Doctor

So victim number two, as I said earlier is a doctor. Very, very successful large practice, his is the second name in the practice. The guy whose name is first name has retired years ago, so he is really the man at this particular practice. And as you look at those lifestyle type magazines that pretty much every community is putting out these days. He is frequently in the ‘about town’ section that highlights a lot of the charitable giving and that sort of thing. The guy is very involved in the community he is a well-known, well-recognized name and when we started talking about the markets and the conversation.

He you know was not nearly anywhere near as distraught as my real estate friend was. But he was complaining about the market little bit and, but from his point of view he still had great cash flow coming into the market place. He isn’t really thinking about pulling anything out, he still feels like he has got a lot of extra work to do so you know, when the time came I asked him, “well tell me. What in your life do you want your money to do for you?  You have addressed it or you haven’t addressed completely. What is your ultimate endgame, that you would like to achieve with your money?” and he did not hesitate for a second. “I want out of medicine. You know, it is just to the point now that there is so much paperwork, so much insurance, so much hassle, so much regulation, so much liability that it has sucked all of the joy out of the practice for me.”

And he has been doing it probably 20, 25 years so he is no spring chicken. He is a senior guy and that created a very easy question. Now I don’t know what his financial situation is but my intuition is that he has probably got a large amount of dough that is sucked away. And so I assumed that he is a pretty good prospect and I say, “well that is an interesting question and it’s probably not surprising to you that I have heard that from a lot of doctors recently. If you were out of medicine what would you like to do?” And he didn’t hesitate to give me an answer back to that. He said, “I would like to do charitable medical work. Like with the group like doctors without Borders.”

And I literally couldn’t help but chuckle here because I am like, “okay so what you want to do is get enough money so that you can get out of medicine. So that you can go and practice medicine?” I laughed, he kind of chuckles at little bit but then he turned round and said, “you know it’s totally different.” And I said, ” Well what is the difference? What do you see as the big difference?” He said, ” right now I am not practicing medicine. I am running a medical practice room. When I am doing volunteer work I am practicing medicine all day, every day. None of the hassles, none of the waiting rooms, none of the insurance forms we’re they are giving a service and making a huge difference in people’s lives.”  And I echoed that back to him, I said, “making a huge difference in people’s lives. That is what it’s all about isn’t it?” And he said, “Yep that is exactly what it is all about.” And I reached over and kind of stuck my hand on the shoulder; I wanted to anchor this feeling in, I said, “not only is that what it is all about. That is the reason that you got into medicine to begin with isn’t it?” and off he went.

And I don’t know where he went mentally but he definitely took a little bit of a trip. My guess is, he was going back to maybe pre-med school or may be in high school or maybe back even further when he saw some difference that some doctor had made in somebody’s life and decided that is what he wanted to do. So his response was to nod and to say, ” you know it is.”  Which again I go back to him and I said, “It really is isn’t it?” And there we were both nodding, both saying it is, it really, really is. ” And you have had that before with your previous volunteer work haven’t you?” And he said, “Yep I have.” Now this is going back and not into the future but the question was, when you are doing that, so even though I am asking him about something that took place in the past. I’m using a little time distortion here to bring it forward to the future “as you are doing that” framed in the present tense “what does that mean to you? What does that feel? What kind of gifts are you giving yourself?”

So this is a technique called revivication, it is he has had this experience at some point in the future and I’m wanting to revivifies, make it vivid again. Some experience that he has had in the past that he wants to enjoy in the future. And since he has already had that I don’t have to ask him to imagine what it would be like to have that it is much simpler and easier for me to go back and say, in essence conversationally, ” in essence when you have had that in the past what as that felt like?”" Although I’m going to phrase it in the present tense because I want him to experience it right now. And the answer that he gave back to me were three things, number ones with the gift of life that he is giving these folks, something that without his service and volunteer services of lots of other doctors and nurses. Many people would die so rather than in today’s modern medicine where, half the time we are going there because we can sleep all we are getting pains, or need help with erectile dysfunction or other problems that isn’t really making a huge difference in somebody’s life. He feels like when he goes down there he is giving the gift of life. But he is truly making a difference. That he is having a massive sense of contribution, which is giving him the satisfaction that is helping and contributing. Two of his big trigger words when he was talking to me. But the biggest one was when I asked them, if you remember the grip and rip formula, grip is your personal persuasion strategy, how do you know when you are achieving that? He says,  “I can see it from the joy on their faces. The faces of my patients and the faces of my patient’s parents. I know I am making a difference.”

So next we went kind of off into an interesting tangent. I am not really trying to end this guy’s business that as I am talking to him I can see that being able to do this, to have this freedom in his life. To be able to give the gift of life to these people, to have the satisfaction of contributing to them and to the other to see the joy on their faces will make a gigantic difference in his life. So I asked him about how often he has done and he has gone off on several two and three week, kind have donated time trips where he has been done there volunteering. And his goal is to someday be able to do that full-time. So we did talk little bit about what kind of money it would take to do be able to do that, which again is really kind of stuff that you want to happen a little bit later in the process. But I kind of felt that I had gone as far as I wanted to go with this particular guy and this conversation but you know what, it turns out that he has got enough money right now. That he can easily fund probably half of the year, being down there giving that. He is not going to do that initially; his initial goal is to do that one-month per quarter. But here’s a guy who is visibly moved, that has got a major life goal, which he now has got the ability to fund. And through our conversation we put him in a position where it is going to go from having done it three or four years ago for a couple of weeks, to being able to do it on a solid, a regular basis. One month per quarter. This guy’s life has dramatically changed.