Have you ever wished to do what you’ve always loved or found a way to work fewer hours and still have all your career dreams come true to enjoy life fully? In this episode, Victoria Wieck’s guest is somebody who did just that. The author of two books, business mindset coach, Certified Pediatric Chiropractor, and holistic practitioner, Dr. Victor Manzo Jr. helps individuals gain clarity and break habits and patterns that prevent them from reaching their full potential. Today, get to know more about his journey to finding his passion and purpose and gain insights on how you can empower your own reality.
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The Road To Greatness: Empowering Your Reality With Dr. Victor Manzo Jr.
You have heard me talk about this one topic over and over again. How do we all do what we love and find a way to work fewer hours and still have all our career dreams come true so that we could enjoy life and live the life that we deserve to live, not the life we think we have to live. In this episode, I am so excited to have a conversation with somebody who did that. Not only did he do it, but he did it in the category of business that is extremely difficult to position yourself and get ahead.
He used to be a full-time chiropractor. He still does this if somebody needs it, but he spends time coaching other people on how to do exactly what he did because he has found the formula for success. What I mean by success is not fast fame, fortune, and money, but about how to achieve your financial peak while at the same time still having all of the gifts of life that come your way. Without further ado, I want to introduce Dr. Vic Manzo. Welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me. I am excited to be here.
I said about you being a chiropractor but long before that when you were first born, you are the most unlikely chiropractor I have ever met because my father was an acupuncturist, which falls into the same category. He was the president of several different universities that taught that. It is a tough way to let people know what you do, especially if you are not in one of those big cities, people do not even know what a chiropractor is. They are like, “Is that a real science?” Most people do not realize that is a four-year course after you graduate from college so it is a Doctorate degree.
You came from a very blue-collar background. Your parents were not rich. They were not particularly hyper-educated. You somehow had to have some motivation that was given to you, like your DNA or you are self-motivated to go in that direction. From that beginning, tell us how you achieved all that you achieved and what you do now.
One of the things that always kept me moving forward was seeing the suffering that was going on and the arguments that you see. As a child, you do not pay attention to what people say. It is the reactions and the modeling that you saw. I saw this heavy presence and heavy attachment to finances, but we did not experience much of that.
My parents lived paycheck-to-paycheck going through that. For me, maybe it was by design in some way, but my father always had me go work hard and lay carpet with him. He is like, “I am going to show you what hard work is all about so you do not do what I do.” My grandfather used to make me go work with him. He was very successful in business from a restaurant standpoint, but then he gambled all his fortune away.
He had to work and he is like, “I do not want you to be a dummy like me.” I got to see that and they were trying to teach me their lessons. Throughout my life, it was always like, “I am not going to do that. I am going to be something different. I do not want to go down that path.” I have seen the emotional struggle, the limitedness, and the fears. I am an empath so I felt that even deeper. I was like, “What do I even want to do?” I was always thinking of the big stuff, like a lawyer, accountant, or maybe a chef. These are all these different things until chiropractic showed up and found me because I used to be very big in health and fitness and did everything from supplements and exercise.
My mom is a fitness instructor. I was doing everything right at nineteen years old. I have been doing it for six years and then all of a sudden, my health kept going lower. Long story short, I went to a chiropractor. I came back to the one I used to see when I was a kid. Within three months, I was in the best shape of my life. I felt absolutely amazing. That is where it, all of a sudden, sparked something. I am like, “What is this chiropractic thing? I want to learn more about this.”
I was telling the chiropractor, I am like, “You do this thing to me and that is going to take care of the laundry list of stuff I have going on?” He was like, “Yes. Pretty much.” I was like, “I got to learn and understand this.” That is where my drive came from there. I wanted to be the best chiropractor that I can possibly be for whoever I am serving and to continue to do that. That was a drive that kept me going through my career to get to the levels of what I was doing and so forth.
Embrace the darkness and see it as a teacher. See the wisdom that it teaches us. Have a different perspective rather than thinking, “This isn’t good.”
I am going to unpack that because I am going to get into how the work of chiropractic or the journey of it is very similar to the entrepreneurship journey. There are no quick fixes. You have to take care and have a pulse on your body, have a pulse on what is going on, and you keep on tweaking. A lot of this is art and trial and error as well. There is real well-proven science to that, but still, everybody is different. Your parents tried their hardest and they failed at many things. A lot of people either succeeded or made one mistake and then they are living paycheck-to-paycheck.
