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THE STORY OF
SLIPPING AND CHECKING[/align]
EVER PLAY GOLF? Or, rather, play at it, for few, if any, ever play it. It’s a game that baffles you every hour, every day, every time you go out to play.
Before you leave home you have your mind all made up to play a good game. You have fully set yourself, your mind is trimmed, your joints properly oiled and cleaned so they work easy — all is just hunky-dory and you play rotten.
On another occasion, you go to tee 1, your mind is clear, you have no particular worries, you are relaxed, your stance perfect, your swing just right, yet for some reason — darned if you know — the club toed your ball and you sliced away off and disgraced yourself in the eyes of all.
You go on to another tee. You think you have found out why — only to correct those defects to find that now your ball hooks and makes no distance.
It is a tantalizing game. If everything is just right, your ball takes a long jump down the fairway and then rolls about fifty yards and lands you so you can get on the green with an approach. But — and here’s the game — betwixt and between your mind and the score is the difference between doing those thousands of little things just right and doing hundreds of them just wrong.
And — here’s the lesson to be learned — betwixt and between your mind that wants to succeed and the score that fails is the mind that either cares or doesn’t care, concentrates or doesn’t, slips and slides and checks and corrects.
For, between the man who plays golf and the man who plays at it, is the one man who keeps slipping, but he keeps checking and the other man who keeps slipping, does not know it and therefore doesn’t check, therefore goes on playing a rotten game until the end of time.
We write this from the book of life, from actual experience. We are writing now from a room in Grove Park Inn, at Asheville, North Carolina, between lecture dates. We have been here ten days trying to play golf; rather, trying to master our mind to make it do what we know it must do if our hands are to do what our head tells them to.
Grove Park Inn is the finest resort hotel in the world. Even as we write, we can look out the window down upon one of the finest golf links in the world. Two miles away is the famous Biltmore Country Club, built by Mrs. George W. Vanderbilt. We have played at golf over there, too. We have been spending ten days, morning or afternoon, trying to train our head to master our hands, for golf is a game of where mind is master. Golf is a state of mind.
As we sit here, or try it on the links, we have seen hundreds of worthwhile men going through this struggle which, after all is said and done, is a fight of checking on the slips and slipping on the checks.
Golf is a game of ups and downs. Today, a good game; tomorrow, a rotten one. The man who plays a consistent game, day after day, is the man who has mastered his mind, gotten it under control and trained to do his bidding.
We have watched and studied these men, at playing golf or at work at the game of golf — for golf is a play at which you work, or work at which you play, which is always but a viewpoint.
We saw one man the other day dub a shot. He got mad, rared, fumed, cussed the caddy, the hill, the grounds, and then deliberately broke a club on the ground. He surely was in a rage. He was an old player so far as time goes, but he was a novice in the game of himself.
We saw another man dub his shot. Quietly, and without a single word, and without any visible trace of changed expression, that man took another ball from his pocket, stood there on the tee, stroked his chin, looked over into the Blue Ridge Mountains, took inventory of his slips, checked them, teed his ball, took his time, took his stroke and drove a long shot straight down the fairway.
Golf is a game of minds. The first man lost his. The second man used his. Some men never play the game because they never think. Other men are learning to play the game because they study and never get beyond that stage.
Golf is an obvious lesson. What we think is expressed the next minute later in the attitude of the ball. If the ball slices or hooks, our mind sliced and hooked. If the ball goes straight, our mind was thinking along straight lines without resistance.
We think one minute and our action expresses that thought the next minute. There is no lost time between the time when we thought and the time that thought demonstrated its character.
How different is business! We think today and perhaps do not see the net result until that thought has gone out into the channels of business and been bounced and bounded about for weeks or months, and then comes back later to slice or hook; and we do not associate the sliced or hooked thought of months before with the sliced or hooked business months later.
And that leads us to the full object of writing this epistle at this time to you folks.
For years, we have seen our profession slicing and hooking. We have seen our fellows slipping and sliding. At present, everybody is well aware that we are not where we were a few years back. There is a generally well-known depression on. Everywhere it is said that “business is slow” and “I have not the business I had a few years ago.” The whole darned thing seems on the fault-crack and the earthquake has all but engulfed us. Why?
