What are those eerie thoughts you let fester inside of your head, haunting your every decision? Halloween is almost here and yet the spells you cast (or let be cast upon you), most certainly aren’t limited to each October. No, in fact, these are the things that get in your way more than you might ever care to admit or perhaps even realize.
I’m talking about more than just your belief of what’s possible or lack there of. What really holds you back from having more fun, being more profitable, and doing more complete cases? What about your team’s performance – what keeps them from getting to the next level?
I’m not here to talk to you about your attitude, I have no doubt it’s great. I’m here to tell you that all the tips and tricks won’t get your practice to the next level – by themselves. As long as there are any negative energy, evil spirits, wicked spells, and forces from the dark side infiltrating anyone’s mind, you are going to run into disappointment or at best sporadic success.
The ‘business of dentistry’ is very straightforward – we talk about it all the time. Often in this Weekly Report, which I will again very soon, I give you a specific topic to work on, think about, assess, or do differently to help you get your profits up and deliver more reliable results.
Here’s the thing: your success has a lot more to do with the ‘energy’ of it all than anything else (as long as you are doing the smart things that you know to do and not getting in your own way of success).
Of course, I’m not totally talking about the meta-physical energy. I’m talking about things like…
The energy of your morning huddle… where is it directly, positive or negative, past or future, problem or opportunity?
If you start the day sluggish or dragged down into pessimism or yesterday’s news then you aren’t going to bring today to life. Like a spell thrown on you to freeze you in the mishaps of the past instead of moving forward into creation mode.
Here’s a big one… think about the energy of the way every team member talks and engages with patients from the phone to hygiene to treatment to insurance. It is boring and a total downer or upbeat and excited for the possibilities ahead.
There should be no – zero – bad news in your practice with patients, period. Everything should be stated in the perspective of the patient’s benefit. Even the worst of news has a silver lining in “we can help you address this.”
This energy is the deciding factor on how someone receives information, how they choose to process it, and ultimately how they make decisions. Feelings always overrule facts because the mind justifies their emotions by making them seem logical… especially when it comes to buying experiences and decisions with money.
It goes far deeper than this.
Do you suffer from the evil thoughts that hurt your patients because you pre-judge and under-diagnose? Do you shortchange people’s ability to get healthy faster by chopping things down into bite size pieces and small increments? Do you use your knowledge and influence for good by passionately educating and positively conveying to patients why their health matters, how you can help them, and what they truly deserve?
Here’s a typical fault of most doctor, really a curse that burdens us all, especially with your team… not noticing the positive behavior and reinforcing the good outcomes no matter how small.
Instead, we all fixate on the negative by being reactive to mistakes and constantly bringing up the mistakes which results in deflating their confidence and paralyzing their ability to keep improving. And we wonder why they only get worse; it’s because they are focused on exactly what you were focused on – what they aren’t doing so well.
As I said last week, you need to use your crystal ball or your mirror mirror on the wall to look inside the minds of your team in order to figure out what spells they are under and start to reverse their course in a very obvious way – by you going first and reversing yours.
Then, one by one, you will see transformation as you remove the trance that is most often unintentionally working against themselves and inadvertently sabotaging the objectives of the practice.
That right there – in case you missed it – is the ultimate secret and the difference between good and evil… the opposite of obliviousness: complete awareness and deliberate actions towards your overall purpose and greater mission.
If you have those, you have everything in order to free yourself, your team, your patients, and your practice from the things that are holding you back from your potential. Break free of these spells and prosperity becomes so much easier and, by the way, more fun.
What’s really exciting and much more enjoyable to talk about are all the ways you can influence your patients to ensure they have the power to make smart decisions for themselves.
With a little bit of good magic you can work what often times might even seem like the impossible with your patients. You just have to believe and remove the bad energy from your environment. You’d be surprised at the power of influence you can have over others when you are using it for good.
We’ll go there next week with a final Halloween Report on the “Magic of Getting More Patients to Say Yes” and we’ll have some great fun with it.
In the meantime, drink your potion, break your spells, rid yourself of any curses, and eliminate the haunting energy from your life, mind, and practice.