Your father did not make a check until he was working with his hands or his body manually. You got yourself motivated and you get into chiropractic. I am sure you found out that as much as you loved it, believed in it, and you want to go fix everybody drug-free, there was such a resistance to the science of chiropractic. Everywhere I go, I have a chiropractor on retainer. I travel a lot. I have traveled 4 million miles before COVID happened. I kid you not when I go to Minnesota, I have a chiropractor there. Not that I feel like I need to go see them the minute I land, but if I ever got in trouble, I want to know there was somebody there rather than going to a hospital.
I am a firm believer in that but I also know that having been recommended by chiropractors to other people that I know who suffer, there is such resistance. A lot of Americans would rather get surgery on their shoulders before they will even try it. It is amazing that you somehow found your financial peak in that area. That had to be hard for you to build a practice and business in that chiropractic.
Yes and no. I had to figure out what my message about chiropractic was because there is such a misunderstanding. Let’s say I adjust a newborn and patients would go, “Why does a newborn have to come here?” I am like, “Do you want the short answer to the long answer? What time do you have?” They say, “I only got ten seconds so I will give you the short answer.” I will explain how the brain is developed, how fast it grows, and all that. I say, “Would you want that for your child to be on track making sure it is developing the way it goes? Symptoms may not show up, but there will be things that will be going on, or do you want to take it by chance?”
They are like, “I did not know that. That is interesting.” When you talk to an adult and mention chiropractic, the first thing they are going to think of is, “Chiropractors just take care of back pain, neck pain, and headaches.” This is me figuring out my message of how I wanted to explain chiropractic because once I got authentic and congruent with myself, then all of a sudden, I set goals. It was happening because I was being true to me and what mattered most to me. I would tell people, “Chiropractic does not treat any illness, conditions, symptom, or disease.” Scientifically, we do not.
The reason why is because if I make an adjustment, no matter where I am adjusting, it may be the neck or lower back, how do I know it is helping the lower back? I can make an adjustment to your neck and someone can regain bladder function. A kid can get an adjustment at the mid part of their neck and all of a sudden, they are not peeing in bed at night anymore. There is no one thing to one thing. A lot of times, what happens in society, and this is mainly because we are mainstream medical driven, is that we think treatment is for everything. Chiropractic is not a treatment.
We do not do one-to-one. It is one-to-many. That is where the difference comes in. When I started educating my community on that, they started to see how it was more related to health just like working out, eating right, and sleeping right. The more you do those things, the better your health is going to be. The same thing came in with chiropractic.
You were dialed in on your messaging. What you said is interesting because a lot of chiropractors get so defensive and they do not know how to explain what they do. They do not like doctors. They talk badly about the medical community. There are a lot of things that they do that I do not agree with, but still, a lot of chiropractors are not clear on their own messaging. They do not believe that their messaging is going to work. You being brutally honest about what you can and cannot do, you are serving your community even if they do not come to you.
Simply by educating and setting an example, you were able to attract a certain number of your target audience. That is how you grow your chiropractic business. After you hit what you thought was your American dream, which is to be making a living and doing what you love to do. You became a chiropractor because you believed in it and then you are at your financial peak yet you were not happy according to your bio. Why were you not happy or not emotionally fulfilled?
It was one of the things where I looked at my wife and said, “We can have almost anything we want. We can enjoy what matters most to us. I was shocked that this was it.” I was conditioned to listen to other successful chiropractors telling me what success was. When I got to that point, I looked at my practice and I was like, “This is not what I want. I am not feeling like I am making a dent in the movement of health care and why I became a chiropractor in the first place.” Within a six-month period, I was letting go of patients that did not fit into the office anymore. We took a 40% hit financially, but all of a sudden, I was like, “This is where I want to go.” It was being a pediatric chiropractor.
I wanted to get into pregnancy and fertility. When you talk about pregnancy, there is so much fear being into the mindset and the psyche of women. My wife is pregnant and one of those things is the stories that people will say where it is like, “We are going to have a home birth.” They are going, “I wish you the best of luck with that.”