For two years the best minds in our profession have been traveling and checking, backward and forward. We have held conferences, here and there. We have verified, corrected, and certified in many parts of the country where conditions are different — and the conclusion we herein give is universal.
We have had men out on the road visiting you failures, you successes. We have been out ourselves. We have watched, checked your offices, your business, and we conclude that facts herein given are true and hit the taproot.
We have talked with many Chiropractors, at home, from many places. We have talked with many Chiropractors, at their home towns, in different states in which we have been. We have pumped hard and they didn’t know why. We even did so to many at Lyceum, last year, and this, and they couldn’t understand our motives. We did.
The Chiropractic profession has been slipping.
The Chiropractic profession has not been checking.
And, as we made this application to ourselves, we did so knowing full well that what applies to our mind and muscle is no different from what has been applying itself to all other businesses and professions in America, until today the entire United States is in a mental slip and without its mental check, hence we are damning the caddy, the ball, and finally blaming external conditions even to breaking our club by getting mad and refusing to any longer play according to the rules of the game.
Business is just as much a state of mind as is golf. If the golf mind slips and checks itself the stroke is improved. If the business mind slips and does not check itself, the financial returns are bad.
Our profession is in a slipping slump.
Many people have offered many reasons for this. One says it is because we do not conduct a larger national publicity campaign; another says it is because there are too many Chiropractors for the patients who know about it; another says it is because we are wedded to selling a “ticket” rather than selling a health service; another says it is because taxes are outrageous and should be reduced; another blames the Republican party for throwing the country into hell.
All of these may be true, but why?
We have seen golf players alibi until they were disgusting as to why they failed to make a good drive. Few, however, blame themselves.
We have been in this game of Chiropractic for 54 years and have never before witnessed a single slipping, sliding, or slumping in business. In “hard” times our business has gone upward and forward. In “good” times we have gone forward by leaps and bounds. Times, good or bad, have never before affected any of us — schools or practitioners. Why now the desire to blame everything else when everything else has been much worse in former times and we grew in spite of them all?
The cause of our growth, in those days, was in us in spite of the obstacles before us. The cause of our present decline is in us, in these days, and is because of the obstacles before us.
Even now, in these “hard” times which some of you say is the cause of your slump, there are many who are forging right ahead and have larger businesses than before. And in these same times, others who have had large businesses are now in the slump. Why? That is what we set out to find and what we give you here.
Here is the problem in a nutshell. Its truth is observable in every business or profession, ours included.
Before the wars, our profession and every person in it was up on tiptoes fighting for existence, fighting a common enemy against extermination; everybody’s shoulder was to the wheel.
On came the war. Prices went sky-high. Chiropractors made fortunes, where before the war they made dollars. Schools made fortunes where before they had made nothing. With many, prosperity acted like booze; they became prosperity drunk. And then we began slipping. We have been slipping ever since. We are now in the valley of the slipping process.
We are now suffering from the post-war depression which is national, and all are despondent. In trying to solve it, we are, as usual, suffering from the illusion of the near. We are blaming the caddy, the tee, the lay of the ground, the club, the everything else that is outside of ourselves.
In one state recently one fellow explained away the depression by saying that it was because it became known that they did not get legislation and people then knew they were illegal practitioners. That same condition existed in other states, but business grew in that state with those men whose minds grew.
In another state the slump was accounted for on the ground that they had gotten legislation and now everybody had lost interest in fighting for Chiropractic. That same condition existed in other states, but some businesses grew in exact ratio as the minds of a few fellows could see ahead of their ball and study the play and make it according to the well-laid rules of the game.
So those were not reasons that affected all, universally, alike.
When these facts are sprung — that we have all more or less slipped — everybody is quick to jump to the defense and deny it. But facts have a peculiar way of getting under the hide of every man who is slipping and sooner or later he admits his weaknesses, one by one, puts himself to the acid test just as does the sincere and conscientious golf player, begins a deliberate process of checking himself, analyzes the slips, figures out the correct play, and finally he has checked himself so hard that he comes through with a re-winning business.
The salient points are:
1st. He thinks he is up on tiptoes just because he can’t see the immediate bad effect of his play as can the golf player. If what you thought now rebounded back in two minutes on your business, you would know you slipped.
