0:00:02 - Mark Henderson Leary

Welcome to Practice Freedom. What if you could hang out with owners and founders from all sorts of healthcare private practices, having rich conversations about their successes and their failures, and then take an insight or two to inspire your own growth? Each week on Practice Freedom, we take an in-depth look at how to get the most out of both the clinical side and the business side of the practice, get the most out of your people and, most of all, how to live the healthy life that you deserve. I'm Mark Henderson Leary. I'm a business coach and an entrepreneurial operating system implementer. I have a passion that everyone should feel in control of their life, and so what I do is I help you get control of your business. Part of how I do that is by letting you listen in on these conversations in order to make the biggest impact in your practice and, ultimately, live your best life. Let's get started. Welcome back, practice leaders. Thanks for joining. I had a concept that I just was inspired by, just to want to point out this concept about abundance mindset and what that means, and abundance versus scarcity and why that matters. Before we dive into that, though, please don't forget to give us some feedback along the way. We cannot get enough feedback. Give us comments, small, big, whatever you got. We'd love to hear from you. In the show notes there's the SpeakPike link. You can send us a voice message. Of course, leave us ratings, share this with everybody. But, above all else, if you're stuck in the process, in the journey to live this free practice life and to have an organization, you're super proud of a life that you love, living with a great culture and super high value, super high impact and patients who love what you do, and you're stuck on how to run a better business, better organization, please don't stay there. Please stay stuck. Reach out to us practicefreedomcom slash schedule to talk about what a first step or a next step could look like for you. 

So the topic at hand, abundance mindset this came up. It comes up a lot, and I guess one of the things about abundance mindset that scares me is that I wonder if it sounds too frou-frou and too esoteric to be practical. Let's just talk about what it is. So abundance mindset is idealistic in its simple definition that there's always enough, there's always enough, and I do think that there's probably some proof to saying that living in an abundant time and an abundant culture as a, you know, in an upper class, relatively speaking world, gives us some privilege to talk about these things where other parts of the world where scarcity is the most common norm or there's not enough. I guess I can see it as a privileged perspective and you know I haven't really pressure tested this because I have lived a relatively protected life when you compare to the as hard and darkest things can be for people on the planet even today. 

But it does seem that the wisdom of those who are less fortunate and the people who are less fortunate than I am always seem to carry with them a grace of abundance that you can bring into even the scarcest of times. And so it is a choice and what it is is there's always enough, there's always more, there's always something to be grateful for, and scarcity mindset is really that fear base and it is. There's never going to be enough. We are almost about out of time, we're almost about out of money and resources and we better hoard it and better keep it. And I think there's some practice. There's always practicality to what people have done and could do. That's why they get it into use. You know, the scarcity mindset comes from a time of there just isn't enough and we got to start hoarding. And if that's what we have to do at the time, sometimes there's real practicality to that. But in my experimental experience, the abundance mindset is the appropriate mindset most of the time these days. And that is to and I guess I've talked about abundance in the past. So if you're like, hey, you've already talked about this, then you've listened to that episode Fantastic. 

The slight angle here I wanted to lean in on is that it's the parallel here is fear and I guess love, right? So I've talked about that as well. So the antidote to fear is love. And why do I guess love, right? So I've talked about that as well. So the antidote to fear is love. And why do I mention love? It's a really big part of so much of what Gino teaches and so, and I think it's a really important part of knowing when you get it right. 

And again, if you want to talk, if you feel like mentioning the word love, what's that have to do with business and running a practice? Let's demystify that a tiny bit. You can mean it any way you want, you can interpret it any way you want, but let's just settle on. Wouldn't it be great to love your job, love your business, love what you do, love getting there, and when you start describing the work you do and the impact, wouldn't it be nice if you use the word love to describe it a lot, and I don't think you have to go much further than that, but you can. You can go way further than that. But if you just started, stopped there, then we've done a lot. 

And if you love your work, if you love showing up and you love time with your leadership team or if you want to or you don't love them right now, you don't love showing up you do have dread of your next conversation with your number two in charge or anybody else on the team. That's a problem because I've lived that man. I have lived that. I have had plenty of people that I work with that I'm counting on to get important things done and as the time to talk to them approaches, I'm dreading it and I got to tell you that you do not need to live that way. And when it gets fixed, oh my God, so much better. So the practical definition of love is that right there, like enjoying and having your heart positively excited and beating with anticipation in a positive way for your next interaction with somebody on your team and the next conversation and the next feedback you get from your patients or customers that, wow, what a great thing you're doing. That's, that's love. 

