What we’ll go through to be the best leaders we can be!

This weekend we spent a bunch of hours sitting in a freezing cold room, getting a ton of information.  Awesome information, and teaching.  But being taught, and having information piled on us, is never what is going to make us the best at what we do.  We realize that we get to be the best at leading people to health, because of what we go through beyond the information.

You see, having knowledge never makes you good.  Having knowledge is a stepping stone towards being good, but the step is a huge one.  In a world where marketing and sales are the driving forces behind health information, or better yet, healthcare LIES.  The step between knowledge and good, or greatness, is a huge leap towards faith.  This weekend we heard, more than once, that at some point to be a great leader you need to stop worrying about the consequences, and just say what is right.

This is a difficult thing to manage in a world where we are told that we cannot tell you what to do when it comes to medication.  That would be practicing medicine without a license.  We cannot advise you in matters of medical advice, only in spinal advice, lest we risk being reprimanded by the state board, penalized, fined or even have a license revoked.  To me, the biggest issue we have with a system like this, is that too many chiropractors are scared to speak truth because of it.  As a matter of fact, most organized chiropractic associations are lobbying to become more inclusive in the medical procedures, and to submit our will, so that we might find ourselves in the favor of the establishment.  To me that is selling out, and it is taking your best interest for granted.  I bet one day I will find myself in court because I am not scared to say what needs to be said.  I will count on God when that day comes.

It was about six years ago that I was driving down to Orlando for a seminar (put on by Maximized Living, though they had a different name back then).  My younger brother was going to school here at Life to become a chiropractor, and he worked with us too, so he was on the trip with me.  I got a message that a Dr. Anderson wanted to talk with me about one of my patients, a young boy with autism.  I did not know who Dr. Anderson was, I just knew that my patients (the mom and the boy both) were in the docs office, and he wanted to talk with me now.  I called him up, to find that he was a pediatrician (actually pretty well known I have since found out), and he was trying to convince my patient to give her son a flu shot.

When I got on the phone he came after me hard.  “I was just curious why you would be advising this mom to not give her son the flu shot.  He has an asthmatic condition that puts him at greater risk for the flu, and he needs this shot.  He could die without this shot, and you are the one who will be responsible should anything happen to him!”  I wasn’t expecting it, but I was ready… “his mom is fully responsible for his decisions, all I have done is provide information and the obvious truths of that information have allowed her to make her wise choice.  You are telling me that you have no concern for putting additional mercury into a child who is full spectrum autism, with profound signs of neurological dysfunction?  The reality is that he is at no greater risk of influenza because of his rare asthmatic events, and the real truth is that the chance of the flu shot preventing death according to medical literature is one in one hundred million, and his mom has followed a plan very specifically to improve his immune system, and all that flu shot would do is weaken it.  Do you believe that putting additional mercury, aluminum, and unknown amino acid strands from chickens will not have a negative effect on his immune system and nervous system? Are you really willing to take the risk of worsening his autistic tendencies through increased toxin exposure?  The mother has made me aware of his toxic assay showing his arsenic levels are twenty times the normal acceptable level, do you think it wise to increase his toxic load?  If you do, then YOU educate your patient and let her make her informed choice!”

He put her on the phone for me, I told her to stick with whatever decision made sense.  She found a new pediatrician… well, she mostly used us from then on.  Her son had improved continuously since that day as she aggressively pursued options to remove toxins.

You don’t just need a good chiropractor, you need a great leader.  God is where that leadership flows from, we are good because we trust Him, and we know that we have the support of a creator.  All we need to do, is to train ourselves to trust in that support, and take larger grander steps than the culture opposing us.  So, how do we do that?  One thing that I believe in, is conditioning ourselves to overcome pain.  There is a doc (Chris Pellow) who used to sit around at these Maximized Living events, kind of quietly hanging in the back… he never built a big practice, or impacted many people. Until.  One day he was driving home and he heard a dad on a radio show, talking about how his son was suicidal, he was on antidepressants, and he seemed to be worsening.  The dad was crying, he didn’t know what to do, and he communicated that he had found his son with a gun.