2nd. He thinks he is perfect in his detail just because he doesn’t see the immediate reaction of his bad play in his business slicing or hooking as can the golf player. If what you now did, by way of detail, dubbed your pocketbook in two minutes after what you did, you would know what you otherwise don’t see for months.
3rd. He doesn’t realize he wasn’t doing right things because he can’t immediately see that they are wrong.
4th. He doesn’t realize he is doing what he is.
5th. He doesn’t realize he is doing what he was.
6th. He realizes that the cash register is slipping, but he knows that he isn’t — and that’s where the slip actually occurs.
Back of the money he doesn’t get in, is him.
Back of him is the way he is thinking.
Because of internal mental slipping, and not knowing it, he blames the external physical conditions which he does know. Because it is a fixed fact in playing golf, if you do all things right the ball will go where you want it to.
The average Chiropractor today, as all of us know him, as we have studied him in many states, those with and those without legislation, began to slip in his thinking during the wars; he’s been slipping ever since. Nobody has suggested that he ought to check himself, nobody has checked him, much less himself on himself; therefore he goes on slipping and doesn’t know it.
This article is intended to be a lesson on slipping and checking for every Chiropractor in our ranks, whether you sell tickets or health service, for we have been selling tickets for 54 years and succeeded; whether or not you have a certain make of sign, for we have been succeeding without those signs for 54 years.
As you slip, results slip, business drops.
As you slip, confidence drops, business slumps.
It all begins and ends with you, and you is your mind.
We see many applications of the slipping process. We have seen them for months. They permeate every avenue in our profession; but that with which we are most concerned now is that slipping of the honest and sincere fellow who commences with the right education, right ability, right application of his art and then gradually begins to slip and slide, thinking he is upholding his exact and definite education, ability, and application that he thinks he has and thinks he is using, but isn’t.
By the above you will note that we do make a distinction between him who is careless and him who is slipping. The “careless” man doesn’t care; “it doesn’t make any difference,” “I should give a fig;” “when farmers get their pay, business will return, and not before;” — always hunting alibis and forgiving his failures because of things over which he has no control and doesn’t want to change.
The fellow who is “slipping” is the one who indicates that the man does care, is interested, is honest, wants to know why, will listen and will study. When somebody comes along and tells him to “keep his head down and his eye on the ball, his left arm stiff and close to his body, and his club head to follow through,” and he diligently applies himself to accomplish those things, some day that chap will play golf.
And, if that man, after being told many times, continues to slip, then he’s still slipping and does not know it. This article is intended solely for that fellow, the one who is slipping and doesn’t know it.
We must check until it hurts. Check whom? Check what? Ourselves — not the caddy, club, or ball.
If this is done by every man and woman in our ranks, in one year we will be back on our feet to pre-war prosperity and success again, stronger for having gone through the ordeal of finding ourselves.
We have said a good deal about slipping, but just what do we mean? We can best explain by proving an actual example:
On our last southern trip, we took sick with cramps. We were actually suffering. We needed an adjustment — one that would get results. We went to the convention and picked out one whom we thought could give an adjustment.
This man was a PSC graduate — a mentally alert fellow — no fool and no slouch. We got out of bed, got down in the Palmer Posture, and then we saw, heard, and felt what he thought he was giving — an adjustment. We say that we saw, heard, and felt it. It isn’t often that a patient can sense an adjustment with three senses. Our face was toward the dresser mirror. In this way we saw it. We felt it because it hurt unmercifully. We heard it because of how he did it — and that’s what we want to describe, because in that was the slipping.
His left hand was laid down all and entirely flat on our back, entire palm on back skin. His right hand was upraised and away from left hand. Fingers of left hand were at right angles to our spine. Fingers of his right hand were perpendicular to our spine. Fingers of right hand were raised up in the air and came down with a slap-like sound on the back of his left hand. He then moved his left hand down to another spot and repeated the upraised slap-like sound. He did this in four places, every one hurting and doing us no good. Not a single vertebra moved.
We got up, mad, and said: “What in the hell do you think you are doing?” He told us in no uncertain manner that he had given us an adjustment. Said we: “Like hell you did!” The poor fellow was taken off his feet, surprised, astonished. He was indignant.
