- Far more people are not reaching their goals than those who are
- Do you have clarity about your goal?
- What is your "why"?
- The setting and planning phase is where most people fail
Did you know that only 8% of professionals report that they are consistently hitting their marks across all industries?
Are you in this boat also?
Do you find yourself changing your goals when you realize they are a little outside your reach than you expected?
Do you find yourself “moving the cheese” when you’re getting close to actually hitting the thing you’ve been working so hard to achieve?
You clearly are not the only one, despite the fact that it often appears that everyone around you is making huge strides in their business and personal lives. Dentistry is supposed to be a guarantee of wealth and prosperity but many of us are finding that achieving that “American Dentist Dream” is more difficult than we expected.
So what happened?
According to numerous polls and studies, most people cannot clearly write the reason they want their goals. Their “Goal” is their “Why”. There is no tie to how that goal will make their lives better. How that goal will make them feel. How achieving that goal will make the lives of the others around them better. Their goal is just an arbitrary idea…..a finish line. Finish lines can be moved. Finish lines are endpoints. Goals are made to make our futures better. They’re starting lines.
- Why are you a dentist and take on all the work and stress that you do?
- Because you love prepping teeth and talking to all your patients who you want to build relationships with? Nope…..try again.
- Because I get to change peoples lives, have the opportunity to earn a substantial income that can afford me an enviable lifestyle, have autonomy with my practice or group, and I will feel like a respected member of my community? Ok…..now we’re getting somewhere.
- Why do you want to start a family?
- Why do you want to save up for your big travel plans?
- How will paying off debt make your life better?
- What is the real reason you want to purchase a home?
Trying to accomplish all of these milestones at once is beyond overwhelming which is why clarity is so important.
Your goals need to have a clearly defined beginning and end point. “Increasing My Production by 20%” is not a clear goal. Without clarity, you have a goal that is constantly changing, leading to a sense of failure as you are never able to obtain the result you are looking for. This leads to burnout as you are putting yourself in the cycle of never being good enough when in fact, you are chasing the horizon and have set yourself up for failure inadvertently. And yes, “Burnout” is an actual Medical Diagnosis with its own ICD code (Z73.0).
Next in the goal planning process-do these goals help support your why? If they do, are you excited by the results they will produce?
Now that you have your big “Why”, you need to test it. Is this going to be motivating enough to make you excited to wake up in the morning? Two of the biggest drivers of our success-excitement and fear-seem to be on polar opposites of the emotional spectrum. Upon closer inspection, they actually are not.
Did you know that excitement and fear appear as the exact same response in our brain during CT scans? The difference is how we process or interpret these emotions. Same with stress and exercise. Exercise in itself is a stressor on our body but one we see as a “good” stressor. What would you rather be driven by-excitement or fear? And which will produce longer lasting results? Fear is actually a very powerful motivator, and should be used alongside excitement. Just don’t let fear be the primary driver of all your goals.
Fear driven actions come when you see that you have so much to lose, and are spiraling in a desperate state, because something in your life has crossed the point of no return. You have had enough. You are not willing to let this be your future. Excitement driven actions come when you consider the possibilities of what lies before you, and can often work in conjunction with the fear driven goal.
For example:
- I want to buy a house in X neighborhood, so that we can build equity and have a safe and comfortable community to live in where we can walk to schools, restaurants, and parks.
- In order to achieve this, I need to save $ in X months.
- This means I must increase my production by x% by x date.
- That equates to $X in Collections
- That translates to $X in take home income
- I need to produce $X more per hour to do this
- I need to have X fewer open hours every day by X date
Now, break down the steps needed to obtain your goal into manageable milestones so you can see the progress you are making daily. Taking one of our examples from above, say you need to increase your collections by 10% by the end of the year in order to hit your goal.
What does this break down to:
- Your Doctor collections last year were $500,000
- I want to grown it by $50,000 to $550,000 by December 31st
- I have 5 months to achieve this goal
- I have 63 working days between now and the end of the year
- I need to produce $793.65 more per day
- This means I only need to do $99 per hour more dentistry in order to buy my dream house.
This is much more manageable than looking at a huge $50,000 number without any idea of what it takes to get there. What do you need to do from a case acceptance standpoint, a scheduling standpoint, a team support standpoint to get there? Suddenly the wheels are turning and you realize that reaching these goals taken in smaller segments can be more than achievable. These segments build over time and suddenly you are not just changing your day-you’re changing your life.