The advice that you give is you would never give that to someone who is starting a business or trying to heal from something, but for pregnancy, it is all this fear. I was like, “I want to be that person. I do not care what happens. If we succeed, we succeed. If we do not, we do not. I am going to go all in. I am going to help out kiddos because their health is declining like crazy. I want to be able to help make a dent in my community at least.”
We went to pregnancy and so forth, and I made that whole shift. Six months later, we were breaking records in the office. We were soaring back a year later to where we were and we maintain growth from that point. I was so less stressed. I was working less. The process was amazing because I was living my truth and what mattered to me now.
What was a chiropractor to Vic Manzo? What did that mean to be a chiropractor? What was my purpose? What do I want to do to serve at that level? We served about 50% of pediatrics in our office. It was kids coming in, getting adjusted regularly, and making sure their nervous systems are in alignment so they could show up being the best version of themselves.
My granddaughter was ten months old and I went through with this exact same thing. I am going to digress and backtrack for all of you who are reading this message. Many of you have known me for many years on TV. You may not have known that my father was an acupuncturist who believed in anything other than going to prescription drugs or surgery as a first thing.
He was a medical doctor back home, but he used to always say, “I do not understand why they call acupuncturists, chiropractors, and acupressure alternative medicine. That should be the primary way you treat your body. What is worse? Getting a bad adjustment from your chiropractor or a surgery went bad?” It is pretty drastic.
Don’t you at least owe yourself to try to do other assets? Here is a true story. My granddaughter is ten months. My daughter went through natural birth. She did not realize she was already for epidural and everything else, but because she was so well-prepared with her body, by the time she felt something moving, she thought, “I do not know if I am in contractions or not.”
Long story short, by the time they got in the car and got to the hospital, which was twenty minutes away, they were telling us she was at 5 centimeters dilated. They took her to the ER. She had the baby within 30 minutes of it then they admitted her to the hospital. They do not have time to give her admission forms. She is chilling out in her room with a healthy newborn.
The next day, they came back with like, “We forgot to admit you to the hospital. Here is your admissions form and a discharge form.” A lot of people do not realize this, but most babies actually are born with their heads favoring one way or the other. Her pediatrician recommended seeing a specialist for this.
There were going to recommend a $5,000 helmet for a baby. Coming from my background, I had questions like, “How uncomfortable is it for a newborn to be in a helmet? Does it sweat? What does it do?” They said, “It sweats and it is quite uncomfortable. They will have some problems with sleep.” I looked into alternative ways to fix this. We went to the osteopath once a week for about four weeks and then once every other week for the next month, and then once a month. Her head is perfect. No medications and the kids still sleep twelve hours a day. Every night, she goes to bed at 6:00 PM and gets up at 6:00 AM. It is amazing. That is what I wanted to tell you about pregnancy and children.
Instead of doing time management, which is fine and good, do energy management. Where are you going to get the biggest bang for your buck?
Let’s face it, professional marketers know that fear is one of the most profitable businesses so they sell fear. If you go to a chiropractor, they might break your bone when in fact, when you look at the real risks of the treatments, surgery going bad or you are not waking up from anesthesia or recovery going back, all those things are much more drastic than natural ways of healing yourself.
Getting back to your story, I see why you wrote the book entitled Rediscover Your Greatness because here you were, you thought you were doing an amazing business. You are an amazing chiropractor, you thought you have achieved the pinnacle of your success, but then you had to rediscover within that framework something that is even greater than what you were already doing. Is that when you wrote the book or did you write the book after?
It was a couple of years after. I was looking at what can help the greatness of individuals thrive and what that looks like. I walked through and talked about the different fabrics of life from the Law of Focus of who we are, how are we a creator, and how we choose our lives, and because of all the things I did in those few years before.
By shifting your focus and going in the direction that you wanted to go, wanted to own your chiropractic business, and practice your chiropractic skills on your terms on the people that you thought you would have a positive impact on. You went from working full-time to working fewer hours, and you have got absolutely more emotional freedom, but did it also help you financially? Did you grow up financially or was it at a cost?