The dad was pleading for advice, and Dr. Pellow thought “I can do this, I can call him”, but then a voice in his head said, “no, not you, this isn’t for you… what are you going to be able to do?”  So an MD calls in and advises him to keep upping the dose of antidepressants (this was before antidepressants were labeled with the black box warning of causing suicidal behavior).  Dr. Pellow found himself staring in the mirror at home later that day, swearing to never be a coward again, to never let an opportunity to save a life slide by.  His practice grew from a meager 150 visits a week, to 1500 in six months time.  Perhaps the fastest growth ever seen in a chiropractic practice, as he began touching lives in his community.  Seeing medication use drop, and filling his office with testimonials of healing.

One of Pellow’s convictions, is that God gives you opportunity, and that opportunity is usually painful.  He works out like we do, to the point of real pain.  He lost 70 lbs in short time as he transformed his life and his practice.  This story of practice success is directly related to his willingness to do what was uncomfortable.  To begin speaking about uncomfortable things.  To win over a community from the lies of the medical model, a model that tells you to be complacent, that you can’t do enough yourself, that somewhere a pill will take the place of exercise, diet, and chiropractic.  Even if that pill is a holistic vitamin, it is still a pill.  Vitality lies within your tissue, within your brain and intersects with your soul.  This is cool stuff!

So, on the path towards pain, your staff has taken a huge step this weekend.  They all workout to the point of pain a few times a week, every week.  But I put them through a couple great tests, and they did it out of their desire to be more… for you, for their families and for the world that desperately needs a more powerful them.  On Friday they worked out hard in nearly 100% humidity and 95 degree heat directly in the path of the relentless sun.  It was a heart pounding 8 minute or less effort that left them all lying in the St. Augustine grass, unconcerned for the itching that it was pounding on them, because of their desperate need for oxygen and general lack of concern for anything else.

Later that night as we marinated our grass fed dinner, we went out after another workout.  In this, we had to accomplish hundreds of group sit-ups, push-ups, squats and jump ropes while one at a time we went out and ran a pre-determined course.  The kicker was that I was the only one with a watch, and we had pre-set the minimum speed that each of us had to run the course in.  If they ever came in over the time allotment, they automatically just added one extra lap to all of the teammates.  Without having a watch to look at, each of them obliterated the times that were pre-set, and we finished the workout 4 minutes faster than we thought we could.

And the final straw… I drove them 7 hours after the seminar ended Saturday night, and as we turned onto I-575, I turned down the radio and informed them that even though it was 2am.  I was not taking them back to the office to drive home… yet… I was taking them straight to the gym.  I heard no verbal complaints, though none of us wanted to do it.  The only reason why I did it, is because I told Levi we were going to (a few hours earlier) so now I couldn’t back out.  We had to each pick a workout to do that we had a known prior time.  If we could all successfully do the workout and  have our total cumulative time come in under the previous, then we would be good, and we would all go home.  If it was over, then we would run.  If the run was slower than the time allotment, we would run more, and this would continue!

Well, this team knows how to overcome pain and work towards a mission.  We crushed the previous times (which would have been following more rest, and no 7 hour drive)!  This was accomplished by Loree, Angel and Dr. Levi… I was part of it, but they were the warriors that made it happen.  I think most would have said no way, and would have complained and whined.  I did not hear one verbal complaint.  They solemnly did.

We are committed to helping you as best as possible.  We are likely going to take a bunch of you and add some more specific home exercises where we see fit, you might be asked to invest in some head weights, as we realized this weekend that it is likely that more of you could benefit from these.  We are going to bring more workshops to the lunch hour, and cut them into 20 minute segments so that there is increased accessibility to all that we offer.  Life is a constant battle of choices.  We all know this, and we all know that the choices that come easy, are usually not the best ones.  If we are to help you make the best choices, then we need to help make hard… easier.

Love that you are part of the mission!  God Bless!!  – Dr. E