I see it all the time. Doctors who are leaps and bounds ahead of where they once were, yet stay compulsively stuck into a routine, a grind, a viscous cycle of work. Often it’s work for the sake of work or it comes from a place of habit by hanging onto responsibilities that should have long been passed on.
It all results in doctors being held back from actually enjoying their success and experiencing some of the liberation they’ve earned at this point in their careers.
I’d be interested to hear…
What you think is holding you back right now? What are you still doing that you know you shouldn’t be? What prevents you from experiencing more fulfillment from your practice?
The reality is both pain and prosperity can be self-induced decisions and attitudes, mindsets and philosophies. Sometimes we just need to give ourselves permission.
It’s true you have to “pay your dues” but I see doctors a few years into their career out-earning doctors forty years their senior who are still trying to crack the code.
So, how do you stack the deck in your favor? How can you achieve your goals without the painful lessons?
It’s certainly possible. Perhaps not without a few challenges but far fewer than most are willing to accept.
My advice to you would be to pick your path carefully. The focus really should be working smarter not harder. Which is my theme for every practice, doctor, and team I work with… finding ways to achieve your goals in a more profitable, less stressful way.
This doesn’t mean that success will not be without pain and hard work. It simply changes where you apply that effort in order to create greater leverage, producing better results with less pain and work.
All that matters is that you are purposefully deciding about your own prosperity. What it is and how you want to use it for the betterment of your life.
That’s why I always say the most important thing you must give yourself out of everything else (and what I really do for you here every single week in our Weekly Reports) is grant yourself permission – permission to be prosperous and to be purposeful with it.
To do more of what you want and less of what you don’t. To decide what is enough and what isn’t. To determine how you go about both earning and enjoying.
We’ll get to some key tactics around this idea of prosperity. Most think of this tangibly as profit, but profit is only part of it. It also matters what you do with the profit and what you do with the time that the profit affords you.
For starters, you have to do that old adage of “pay yourself first” but actually commit to it with specific adjustments.
In order to have peace with that idea and still have money in your bank account for necessity of cashflow, you must know the right numbers and be focused on profit with a structured way to get it out of the practice and into motion in your life as part of the cycle of prosperity.
The other thing that is so very important is to make sure your goals are actually sufficient enough to yield what you expect. I call it “The Magic Number That Makes Your Life Work” and you have to have realistic, practical, formulaic, and engineered ways of making certain it occurs consistently and predictably.
This goal can’t be hit once in a while when we get lucky, type of a thing. These are “have to’s” in order to buy you the ability to “never have to” again and practice on your own terms.
And this is not about greed or hording every dollar that comes through. Come up with some challenges for yourself and your team, then when you hit certain goals reward everyone with more time off. This is about far more than just the money.
Next, make sure that you really take time to come to terms with whatever you determine your own version of balance to be in your life.
Again, zero judgment from me. Besides, you should be absolutely immune to criticism anyways. The point is to find your equilibrium and then just be, enjoy, and savor the arrival at perfect balance. Work, live, and play – and while it won’t be equal time to all, you can maximize the quality of time for each one which will elevate the value of how much they mean to you.
This is true prosperity, my friend.
Find things that fill you up outside of your practice (whether these are hobbies or charity work or mentoring or church or travel or just more time at home with your family) and it will translate to more fulfillment in your practice as well.
The mistake is often to go full speed and then be forced to come to an abrupt stop. If you grind so much you become burnt out and exhausted for all other aspects of your life, you’ve completely negated the entire purpose of grinding it out in the first place.
There is a middle ground that must exist for everyone but especially for peak performers, high achievers, people who get paid as much for their brains as they do their bodies, their value as much as their time, their skills as much as their service.
You must have dedicated time to do nothing, to decompress, to breathe, to think. That means you are not always on the clock working through the to-do list and filled with activities, no matter what they are and who they are for. This is vital for your own growth and prosperity.
The next big one that must happen – and we work on this with my Wealth Groups with incredible intentionality – you must have places for your prosperity to go and not just into your 401Ks or some version of a retirement fund.
Purposeful with your prosperity means it having defined places for it to exist and to proliferate, to be experienced and enjoyed, to be tended to and appreciated.
Making the money and creating wealth, as I outlined the past few weeks, is only half the battle. You’ve got to know how to care for it, protect it, and be more purposeful with it. Otherwise, what’s the point?
We’ll pick up right here next week as we continue to dive deeper into the what your practice should ultimately be providing to you as an independent private practice doctor. Get ready, this is where the real fun begins.