Being a family wellness chiropractor, I was always told, “You have to work at least four days a week plus a weekend.” I started to build this confidence and I was like, “I chose to do these pediatrics.” I had to cancel my weekends and my practice grew. There is a law of least effort which states, “Anything in the world, anything in life, anything always has a minimum amount of effort to get the maximum gain.” That does not mean you can do more effort, but you are not going to maximize the gain. There is only a certain point that you are going to get to for every effort that is created. I was like, “What is the least effort I can do to keep my practice where it is or continue to grow?”
We started looking at our hours and getting creative. We are like, “What are the times that I want to work compared to what I was told to do or what most chiropractors do?” For a few years, we worked fourteen and a half hours a week, which means I was in the office fourteen and a half hours a week. The average chiropractor works about 24, 25, or 26 hours, give or take. I was almost half of that. It was one of those things where at the same time, I continue my growth. I was still growing at least at a minimum of 10% to 20% per year from a profit side, not a sales side. We never had a negative down year and it was wonderful. We were breaking records still. It was unreal.
Even during COVID where most chiropractors took hits of 35%, 80%, roughly. We took a 40% hit, but we regrouped and re-centered, and then we were breaking records in that year and continuing. I sound like a broken record, but it is what it was. Being authentic is what mattered to me. I am all about, “What is the least amount of work I have to do to get the greatest gain possible?” That has been my model in my life of trying to figure that out. We did it with the practice and it worked wonders.
The Law of Diminishing Returns is real. The military is a great place where they discover all kinds of experimental scientific backgrounds. If you are shipping something to QVC or HSN and I will make a piece of jewelry and they will sell 10,000 pieces of the same item, on any given month, I will be on TV and we go through 100,000 of something.
What happens is when they do a QA control, if you have twenty people checking the 10,000 of the exact same piece over and over again, the first few hours are very productive. They catch everything, every single stone that is missing, but after they hit about 8 hours, the next 10 hours, even if they are going to sleep, the next day they come back, they do not catch everything.
They are almost better off that they randomly pick 125 pieces. You can pick blindly and make sure that they check those. Believe it or not, they are more accurate in checking the 125 pieces than having somebody check all 10,000 pieces. That is a real deal. That is how most of these companies do their QA control. That is what we described as the Law of Diminishing Returns because your eyes cannot see the difference after a certain amount of time. A of times, many of you have spoken to me personally after a speech that you are exhausted and working.
You used to work 60 hours a week in corporate then you leave. You loved it when you were working 35 hours a week because you had to make enough money. You are now working 60 hours a week and making half the money. You are worried about whether or not your kids are eating healthy food or they are driving through a fast food thing with their dad. You certainly have found a way to maximize returns where your efforts are at their peak, not by working too many hours but by working the right amount of hours. You now have a path forward. Is that what you are sharing with your audience and how do you help other people?
It is all about health. You shared it greatly and the same thing with the mind. They have done studies on peak performance in the mind and what it can handle. A lot of times we think we got to keep grinding things out and what we know is that is so the opposite. That was old research about muscles and it was like, “We challenged a muscle,” and then they started seeing similarities in the brain.
What we know is the opposite. The brain likes to rest. Your heart beats all the time. It never stops. It never rests, but if you look at what the heart does, it works nine hours a day when you add up the time. It contracts and then relaxes. The reason why I shifted these gears is I wanted to maximize my energy in what I do and maximize my focus so that when I am doing something, I am 100% there.
I may have worked only fourteen and a half hours in the office. I probably worked about twenty hours a week in my business for chiropractic. I did podcasts. I had a book. I had another coaching business that I was doing but I was able to jump into each of those and it was that. The more you can laser focus in and hone in, some people call this flow state, and some people in athletics call it the zone, this is a true place to be when you are hyper-focused on what you are doing.
Do you have infinite energy? I can continue to go and go. It is one of those simplest things, but it is knowing how you can break this up so you can manage your energy. I teach a lot of my clients and I share a lot of this stuff instead of doing time management, which is fine and good, do energy management. Where are you going to get the biggest bang for your buck? For me, I am more effective when it comes to creative ideas first thing in the morning. All my good stuff comes in the morning. That is why I do it in the morning.
In the afternoon, I am doing more of the stuff that I got to get done. It is not the good creative stuff. It is maybe my socials. I will get that stuff out then because I know how my brain works, I know what works for me. This is something I share with my clients a lot. Knowing your type, are you a bear, and look at where your performance is going to be at most time.
