In case you have not noticed we have a pine tree as our symbol. People often ask why we chose this and thus the name White Pine Chiropractic. I figured for the first blog of the new year (2023) I would go ahead and give my thoughts behind it.
This was a long conversation between my wife and I. We spent a few weeks researching a possible name for the practice and ultimately it was my wife, the other Dr. Maltby, who came up with it. My father's practice, the other other Dr. Maltby, named his practice Maltby Chiropractic, and even though I love my family name, I wanted to use something else.
There are many different schools of thought on how to pick a name for a business. A classic technique that used to be popular was to call yourself AAA Business, that way you would be the first to appear in the phone book, but since I do not know too many people flipping through the phone book to find anything, I chose to stay away from the triple "A." Another method is to use your own name. Many good reasons for this, especially name recognition since when you are the face of the Business. I did not want to go this direction either, because I wanted to stand out beyond my own name. Hence the search went on.
My wife came across the Idaho State tree, White Pine, and made the suggestion. I, being driven by my ego, rejected it because I wanted to come up with the name myself. I furiously searched all the Idaho state emblems attempting to come up with a better idea and threw out every symbol and word associated with Idaho that I could find, only for my wife to point out why it did not sound good or work well for us. Now, there was one name I found that I thought was a winner for sure, Cutthroat Chiropractic. You see, the Idaho State fish is the Cutthroat trout and it seemed that the two words rolled off the tongue nicely. Our sign would be the silhouette of a trout with the words Cutthroat Chiropractic over it, I could already see the avid fly fishermen flocking in. I assured her that everyone would understand what it was and that there was no way anyone would look at it and come to any other conclusion. Well, my wife helped me see the errors in my thinking and I had to put that idea away.
After some more searching, I finally push my ego aside and accepted the fact that my wife had already came up with the best name for our new practice.
Now, almost 6 years later, I still laugh when I think on how my ego could have made me miss a great name for the practice and settled with something far worse.
The moral of the story is this, crush the ego.
"To subordinate your ego you must have incredible confidence. If you find you cannot put your ego in check because you're afraid it might make you look weak, then guess what: you ARE weak."
- Leadership Strategy and Tactics
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