He then got mad. Said he: “What are you trying to do, kid me? I have just given you a genuine Palmer recoil, such as I was taught in school. What’s the idea of bawling me out?” We stated that we were sincere in our remonstrance and he retaliated by saying so was he.
Here was a right up-to-the-minute intelligent man who was right then thinking that he had given us what we taught him at The PSC. It wasn’t. It was as near like it as a cat is like a canary. It suddenly knocked us down with the reality. It focalized much that up to that time was rambling around hunting for a conclusion. This man had previously said that his practice was up for sale, and would we help him sell. His business was for sale because his business had dropped down to nothing, gradually slipping for months.
Here was a man who thot he was thinking The PSC teaching, but in reality his mind was thinking slipped thoughts and he did not know it. This man was honest in thinking he was checked, but he wasn’t.
And there is the lesson. Thousands of us have been slipping. We take it for granted that we haven’t. We have been taking too much for granted. We can’t see where the ball is going except for months after, hence do not know that we have slipped.
This man knew that his business had failed, but he was blaming everything else. The fault lay in his slipping and not knowing it. Because of just what he had done to us and to others, he was hurting all. Being hurt and not getting results, they were quitting him, and because his business had slipped (covering a period of many months) he had offered it for sale, blaming the local town conditions.
What was the moral — with him? We talked over the entire matter. Being honest, he saw what we proved to him to be true. He checked himself then and there. He said he could understand why people would quit. We have since heard from him and he reports that his practice could not be bought, business is picking up rapidly, he is rebuilding himself, reestablishing himself, and thanks us for checking him on himself — a condition he would not admit, yet when proven knew it to be true.
The gathering of many details now crystallized into a stubborn act. We then went after the idea to make a study of it. It hit us hard. We found that condition existing everywhere.
While on that same trip, we spent one afternoon in a certain state penitentiary. We were introduced to a cultured, refined, well educated, genteel and intelligent murderess. We talked with her and could not understand how this woman had taken a pair of scissors and jabbed them into the throat of her husband and killed him. She was anything but that type. Here was a woman who was not a murderer, yet she had murdered, showing that she had done the thing she was not by nature and education capable of doing. Why this inconsistency?
We asked the woman to tell her story. She said the husband was a nagger. He nagged and nagged. Her resistance to the invasion of his nagging was 100 per cent. She ignored him and never let it enter into her or become a part of what she thought. One day she grabbed those scissors and killed him. She then realized, as never before, that for months his nagging had penetrated her system; had been stealthily reducing her resistance; but she did not realize it until the act of murder had been committed.
Gradually her resistance had weakened; gradually the penetration had increased; gradually the one was worn down and the other built up, both of which were occurring and she did not know it.
Could she have but recognized what was occurring, she could have checked on herself and the murder would never have been committed, and she would not have been where she was.
She was slipping and didn’t know it. She couldn’t check because she didn’t know she was slipping.
One fellow recently told me that he was so busy that he “didn’t have time for all his patients to undress, so when he was busy he adjusted some of them through the clothing.”
That man is slipping. He doesn’t think so because he doesn’t think.
Yet others are busy, and they take time to have every person undress, that they might do what they do right. They are checking.
Another said: “We think we will throw out our rest rooms; rent is so high.” That man is slipping. He didn’t think so because he hadn’t thought it to a conclusion. Rents were high on 34th and Broadway in New York, but Dr. Dueringer kept his rest rooms. He checked his business in results, not in rents.
“It makes no difference.” Ever hear that as an excuse for why certain things were being neglected, not done, or alibiing why they were not necessary? “It makes no difference” is the shoal on which more businesses are wrecked than any other one condition. The minute any person in business makes that statement once, and believes it, he is slipping and needs checking of his mental state.
Go out on the golf links and pull your club with the left arm. “It makes no difference,” but your ball goes hook. Look up and follow your ball. “It makes no difference,” and you find you dub your ball. Do lots of things you shouldn’t do; “it makes no difference” until you count the sum total of your score at the end of the game, to find the man across the hall from you, who knows that these things that “make no difference” to you make a difference to him, has secured your business.
