Confidence comes from talking less not more

How often have you experienced a moment of silence in a conversation with a patient and you felt awkward? Most times this awkward feeling is felt by both people and the person who speaks next is at a disadvantage.

This is the biggest difference between recommending and selling. Your job as the doctor is to educate your patients on all aspects of your care. You need time to explain how your adjustments work and will benefit them in the long run. You need to tell them how using exercise, whole food nutrition, stress management and stretching will provide continued benefit and value to them. They need to hear why a long term relationship with your office is really in their best interest.

However, all of these communications cannot be done in one or two visits. Your job is to pick one and tell this side of the story on each visit. Even more important is to make your point and then shut up and listen to the response you get from your patient. If you have engaged them in the proper way, they will provide you with their point of view.

Some will agree, some will disagree and some will have further questions. Any of these three responses gives you the opportunity to strengthen your doctor-patient relationship. The last thing you want to do is to continue talking through the pause or further clarify a point you made without letting them talk. When you do this you are walking into the selling realm. You want to make your recommendations and then listen to their response.

Our goal as physicians is to make our patients accountable for their own healthcare decisions. They need to take a proactive role in staying healthy for a lifetime. Our job is to challenge them to do so. Your recommendations should be designed to lead them in that direction. They might not agree with you because they have no other frame of reference, but if you consistently tell them the same story and they hear similar stories from other sources, this leads to credibility and validation.

So make your point then listen. You don’t always have to be the one leading the conversation. Besides, everyone loves to make things their idea anyway. If you give them a story they can agree with, they will take the ball and run with it, and you have another patient for life.