The Practitioner's Game - Don't Stop After One Shot!

You worked hard to get here. The certifications, the training, the personal health journey that lit the fire in the first place. None of that was easy. You earned your seat at the table.

So why are you treating your first missed shot like it's the last one you'll ever take?

In this episode of The Fulfilled Practitioner, Ricky uses a powerful sports analogy to unpack one of the most self-defeating patterns he sees in talented practitioners: quitting after the first attempt. The first post that didn't land. The first webinar nobody showed up to. The first email campaign that got crickets.

Elite athletes don't retire after a missed shot. They study it, adjust, and come back with better mechanics. Over time, their shooting percentage improves. That's not luck, that's the system.

Ricky breaks down why practitioners need to shift from measuring success by whether the first shot goes in, to measuring success by how much their shooting percentage improves over time. Because the practitioners who build real, sustainable practices aren't the ones who got everything right on the first try, they're the ones who stayed on the ice long enough to get good at the game.

In this episode:

• Why quitting early is costing you more than you realize
• The mindset shift that separates struggling practitioners from thriving ones
• How to use every "miss" as data to sharpen your approach
• What increasing your shooting percentage actually looks like in practice

Wayne Gretzky missed 83% of his shots.

You didn't come this far to walk off the ice after one shot.

Get my book The Fulfilled Practitioner for FREE: www.rbrar.com/tfpbook

Follow me on instagram: @fulfilledpractitioner

Follow me on Facebook: @drrickybrar

Set up a strategy call with me here: Schedule Here

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:32

What's up, everyone? Welcome back to the Fulfilled Practitioner Podcast. I'm your host, Ricky, and today we're going to dive into something deep that I constantly see with practitioners. And honestly, it's one of those things that when I say it out loud, it's probably gonna sound absurd at first, but it's happening every single day, and it might be happening to you. So let me start by giving you a good example. If you guys have been following the podcast for a bit, you know I love sports and I love sports examples. So just follow along with me here. Hypothetically, put yourself in this situation and let me paint this picture for you. So let's go back to your childhood and imagine you're a kid, and you're not just any kid, you're that kid. You're the one that always seems a step ahead of everyone else. Uh in sports, you're the fastest on the ice, you're the sharpest shooter on the court, you're the one the coaches might pull aside and say, Hey, you know you've got something special here, right? And it's not just that you stop there, you work for it too. So every morning you have early practices, every night you're staying up late in the driveway, honing your craft. Every offseason, when your friends are partying, you're in the gym, you're with coaches, you're improving overall. And you don't just have talent, you have the work ethic to back it up too. And it's this combination that gets you noticed. So slowly scouts start showing up to all of your games, recruiters are calling, and then the magic happens. You get drafted, you make it to the big leads, whether that's the NHL, the NBA, the NFL, whatever sport you have some sort of relationship with, you made it to the highest level in this example. And this is everything you've worked for. Now let's fast forward to your first game. The crowd is super loud, the lights are shining bright. This is real now. And your moment comes to take your first shot and the goalie saves it, or you miss that basket, or that pass gets deflected. And then you walk off the ice, you walk off the court, and you say, you know what? This isn't for me. And you never play again. Now I know what everyone's thinking, like, Ricky, that's the craziest example ever. Why are you telling me this? No athlete would ever do that. They wouldn't just walk off the court after taking a single shot. And you're absolutely right, no athlete would. But here's what I need you to hear: this is exactly what most practitioners do with their practice. I have the honor of working with some of the most talented people ever. So this includes chiropractors, naturopaths, functional medicine dogs, health coaches, people who have been through the fire personally. They got their own health back. They went through trainings, they got certifications, they put in the years and they've helped a lot of people. And then when they want to grow and they want to put this messaging out to the world, they make their first social media post and maybe it bombs in their perspective, uh, where it gets three likes and two of them they're family members, or they host their first webinar and only two people show up, or they send that first email to their list and they get no replies and maybe even an unsubscribe. So just like that, they go quiet. They pull back, they tell themselves that same story, like the athlete from our example. This isn't working, social media is not for me, my people aren't online, or some sort of excuse there. So if you really boil this down, a lot of practitioners they take one shot after spending a lifetime, after spending years finding out what their true purpose is, what their passion is, what education they should get, going through all of that. And they take that one shot, it gets saved by the goalie, and they walk away from the game. So today we're gonna go through a bit of a reframe here because ultimately I want you to win the practitioner game. There's too many people that need our help. This is the big core principle and core vision of the fulfilled practitioner, is we need more fulfilled practitioners out there who understand their purpose, their role, and they understand themselves and what makes them fulfilled and where they can deliver and where they need to work on certain aspects of their game. So, what we need to do is we need to think of ourselves like hybrid athletes. And if you've listened to the podcast for a bit, I highly recommend go checking out the hybrid athlete episode that we did. But if we really compare ourselves to athletes, whether you resonate with sports or maybe you don't watch any sports, the example still hits home. Here's what we often forget about elite athletes. Think about Wayne Gretzky, who is considered the greatest hockey player of all time. If you take a look at his missed shots, he's taken a lot of shots. Guess what his career shooting percentages? So, how many shots that he took actually went in the net and produced a goal? It's actually around 17%. So he, as of