Those things which “make no difference” to you on the first tee are the very things which make the difference on the 18th hole at the end of the game. Slip at the beginning and you may check all you please at the end, but your score is against you just the same.
A few weeks ago, we were talking to a certain Chiropractor who was talking “blood pressure” in cases. This person took “blood pressure” thinking “it was nice to know and to tell the patients.” Blood pressure is not nearly as important for that Chiropractor to tell the patients as nerve pressure. It’s the difference between urinalysis and our analysis. This person is running to seed on “blood pressure,” even to asking us, in front of a consultation case, whether we thought the adjustments would reduce his blood pressure. This individual is slipping into the language and ideas of yesterday, of medicine, of the patient’s understanding of his sickness. This individual does not know she is slipping, but she is. If she does not check it will be but a question of time until the only thing the patient will get, different from the physician, will be the punch; and even that may be slipping because when the mind slips on one thing it usually slips on many others.
Why shouldn’t she talk “blood pressure” — “it makes no difference”?
Talking the other day to a PSC graduate — a mixer — we asked him, “Why do you mix?” His answer: “I can’t get results without.” He also said: “I got excellent results for a while after I graduated. After a while I believed I had been fooling myself in thinking I was; so, to get results, I took to mixing.” Now came the turning point question: “Are you today using PSC methods of analysis and adjusting?” His answer came true to the form of the slipper: “Yes, and they won’t work.”
Knowing about the unconscious slipping of men’s minds, we asked him to analyze a case, and give the necessary adjustments and let us see all that he did. At first he hesitated (showing a lack of confidence), and then he consented.
What he did was not what he was taught at The PSC.
Here again was another sample of proof of our conclusion. Upon questioning him firmly, he thought, and admitted that he thought that what he had just done was exactly as it had been taught him in The PSC five years previous; and while it worked for us, and worked for him at first, it wouldn’t work for him any more.
The unconscious slipping had been going on and he was honest in admitting that he didn’t know it.
We went all over his work, checked him point by point, pointed out where he was wrong, demonstrated his way and then demonstrated The PSC way, and not until he saw the contrast would he admit that he had slipped.
That boy promised to cut mixing at once, get back to exclusive Chiropractic, by checking himself all along the line. We have since heard from him and he is rebuilding back his mind, his delivery has stepped up, his results are what they ought to be, his business is coming back, he is getting the old-time PSC Chiropractic spiz, he has cut all mixing and he’s as happy as a lark.
It has paid him to check.
R. H. St. Onge of Seattle graduated from The PSC. He was our close, personal, and intimate friend for years. He came back one summer to visit us. He stayed at our home. He came at a time when we were thinking about slipping and checking. Rufus had not been back to The PSC since he graduated ten years before. Had he slipped? We were anxious to know. We asked him for an adjustment. He put us through a case of sprouts, perfect from A to Z. His adjustment was improved. He gave a better adjustment now than ten years before, notwithstanding he was ten years older and by the usual rules of the game he should be slower.
Slipped? That boy’s mind didn’t know what it was to slip. We talked with him about this slipping and checking after the test was over. He told us that he put himself through the acid test every day. For ten years he had checked himself every day. He did not mix, never had to because he got all results anybody could want with adjustments.
R. H. St. Onge was one of the men who put the kibosh on this alibi financial depression stuff; he tended his knitting, prevented himself from slipping by checking; therefore he had more business than ever before.
We checked those Chiropractors whose businesses are normal or above normal, and each of them is a checker. The fellows who are next door, whose businesses have slumped, who are complaining about this and that, are the slippers.
W H O is the largest, best, best programmed, best modulated radiophone station in America. It is universally conceded. Other stations have not such a reputation. Why?
To be able to intelligently answer that question, we have made it a business to visit other stations, large or small, look them over, check ourselves and the way we do things as against them and the way they do things. The entire answer is that all other stations are slipping on many details that “make no difference” and WHO is checking on every detail, knowing that it does make a difference to the listener-in.
Just recently we took occasion to copper-ribbon-ground all metals of any kind or quality on all our roofs. It’s a small thing that others say “makes no difference” but by actual tests we found that those metals were absorbing some of our modulated energy which was being sent into the air to go to you. Instead of going to you, we were absorbing it at the seat of distribution.
