person who comes into your life that day. By doing just these last two things, you will be amazed at how your life will open. Nothing would give us more happiness than being able to somehow wave a magic wand and make all of you spectacularly successful. Unfortunately, that is an inside game, and you are the only player qualified to participate. Remember always: “You change your thoughts, and you change your life.” Key component #4: Nothing can limit your growth, only small ideas We live in a world where mediocre is celebrated as a win. Where everybody who competes gets a trophy and nobody academi-cally fails, they just get pushed on to a higher hurdle even more difficult to get over. For whatever reason we are being trained or conditioned to think small and stick with the herd. Keep your head down, do a good job and whatever you do, never colour outside of the lines. The problem for some of us is that when you are running with the herd, chances are you are going to spend most of your life looking at someone else’s bottom. Our current society and institutions provide little in the form of encouragement to stand out in the crowd or go a different di-rection. In fact, it almost seems that thinking differently has become a punishable offence. Innovation or new ideas come with a price, that being a higher possibility of failure or setback and it seems that we have in many ways lost our tolerance for failure making innovative thinking almost dangerous. In an article published in the Har-vard Business Review, entitled: The Hard Truth About Innova-tive Cultures by Gary Pisano, the author notes, “A tolerance for failure requires an intolerance for incompetence. A willingness to experiment requires rigorous discipline. Psychological safety www.Cndoctor.ca requires comfort with brutal candor.” Throughout history great things have happened when well-meaning people have conceived a new idea or novel ap-proach to a problem or threatening situation and fought tooth and nail to protect and foster the righteousness of it. As chiro-practors and naturopaths, we are considered among many in traditional western healthcare, as outliers or fringe dwellers. To a degree, we are acknowledged and tolerated, but rarely em-braced and welcomed to the party. This from a system that in a 2019 statistical survey by Statista showed that only 46% of Canadians and 30% of Americans were satisfied with the na-tional health system. Just as life as we know it is changing, so has healthcare’s ability to deal with the needs of its consumers. People are right-fully losing faith and more importantly respect for the ability of western medicine to effectively deal with current challenges much less the future demands of an aging population. This is not conjecture, this is fact, and the sad thing is that nobody seems to be grabbing a mitt and getting into the game. We all see this every day in practice as patients constantly voice their displeasure with the current health care delivery system’s ina-bility to satisfy their needs. With this, there is a groundswell of people actively looking for new ways to stay healthy. In many respects we have lost the battle of fighting disease, and the only way the human race is likely to survive this century will be found in rediscovering what it means to be healthy. We have forgotten that health has always been the intended expres-sion of life. For the most part, we get sick not by chance, but because something systemically has gone wrong with the or-ganism creating a predisposition to illness. Health has in some way been compromised. This is not rocket science; it is just logic and common sense. The only way to ever fight disease effectively is to create a healthier species. To build upon the thousands of generations of evolutionary trial and error and capitalize on or discover strategies to effectively facilitate health. This is where the need to think big comes in. We believe that chiropractic and naturopathy are perfectly positioned to lead the new health discovery movement. We all know that efficiency of movement is pivotal to health and lon-gevity, as is the maintaining of efficient biological and physio-logical systemics. The body inherently possesses everything that is required to maintain health. What we don’t have is a proactive enhancement strategy to take the human body and make it stronger and more resilient. Lasting health improvements can only occur through the identification of core components of what it means to be alive and then the creation of programs to systematically nurture their improvement. Better food, better fluids, better movement, better breathing, better detoxification and better sleep. He/she who finds the solutions here will have automatically created a better machine, with improved capabilities in all facets of per-formance. If you truly wish to create a hero’s legacy in health care, cre-atively find ways to better service the foundational components of what it means to be healthy, for your patients. The informa-tion and tools to support this is out there. Let’s find ways to bring science and pragmatics together to build better human beings. Think large colleagues. March/April 2022 Chiropractic and Naturopathic Doctor 17
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