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You have to live in your patient’s world
Don’t change the situation for the patient -Change their life
So how do you find something you “Love” about your prospective patients?
We would take a swipe from Mandy Len Catron’s Modern Love essay, “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This.”
Here she refers to a study by the psychologist Arthur Aron (and others) that explores whether intimacy between two strangers can be accelerated by having them ask each other a specific series of personal questions. The 36 questions in the study are broken up into three sets, with each set intended to be more probing than the previous one.
The idea is that mutual vulnerability fosters closeness. To quote the study’s authors, “One key pattern associated with the development of a close relationship among peers is sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personal self-disclosure.” Allowing oneself to be vulnerable with another person can be exceedingly difficult, so this exercise forces the issue. (source)
So what questions would we ask and where?
You could have a few fun questions asked on the new patient phone call or patient intake or you can save them for the actual consult – the more info you can collect before the consult the better though!
Here are 5 Questions We Aren’t Afraid To Ask Our Future LifeLong Patients
(Swiped from the 36 Questions to Fall in Love with Anyone)
- Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?
- For what in your life do you feel most grateful?
- What would constitute a “perfect” day for you?
- If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?
- If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future or anything else, what would you want to know?
Now to get here, to be able to ask this questions, you have to almost build instant rapport- you have to give yourself to them right away.
How do you do that?
Drop any and all bulls**t and just be you….
Sounds good. But it’s hard to drop the “mind-made” version of you. And which version do want to appear? “The Doctor” or “The Friend”?
It’s a tight line you have to walk between being too friendly and not friendly enough.
But one simple tactile way or hack of dropping your own BS (Bulls**t and Belief Systems) is right before the consult or meeting watch something funny – a brief comedy clip on Youtube – it will diffuse you, make you more relaxed and get in a very nice warm headspace.