I do not work out in the mornings because I do not have the energy there. I can work out but I do not hit the levels of where I want to go in my workouts. If I work out between 12:00 PM and 2:00 PM, that is prime time for me. I can go in, do a hard workout, hit the numbers, break some personal records, and go exert as much as I can.
When you are doing mental work, research has shown that it is anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours max peaks. You got to find what works for you. You got to play with this. You will know because your productivity or creativity starts to slow down or you start to get a little tired then you know you hit your max and you start playing with this until you figure it out. Mine is an hour and a half. That is what I know I can go to the max with then I need to take a break.
I completely agree with you on that. I am a very productive person in the morning. I am in the middle of writing my second book. I wrote science fiction, I am writing my second. I wrote from 5:00 AM to 7:00 AM because that is when I am most creative, but if I asked twenty entrepreneurs, “What is your most productive time?”
The truth is they do not know because you are too absorbed in your schedule and going with what is on your calendar, what your admin assistant tells you what you got to do, and you are just going until you mentally crash. You do not even realize it. The whole idea of taking an inventory of why you are here? What is your purpose in life? What are you passionate about? What impact do you want to have? What do you want to focus on? What do you want to align yourself with the belief system?
The universe is always there to support us. Every step of the way, it’s always there for the good. Everything’s always a win in life.
Also, take an inventory of your body. You got to understand that if you are a morning person, you probably are going to be most productive in the morning. You want to do the most important things in your life when you are most productive. I could not care less if I am burning 200 calories or 20 calories. I do not do that in the morning.
I love my science fiction. I presented it to a bunch of publishers and they all loved it. They asked me to write three books. Not only because they told me, but I loved the story and I wanted to write it so I am willing to get up an hour earlier than I normally do and write between 5:00 AM and 7:00 AM no matter what.
When you are talking about rediscovering your greatness, as your book said, you do have to have some inventory of what your skillset is, why you are here, what your purpose is, and what you want. You need to go, “I am here now, grinding it out. If I want to be over there, how do I get there?” Part of that is taking an assessment of yourself.
If you are not healthy enough to have a full schedule, maybe you should have an inventory of your health, too. Understanding what your strengths are, who you are, and what your mission is. If you do not have that dialed in, you cannot help other people. You cannot serve other people in a way that could be maximumly affected by that. I am glad you shared that with me. Now, let me ask you. You wrote another book called A Walk in the Dark. What is that book about?
It is all about the darkness that we face in life. It is obstacles, challenges, and traumas. The whole purpose of the book was to end mental suffering, but also to embrace the darkness and see it as a teacher, see the wisdom that it teaches us, and have a different perspective rather than thinking, “This is not good. I had this happen to me in the past.”
We resist it, which only affects our mental health and also our physical health, and to have the dance of life and return people back to that. They can understand that, “This challenge may be showing up or maybe this hiccup showed in my life, but Dr. Vic said in that book, the universe is always there to support us every step of the way. It is always there for the good. There is always a win in life. How can that be a win?” If you ask that question, “How can this be a win?” You will start to see that. Things will start to show up. If you truly believe it, it will start to show up.
One of my friends was sharing a story about how he had a flat tire and he goes, “Most people would be upset about that. All of a sudden, I had someone call me I have not talked to in years. I am waiting for someone to come. I had a great time being able to have a conversation. If I held myself being frustrated in my conversation with that person, I would not have time, but if it was, I would have been complaining. Instead, we were reminiscing about life and I have not talked to him a lot. We talked about how we have not seen each other. Now we are getting together next week for lunch.” If you had that shift, you would have known there is something always good coming out of that. That was the main purpose of the book.
I love the title of the book and when you explained what is in the book. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate the thought of embracing the darkness. Without the rain, you will not have a rainbow. Personally, it is very Asian thinking, I believe that a certain amount of darkness is given to you. It is built into your life so that you can learn and grow.
If your life never has any challenges, you do not have a dark day at all in your life. Number one, it would be pretty boring. Secondly, I believe and I know you believe this too based on your own background, it is all those dark moments that you have survived and endured that shaped your future. Only because you embraced it and you did not resent your father for working being a manual laborer or maybe your uncle or grandfather are telling you, “I lost all my money. Do not be like me.”