This is a detail that costs, which other stations do not even think of — WHO does.
A few weeks ago, we went into the WOC studio while a certain songbird was warbling. We noticed she was standing by the piano, reading her words off the music which the pianist was reading from, and she was singing toward the piano. The microphone was to her right. She was singing away from the microphone when she should have been singing into it. We checked her, as well as the program manager, in no uncertain terms, stating that such will not be permitted in Station WOC. It embarrassed the singer, and it hurt the program manager, but we would rather offend two than injure the quality of modulation and quantity of sound that went out to millions on the air.
Careless isn’t the word; it’s slipping that better explains it.
The PSC is the largest and best Chiropractic school in the world. Other schools try to duplicate and imitate us in “Palmer methods” and quality, as well as quantity. But no other school equals ours in any one feature, let alone all of them. Why? Because this school does not slip; it checks all along the line, and checks hard, and without mercy.
Other schools are constantly slipping on all things. This school will not knowingly slip on a single thing. That is why we have been begging for you field people to constantly check on us. When something goes wrong here, tell us. If you get a letter from some student at The PSC and in that letter he states something that isn’t right, report it to us and his name, and we’ll go clear to the bottom and make it right. We insist on checking.
If you order goods and don’t get them, or they come wrong, or the count isn’t right, or they are damaged, or a mistake has happened, or the bookkeeping account is in error, don’t save us one minute. Tell us all about it; give us the particulars, and it’ll be made right if it takes a leg and an hour’s time.
The PSC will live if it checks everything and everybody all the time. And it will slump if it slips and slides. We want every Chiropractor in the field and every student in the school to feel perfectly free to register anything that is slipping. We’ll do the checking here. And that man or woman who reports our slips to us, and gives us an opportunity to check our business, is our best friend.
We are a master of detail. We check the faculty, business management, cafeteria, burning of coal, burning of lights, cleaning of halls, advertising matter, WOC, printing plant, etc. The department heads call us “eagle eye.” That matters not, so long as things are done right. It may hurt them, but it pays the business. It hurt you, but it will pay your bank account.
Your friends tell you your faults. They pick out your weak points and show you where you are falling down. Your friends also point out a correction, show how to strengthen it, how to save yourself, and how to keep you on your Chiropractic feet.
If this article is taken seriously, weighed carefully, and every man and woman immediately admits that he has been slipping and begins a merciless grind on his habits, he will benefit and so will the Chiropractic profession.
We have all been slipping and don’t know it. Now that it is called to our attention, we can all check, and do it intentionally.
It would be presumptuous on our part if we were to infer that we had not slipped and slid at The Dear Old PSC. But, as soon as this slipping idea took definite hold of our consciousness, we began to check ourselves first. We soon found hundreds of leaks in our mentality. One by one, we pruned ourselves. Then we called in the department heads and we pruned them all along the line. They took it in the same good, constructive sense we intended it. The faculty came next in line. We pruned our ideas, ideals, methods and results. It was surprising to see how much we were suffering from war-prosperity.
We began checking about January 1, 1923. We have been at it from that day till this. Everybody has been glad to check. We are now pulling up and out. We have slipped and didn’t know it, but we have checked, and everybody knew it because we checked so hard that it hit and hurt everybody somewhere.
Having actually gone through the process, we can well understand the human nature of humanity other than ourselves, but we can also now speak from experience. We are still checking, and we expect we will continue from now on, indefinitely.
The PSC is now beginning to see its way clear, although it has taken months of checking to catch up all the slips. It may take you months to observe the same thing, but if in the end your business materializes into bigger things than before, the price you pay is worth the investment.
Slipping and sliding, mentally, is slumping professionally and commercially. To check mentally is to cash financially.
Check until the dog-goned thing hurts you all ways, always.
As careful as we have been, we didn’t think we could slip. But we have been; but never again. We are now back on terra firma and we propose to stay there and help every other fellow come through in the same big way that we fought through. We say “fought” because when any man takes hold of himself and struggles through weak spots within himself, builds them up until they are strong, that is some fight he has to go through.
Check until it hurts and your business will prosper!
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