recently, had the goal record. It was just recently broken, but at the time he had 894 goals and he took over 5,000 shots on net. So that means roughly 83% of his shots didn't go in. 83% of his attempts failed if you take a look at it from a solely goal metric. The goal is the goal, a goal on net, uh score, that's the goal. And if it didn't go in, that's a failure, right? So really compare this to yourself as a practitioner. Think about other examples. Michael Jordan, another very famous person. He's considered the greatest basketball player of all time. He was cut from his high school basketball team. Babe Ruth, one of the greatest baseball players of all time, he struck out over 1,300 times in his career. And all of these people, I can go on all day. We don't remember them for what didn't go in. We remember them for what did. And here's the thing that separates elite performers from everyone else. It's not that they just kept shooting. Like anybody can keep shooting. It's that every shot made them better. Every miss was data, every rep refined their form, every attempt that they made increased their shooting percentage over time. So this is important. They weren't just taking more shots, they were taking smarter shots. They had better mechanics over time, better timing, better read of the defense. And that's the whole game in a nutshell. So, what does this actually look like for you? I meet so many people that they did their first webinar and only two people showed up, and that was their first shot on goal. And instead of taking it as, hey, this is my first shot on goal, maybe I should go for that second shot, that third shot, they give up. And the real reframe is you need to learn from that. How can I refine this process? If we actually take a look at it, did I learn something from this process? Maybe my title wasn't that good of my presentation. People weren't really attracted to it. Maybe the platform I used was way too complicated and way too confusing. What about the time of day? Was this a 6 a.m. webinar that you did or a 9 p.m. webinar? Was this at a time that the likelihood of people not showing up was higher? And then one of the biggest ones is like, how did you promote it? If we actually take a look at your promotion style, did you just post about it once and hope to get a packed room full of people and you never talked about it again? So we need to look at these variables. Because if we did look at these variables and we refined upon this, the next webinar you do gets better. And it's not because you got lucky, it's because you actually got better. Take a look at social media. Think about maybe an Instagram post that you made that flopped. Did you actually take a look at why? Take a look at the hook. Was there even a hook in place? Was the hook very weak? Was it something that people resonate with? Was the image that you use blurry and unclear? Was it just random stock images that you're using? Did you maybe use too much jargon? Did it produce more word salad than something meaningful that people can connect to? So if you actually take a look, now you know, and now you can refine. So every piece of content that you put out, every talk that you give, every consult you have, they're shots, right? And the goal isn't to make every one of them. The goal is to keep shooting and keep improving. So at the end of the day, whether we're talking about sports or we're talking about being a practitioner, we have to play the volume game. Volume creates opportunity, but volume combined with refinement, that's what actually creates momentum. That's where you actually start to win. And that's where you actually start to see some of these goals go in past the goalie. So in real life, we actually hit goalies every day, right? The algorithm changes as an example, right? People don't have as much trust in things that they see online anymore, especially in this new world that's filled with tons of AI slop and garbage and just a saturation of like bulk created content out there. People are a bit more on the fence before actually trusting something that they see online. And then if you're somebody who is posting and you're posting maybe randomly, maybe you are playing the volume game, but that volume has no refinement. There's no clarity. Your first post and your hundredth post might have the same quality to them. And that's because you never took that data, that feedback, and actually improved your process. So that's the difference between practitioners who break through and the ones who stay stuck. And it's not just talent. The talent is something that a lot of practitioners have tons and tons of. It's not credentials either. A lot of people think that they need to just keep going to certification program after certification program. And at the end of the day, sometimes it's not even timing, it's the willingness to stay on the court, stay on the ice, take the shots, study the misses, and come back the next day with a slightly better shot. Every professional athlete reviews film. That's a big part of becoming a better athlete, is reviewing film. My six-year-old plays hockey, he plays rap hockey, and guess what? We review film. I have a service that records his games and we actually go through what he did right, what things he can improve upon. And I'm starting to notice those differences in his game. So if athletes are doing this, we as practitioners need to learn something from that. We need to learn that this is the only way to make that process better. Now, I do want to address a unique aspect of this, something that I suffered with for the longest time, and it's still a work in progress, if I'm being totally transparent here. I want to address the fear piece here because I think it's real and I don't want to gloss over it. A lot of practitioners, practitioners, they go quiet, not because they don't care. They go quiet because they care too much. So they care too much about judgment. They're afraid of judgment, they're afraid of looking stupid. They're afraid that someone from their clinic days is going to see their Instagram post and think, what does he think he is or she thinks he is? What does he think he's doing? Like this is a bit extreme. This isn't the person I remember. And I've been there, right? So I've ebbed and flowed with this my whole career. There were seasons where I was showing up consistently, seasons where I went completely silent on different platforms. And what I've learned the hard way is that every day that I stay invisible, someone who needs my help doesn't find me. And the same is true for you. You didn't build your expertise to keep it for yourself. You didn't put in all this work to get drafted to the big leagues and then never play a game again. You went through what you went through, whatever inspired your journey to get started, whether it's your