5 in a week so that each email has its own clear outcome. Cool. If you only need to send out one, amazing. Which you should not be having multiple actions that are needing to be taking on that email. 

However emailing your people once a month is not good enough. I know email is getting saturated, I know people are getting annoyed with it, it doesn’t matter, email is still king. People are still making thousands of dollars off of email. Every time we do our beta launch with our elite level member, they make 2-4k on 4 emails every single time. People are still checking their emails, even if they don’t open your email. You are popping up top of mind and they’re reminded about you, and if you let too much time go by then you will get forgotten. So you need to be leaning into emailing at least once a week for whatever the reason is even if it’s ‘hey I just went on Instagram live, go check out on my video.’ Do that. But the emails are very important and it is an asset that you can’t just leave us on a shelf. Every email you get is like getting money into your marketing bank and you need to be in your during those emails. 

And then 5, this is summarizing everything that we’ve already talked about but this is again, assuming that if you layout all of the options for your patients or clients that they will get too overwhelmed and they won’t know how to make a decision. And so therefore you hold a lot of your cards to your chest, you just think you know what I’ll play these cards when I feel that the time is right. Again, there’s different ways of presenting all of the information to make it a lot less overwhelming. If you just do by mouth, yes, no one’s going to remember half of the things that you say because people are always just half listening. But if you present it on a very easy sheet with little check boxes with a quick note that you can make that they can take home with them, they are much more likely to be ‘ok cool, I see where we’re going. I see why I have to make such an upfront investment. Or I see why I have to invest on this test, or I see why these supplements are important. Cool, I get it.’ 

Again it is your job to give your patients or clients the most informed decision that they can make every single time. Because every time that I don’t do that, I wished that I had because I assumed that it wasn’t the right time. I assumed that it wasn’t the right protocol, we will end up wasting months, come back to what I originally didn’t want to present as if being a solution to all of their problems. So I have learned the hard way, I’m hoping to tell you to don’t do as I’ve done. Do as I’m telling you to do right now and stop making these assumptions. So I’m going to summarize them all again; one, is that they can’t afford your treatment plan, your program, and your group offering whatever. They will value health if they value health and they’ll find a way to pay it, so don’t make that assumption. Two, don’t make an assumption that they can’t afford testing, because more often than not people that we attract the most are the ones that want answers, they want answers quickly. They don’t want to dick around, they don’t want to be taking supplements for no reason, they want to know what’s going on, they will take the test. 

Three, follow up. Don’t let the no today be the cemented no for tomorrow. You need to follow up, you need to remind people about your previous conversations, you need to remind other people about your other services. You need to remind people about your protocols, about your programs, every single visit. It is your job to remind them, it’s not their job to prompt you and that’s where the future plan comes in. Four, email follow up. Nurture those emails, let them know what’s going on in your office every single week. It is your responsibility to treat those emails like gold, because they are gold. And if you wait monthly or you forget all the time or you just don’t put value in it you’re losing out on massive recurring revenue especially from past patients or clients. It is way more expensive to acquire new ones for you to nurture the ones you already have. And five, you don’t hold any cards at the chest layout the entire hand and let them choose what to do, what they don’t want to do, what they want to do in the future. That is your job, your job is to always give them as much of an informed decision as you can. 

So I would love to hear from you how this landing is, if this is waking you up. But if you remember back in the day when you used to make those assumptions and now you’re not please let me know. By just commenting, hitting me up on Facebook, Instagram @andreamaximnd and I just want to hear from you. I want to make sure this is working. So in the meantime download my maximized practitioner handbook, links are in the show notes. And that will walk you through a lot of those limiting beliefs and obsessed blockers that a lot of you have, I don’t want you to have I want you to follow in my footsteps and run down the path that I’ve created. And of course if there’s any way that I can support you in particular that 30 min game plan call with me, we’ll chat about what’s working, what isn’t working and how I can support you and that is what I’m always here for.