As promised, over the next few weeks we are going to talk about what holds you back from greater success and what is keeping you from your personal and practice potential. Then we are going to un-train you from all of your bad habits and then retrain you to be a goal-achieving, progress-making, success-minded doctor who gets what you want and deserve doing it on your own terms.
We begin right now with the number one way to ensure you will not achieve your goals and you will always live in a constant state of disappointment because you bring it upon yourself.
There is one thing before there is anything else that lays the proper foundation of success and your probability to achieve what you say you want – that is – your belief that you feel it is actually possible and that is can and will and should happen.
Belief. It is more than just a simple word. It moves beyond ‘pretending’ and ‘imagining’ to a place that makes your success real to you before it ever happens.
As a doctor you have so many places where belief matters.
Your clinical skill.
Your team leadership.
Your practice vision.
Your diagnostic confidence.
And we are going to talk about all of these things in great detail because your belief about who you are and your ability to be effective at these critical elements in your practice will determine more than anything else how successful you will be.
It begins with belief. Everything does.
And you can ignore it as long as you want to end up sabotaging yourself and getting in your own way as you make all kinds of excuses about why something didn’t happen, why things didn’t go your way, why you didn’t win…
Or you can take a cold hard look inside of yourself and ask did you really believe this was possible.
I can give you so many examples.
Take Big Cases. “Big” means many different things. To a person never having done a full arch yet, $10,000 or $20,000 might be big. To a doctor never taking the time to treatment plan a full mouth (or lacking the confidence to be able to really put someone back together again), they might consider a big case just a few thousand dollars… and if you are use to getting one tooth at a time anything more than that is a good thing.
Then there are doctors who “big” means $40,000, even $80,000 to $100,000 cases. To each their own I always say. It doesn’t matter.
The point is: you have to believe first before you can do anything else… before you even have that patient walk into your practice and have the mouth full of work available to do.
You think you are missing the patients; I know – because I see more than you do – that you are just missing the belief.
And this is just one example. Forget big cases – how about your best collection day – what do you believe is possible?
I always get the comments about setting realistic goals and I say: what is realistic anyways? Something that has already been done – is that realistic? Well then done by whom?
This is why I love reverse engineering because it appeals to both the logical and the creative mind. You can actually see realistically what is possible by reverse engineering your potential and then you can also get excited about it emotionally because of the creative means of getting there.
If you have a “see it to believe it” type of mentality, then fine reverse engineer and make it realistic so you can build belief and buy into it.
If you are more optimistic and just believe everything is going to work out because it’s suppose to then stack the deck in your favor with positive actions that will reinforce what you are feeling.
I can tell you this: I have never seen a doctor in my career achieve something they doubted and sustain it. Maybe they do it once with a big case or a longer month or something that’s like a fluke – but not on purpose. Because belief is everything.
I challenge you to believe more. All professionals first start with visualization for everything they do and all that they want.
Rest assured, things don’t happen and then you believe in them. You believe in them and then they happen. Working on your belief muscles are perhaps the most important muscles of all.
You may be thinking that you believe you can but still fall short. You might say you know you deserve more money for your efforts but you aren’t earning more. If your behavior, decisions, attitude and everything else does not completely support and reflect your goals then it is a belief problem. You will always settle to what in your gut you knew you would.
Sure, you have to have all the pieces that make things possible. No matter how much you believe in something, if you do nothing other than feel worthy, then belief won’t matter at all.
And that is why this message is so important because all doctors and practice owners settle for the success they feel they deserve. If you are achieving less than you want, it begins with your expectations and then your execution.
Remember those two words. It takes both of them to make what you believe in a reality.
Use this message to think through where your confidence lacks, where your belief is shallow, where you get in your own way, where you experience negative or self-defeating thinking… and then let’s fix it.
We will begin that process next week.
