As any year comes to an end, the tendency of the ‘average’ doctor is to fall victim to two typical mindsets.
First, they have almost a defeatist thought about hitting goals in months with major holidays since patients want to delay or do nothing or bring up money or other excuses. As though that is different now versus any other time of the year.
What do the ‘average’ practices do? They get desperate, try to cram in every patient, max out all insurance, do all the things they have worked so hard to rise above and get away from. They divert away from the actual goal and retreat towards a familiar place, a habit of the past.
Second, they fall into the trap of letting the circumstances dictate attitude and busyness determine outcomes. Gifts, parties, people, places, and calendars take precedent. So much to do, so little time. Everything seems to slow as they ease into the Holiday Season and New Year’s. They even lack any sense of urgency because the end is already near.
I challenge you: don’t be average.
Heck, this isn’t even the 2-minute warning yet. There’s still a lot of time left with 1/6th of the year remaining. That’s a substantial percentage and most likely at this point (hopefully long before now) you are working towards stacking income as you run up the score.
Of course, you don’t look at it that way because you look at things monthly with overhead and such. Yet, if you followed my “number that makes your life work” reverse engineering formula for total financial independence that every Private Practice Owner must know – then you’d realize that the last two months are nothing but icing on the cake, fund your future, long-term wealth building months of your year.
This is why I say so many people don’t exceed their goals. They come up short and stop before the race is even over. Instead, I want you to RUN THROUGH THE FINISH LINE.
Right now, purposefully assess which traps you are going to avoid, what old habits will you never revert back to, what mistakes of the past will you not repeat this year. Change this thinking. Stay hungry, maintain your focus, and keep hustling.
I want you to flip everything upside down and help your team understand…
The end of the year is the most important. It’s the perfect time to get patients to commit to themselves, to invest in and budget their health and future, and to load up the first quarter of opportunity as you drive home case acceptance.
The calendar is running out of time for everyone. Therefore, you have a built-in deadline to increase urgency, exclusivity, time sensitivity, and use demand in your favor.
If you want to really be a master of success then you should reassess and review and possibly even reallocate the rest of your year in minutes, hours, days, weeks, goals. Make sure you are doing all you want to do, focusing on the highest value priorities, and maximizing your time.
Besides if there is one thing the end of the year will do it’s fire you up to be in an even better place this time next year. Everyone’s goal is usually a baseline from the past 12 months (what you achieved in the previous year). The best way to set up next year for success is to reset the baseline to an all-time high.
Now, before we set our sights on our theme for the next few Weekly Reports, I want you to very clearly in your mind know exactly what ‘run through the finish line’ looks like to you.
Make the list. More importantly visualize yourself and your team doing it. What is it going to feel like to win!
This will also help you to avoid any setbacks or average behaviors from sneaking up on you.
Speaking of that, I want to move on to a vital topic that breaks through pre-conceived ideas of what is possible and set you up for success – not just for the next two months but the start to a brand new year ahead.
In the last several Reports, we focused on building a fortress around you, getting rid of self-limiting beliefs, avoiding self-destructive behavior, and protecting you from others who are not aligned with your ideals, principles, philosophies, goals.
Now, I want to move to inside of your practice and share one of my most fundamental concepts about the business of dentistry.
This ties in nicely with the end of the year when so many teams throw all their principles out the window in exchange for short term gratification or the easy way that we end up regretting when the New Year rolls around.
The greatest decision you will ever make is the ‘way’ in which you want to win. In other words, ‘how’ you want to do dentistry, the dentistry you want to do, the time in which you want to work, the team that you want to have, the experience you want to deliver to your patients, etc.
Most doctors start with money but the money is the easy part. Any money goal can be made with any model. It is more about ‘at what cost’ in order to achieve that money.
The begets two critical questions…
First: is the way happening to you or are you deliberately choosing, engineering, designing it?
Second: is your current way the best and most appropriate future way?
It’s important to reflect because what you are doing now will keep you where you are at now.
If you want to realize, achieve, become something more (or even just different) then the path to that is through a new way; not the old/current way.
This will be one of my most significant topics during my upcoming Whiteboard New Year Strategy Session. Stay tuned for details.
You see, all too often doctors are trying to find ‘a better way’ by looking out there at everyone else instead of looking inside and asking themselves what they really want and how they can make their way more in alignment with their life.