health journey, whether it was the training, the sacrifices you made. And it was to hand people that lifeline and give them someone that can support them on their journey. But they can't find you if you're not in the arena, if you're not even playing on the court. So visibility, I've talked about this before in other episodes. It's a skill, it's not a personality type, it's not necessarily a gift that certain people were born with. It's a skill. And that means you can learn it, you can practice it, and you can get better at it, but only if you dedicate yourself to taking more shots and refining your process every single time. So here's what I want to help you walk away with today. Stop measuring success by whether the first shot goes in. Please don't do that. I've just met so many practitioners who tell me really hard stories about this thing that they tried and it didn't work and it's not for them and they don't want to go back there, right? So stop measuring success if that first shot goes in or doesn't go in. Start measuring it by how many shots you're taking, and more importantly, how your shooting percentage is improving over time. So initially, you might do that one webinar and it produces no results. So your shooting percentage is 0%. There's no results. But let's say by the time you do 10 webinars, that shooting percentage has gone up to 20%, right? So now 20% of the people showing up are then taking you up on whatever your offer is, whether it's to jump on a call with you or fill out some sort of form or assessment, that's improving over time. And here's the truth. So one great webinar probably won't change your practice. But if you get 50 under your belt and each one is a little sharper, a little more dialed in with a slightly better offer and a slightly clearer message, this builds magic. That's when the magic happens, that builds something real. And the same thing with an Instagram post. One post won't get you clients, but a few months of consistently refined content where you're learning what resonates, what your people respond to, what lights them up, what creates trust, and trust actually creates that relationship for people to want to work with you. That's what's going to create ongoing success for you. So you're not failing because a goalie saved your shot. You're failing because you never took a second shot. And I really want to hammer that point home. So here's where we come down to what can be done about this. So one of the biggest things I do when I work with practitioners is I look to help them increase their shooting percentage. I look at the things that they already do well. So, as an example, I wouldn't make a basketball player who's never stepped foot on the ice start practicing ice hockey and taking slap shots because they don't know the technique. So the first thing is we have to take you as a person and see what you do well specifically, first and foremost. And then we have to stack on the refinements. So this is where over time we're going to increase your shooting percentage that's specific to you. So I don't generally just give blanket, non-helpful answers to practitioners like post more or be more consistent. That's super easy advice. You could watch a YouTube video and learn that. That doesn't really help anyone. So when I work with practitioners, we take a look at what they're doing, what they're putting out there, we take an audit of their entire effort that they're making. And we also look at the other side of the coin. Like, why do you think things haven't worked? If we look at this, and if I was approaching this from the view of a prospective client who maybe doesn't have any sort of uh training in the health industry, it's completely new to them as well, especially in the natural health and nutrition and performance industries. Uh, we need to refine that message so they understand it. We need to understand how are you working with people? Like, what are you actually offering here? And then most importantly, we need to build the system so the shots start landing at a higher rate over time. So the practitioners I work with, they aren't missing because they don't have the goods. They have the talent. I've said that many times today. I know so many of you are the most talented people. If I was a fly in the room uh during one of your consults, I would be a very impressed fly. I would think I was watching a superhero at work here. But the problem is that you don't take enough of those shots and you don't have a coach that's showing you a vantage point that you might not see about yourself. So this is where a basketball player doesn't necessarily know exactly what their elbows are doing and what their shoulders are doing and what their knees are doing and how high they're jumping and when they're releasing the ball, all from feel alone. And that's why every single elite basketball player that shoots really well, they have somebody who's guiding them on the mechanics and the structure and making sure that the system is there so this is repeatable for them and they can execute that shot whether it's in the playoffs with high pressure or it's just a preseason game that doesn't really mean much. So always go back to these elite athletes and remember they all have coaches and they're we know they're talented. Talent alone hasn't created many amazing athletes. It's when it's mixed with refinement and hard work, work ethic, and also being open-minded to what can be done differently. So that's what I want to be for the practitioners I work with. That's my mindset the entire time I'm working with them. Is I'm working with elite athletes and I need to find out what their superpowers are, and then we need to refine those superpowers over time. So if this resonates with you, please reach out. I'd love to jump on a call with you. Uh, if you have not read my book, The Fulfilled Practitioner, that's in the show notes for you. You could get a free digital copy. And if you want a physical copy, that link is there as well. And this is where we can figure out what the adjustments are for you. So that's down in the show notes for you. And that's a wrap for today. So if this hits home for you, uh, all I ask is if you could think of somebody who might benefit from this episode, please share it with them. Uh, you are living in a world where there's not enough of us. And with the way everything is going in the world right now, stress is at an all-time high, people are getting sicker and sicker. There is never going to be a higher point of need for people to find fulfilled practitioners than there is right now and going forward. So please, if you haven't, leave a review. That generally will help the show a ton. And remember, keep taking the shots, get better with every single one. And that's how you win the practitioner game. I'll see you in the next episode.