You embraced what they were telling you. You learn from their mistakes and watch other people suffer that you did not want to suffer. You were looking for a pathway out of that. I am so happy that you came on this show and shared your story and your journey. I am excited to see many of you go and check out Dr. Manzo’s website. It is EmpowerYourReality.com. As we close this episode, if you were to give somebody who started a business or who is in the process of starting a business like they are in that transition period to side hustle, what advice would you give them?
The thing I share with my clients when I started work with them on day one, and that is you got to create your vision. What is the vision that you see in your overall life? The reason why I say it is because success happens because we are congruent with something. When we do not have congruencies, we have blockages.
When you have blockages, it is going to be a hard battle to get up there. When you have crystal clear in your vision of what you are being here in this world like mine is to raise the consciousness of every human being I can come and touch with. All the work I do from every element of what I do aligns with that. That is why I write books because I want to help elevate the consciousness of a human beings.
I was a chiropractor because I want to elevate the consciousness of the human being that I am working through the art of chiropractic. Being a business mindset coach, mindset is everything. The mind is all ends and starts. That is why I do those things. When I have that, that is the one thing you want to get so crystal clear on. A lot of businesspeople miss that.
I was a Business major so I was like, “We heard about the vision statement. We heard about vision, but it was not that. We got the mission and we talked about what to do.” I have seen the radical change in my life and others. When we can get crystal clear on the vision, you are starting to utilize the universal principles, the laws, and how to interact in so many different ways.
Quantum Physics supports this, too, that you make the path a little easier because now when you make choices and if it is not aligned with your vision, you are not going to take it because that is a distraction. When you have a shortcoming coming up, you are not going to let the negative energy come in so much or lower vibration of emotions because you could stay centered on the vision of what you want to create. That is what the billionaires that I have studied done. Elon Musk is one of the prime examples. It is one of those things where if you can have that, that will set the tone for everything else.
Get clear on your vision and that directs all your efforts, your thinking, and your mind-body aligned with your vision because that vision is the end goal. If everything hits the right way, that is what you are going to end up with. That is important that you start with that, not something you are going to stumble into because there are a lot of other things before you get to the end. Can you share how other people can get ahold of you and when they get to you, what they can find on your website?
The easiest way to get ahold of me and find me on social media is EmpowerYourReality.com. At the top, you will see all the socials that I am connected with. My podcast, my blog, I have got some freebies on there. I got a book on the power of visualization sharing some science on how the mind can change matter. I share some studies there, and then you can contact me there and so much more.
Do not forget about the two books that he had authored. I believe everybody is great. You just have to rediscover your unique greatness. Believe me, you do have the greatness that you can share. Rediscover Your Greatness and A Walk in the Dark by Dr. Vic Manzo. Thank you so much for coming on. For those of you who are reading, please go ahead and subscribe to the show. If you have not shared it already, please share it with at least one other person so we can amplify and elevate our message out there. Until next week, please stay happy and healthy. Remember, happiness is a choice and I hope you make great choices.
Important Links
About Dr. Victor Manzo Jr.
I am a business mindset coach, certified pediatric chiropractor, holistic practitioner, author, podcaster and speaker.
I am the author of two books, “Rediscover Your Greatness,” and “A Walk in the Dark.” I am currently working on my third book which will be released May 2022 called, “Decoding The Matrix.”
I am a podcaster for two podcasts, “The Mindful Experiment” which has over 360 episodes and has 30,000 downloads per month and The Mindful Chiropractor Podcast which started in Oct 2021.
I help business owners get truly clear on what they want to create in business and life, review where they are and what they have tried, help come up with and options to create action and hold them accountable by agreeing to the plan of action.
But, what separates me different is the mindset side of things. On top of the 4 things above, I go deeper to uncover their beliefs, blocks, behaviours, habits and patterns of thinking that prevent them from living the life or creating the business they like to experience.
From there, I use a box of tools to help reprogram the mind, reshift focus, teach spiritual truths and bring quantum physics into the mix to unveil their true potential and then, make that a reality.
With this breakthrough process and systems, it helps my clients achieve faster results, greater and deeper transformations and long-term success.
For more info, visit www.empoweryourreality.com
It is a copy of my first 3 chapters of my 2nd book, “A Walk in the Dark.”