Achieving this harmony is the entire point of private practice.
Therefore, one of the greatest breakthroughs on your path to achieving success is when you come to the realization that your current results are entirely tied to your current practice structure, the decisions you’ve made in the past, and the actions you are taking (or not taking) now.
They say with success there are no accidents and really with results there are no coincidences. There may be things that happen to you that you didn’t have control over but the cause and effect is 100% real; even though it might not be fair.
So once in a while, nearing the end of one of my Blueprint Days with a new doctor, he or she will ask in so many words, “From your experience what do doctors do that derail them on their path to success and how can I NOT do those things?”
It’s a great question because what they are referring to is: self-sabotage. Getting yourself out of your own way to let things happen and achieve your potential is one of the most foundational principles you must master. It is a daily fight and it’s one you have to win.
This is because you are getting what you are getting by doing what you are doing as the leader, owner, and doctor.
If we want to change the result on the right (output) side of the equation, we have to change something on the left (input/formula) side first.
You can’t just wish it, think it, dream it into reality. There must be change and that begins at the very least with your decisions and your attitude about success and what’s possible.
That right there is probably one of the biggest challenges I face daily… doctors’ attitudes.
Attitude about team, patients, money, what’s possible, work in general.
You control your own attitude; no one else does. If you let other influence your attitude, you’ve given them permission to control what you experience. In reality, your attitude is the cause, not the effect on so much including patients’ attitudes towards dentistry and teams’ attitudes towards work.
This is the truth that leads to a breakthrough in success.
You would be amazed (or maybe not), at how some doctors spend all their time trying to find ways to make something NOT WORK, even when they are even asking for advice. They stay stuck, yet they know others are more successful than they are and still they question everything.
They won’t succeed because they have already made up their minds to fail. All because of their attitudes.
For some, it’s always because of something else. They never realize that they are in their own way and can’t get out of their own head to see what is really possible. Quite frankly, it’s actually NOT very difficult once you understand that the effort to achieve greater results is actually NOT more effort. Instead, it’s just smarter application as you replace certain habits, systems, approaches, sometimes people and especially thinking with ones that are elevated to the level of success you want to have.
You see, I’m known for “making room for growth” and my approach to exactly that isn’t more chairs, more patients, more team members, more hours, more days, more doctors and certainly not more effort. It can include any of those, but most Doctors I know prefer making more while working less. That means doing more meaningful dentistry and having more to show for it at the end. They prefer life less complicated.
My point is this… MAKING ROOM FOR GROWTH is about clearing out things that aren’t working or are working BENEATH the level of success you desire and replacing these components with those that match what you want.
In every practice there are places we can uncover lost opportunity and find missing treatment, patients and money without causing you more stress (actually reducing it) and without more work (actually reducing it). All because we elevate the level of performance of each variable and person in the practice.
But, before any of that can be done, we first have to make room for growth in your mind, in your belief of what’s possible. That absolutely begins by you taking back control over your attitude.
This doesn’t have to mean you are a grumpy or pessimistic person in order to improve – attitude is a very personal thing. We all know our own and often choose to deflect, ignore or displace instead of using it to our advantage.
We can grow your practice the hard way. It will feel like banging your head into the wall as we only go to work on what’s inside the practice. The real magic that makes everything else possible is going to work first on what’s inside the doctor.
And to the right doctors (the most ambitious, the smartest, the already successful or those with a whole lot more potential still to realize), you will embrace this message. You will think deeply about it and really assess yourself.
It doesn’t matter how big your practice is in physical size or what your current production is, the next biggest breakthrough to growth and profit in your practice is going to come by expanding your vision and making room for growth inside your mind first. All changes and possibility begin there… with you.
When you welcome that adventure, you’ll be amazed at what you discover.
Now, you’re ready to move on to making room for growth on the other “inside” next week.
You’ve got work to do. First in your future focused plan for running through the finish line of the rest of this year and then preparing yourself to re-imagine with me, build up your belief and deserve muscles, and take a very close and scrupulous look at your current reality – Your Present Way – and decide if ‘exactly as is’ is really going to lead you to the future you want, have earned and deserve to make possible for yourself.
I’ve got a hunch your path to a bigger better future is going to require a new bigger better way forward! We’ll head there next.