And so the abundance mindset is a really built around, not built described as feeling like there's enough to give, enough to share, and I've talked about this before the idea of you always have if you're worried about running out of stuff, you always have some love to give. You always have some kindness to share. You always have that. That's always there. You will never run out of that. So that's sort of the anchor point. 

But again, I'm trying to get to the point why did I bring this up today? And that is. But again, I'm trying to get to the point why did I bring this up today? And that is. I want to emphasize the point that we are all scared at times. If you have a massive amount of debt for this practice because you've got lots of machinery or you built out two floors for a surgical center or whatever you got, and you're looking at that debt service and you don't have enough revenue to pay for that, it would be really weird if you weren't scared of that. If you're freaking out. That just means you're normal and that just means that you're going to have to be practical in your choices. 

But, as Max Kerr, one of my recent interviews, said, there's no license to do harm out of fear. There's no license to lower your standard of excellence of caring for and healing people and doing great work and building people up. We can give ourselves you know what. Let's just have a bad doctor another year because we are not going to make enough money if we don't have a bad doctor, who's on staff, who's doing bad stuff, we know who's being abusive to people or being disrespectful and not prescribing the right stuff, and we're having bad surgeries, bad eye care, bad whatever, and I guess it's important to kind of call that out. That happened, that happened and if you've done that in your practice, that is real. 

And I want to call your attention to look in the mirror and there's a dual message here. I kind of feel like I'm getting pulled in two directions, like I don't want to beat you up right now, because you deserve love and you deserve coaching and you deserve some grace and you're doing great things. You're doing great things that are, on balance, very positive. At the same time, there's a dark side, and I guess this is probably really what this unpacks With great ability to heal, to be able to help people live better lives. If it's about getting them back to walking again, working again, spending time with their family, sleeping better, seeing at all, preventing blindness, whatever you're doing, there is a potential darkness to that of not doing that knowingly, consciously, and I guess I want to really hold two very polar truths, and one is that the power is very great and the gift is very great, very, very great. And don't take it lightly what badly it can go, and take it very seriously. 

And maybe this is again the double message here is I don't want the abundance mindset to make you feel bad because you are scared right now, because you are making choices that feel compromised or you don't feel powerful enough in the moment to make the choice you wish you could. But I also want the wake-up call to be strong and say your future self is going to have to cash the check or going to have to pay the mortgage a better metaphor on the choices you make today and add some levity. You know when Homer Simpson's eating that, you know those donuts or whatever. You know that's a problem for future Homer. You know wouldn't want to be that guy. You know, don't be future Homer, you're going to be future you, and it now is always the time to make better decisions for the future and look in the mirror and, you know, be pragmatic. I'm always a believer in pragmatism. 

When we look at the objectives for the company, for your company, for the next 90 days, for the next year, there's always all of them are great, got to do them, but we only have bandwidth for three to seven, hopefully closer to three, and so we're going to look a few fires in the eye Really badly mix a metaphor. We're going to look at these fires and think they got to burn to the ground because we have other things that need our attention and we're simply going to run out of capacity to take care of everything. And if we do try to take care of everything, everything is going to suffer. We're not going to really solve anything because we're going to be spread too thinly. We have to focus on one big problem at a time and so, using the motivation to say we have an awful lot of power and an awful lot of responsibility to heal people, to put healthcare professionals, healers, anybody, in front of anybody who's moving that needle, in front of the right patient to do the best work as possible. We cannot compromise that tip of the spear. We cannot knowingly continue to abide by disrespect of the massive responsibility and privilege and gift and the value we're offering. We cannot do that. We will always have to start with the biggest movement we can make. If we've got a toxic doctor, a toxic healthcare provider, that's probably very near the tip of the spear. Maybe not. Maybe there's something bigger, an even bigger forest fire that needs to be dealt with and maybe we can kind of coach them to be a little bit better while we're figuring out how to get to the next phase. 

But just asking those questions of do you believe in abundance? Do you believe that you can make a difference? Do you still do you have memory of what it used to be, if, if you've been in a spot where you it's been frustrating. I don't want to speak to both sides of this. Some of you listening to this are feeling like losing hope, like this business sucks. I don't like doing this. This is not fun and if that's the case, I want you to think back to the time when you thought it could be fun and what was it going to look like and what did you believe in? What were the simple things that you've since dismissed as sort of childish Like? What would happen if those became true? Like, I'll argue that the earliest, simplest, most thoughtless visions you had and I'm projecting here, certainly for myself, my earliest visions ended up being my most profound and most powerful, the ones that I got talked in through lots of nuance and conversations and outside feedback. This tended to not be as pure and as simple and easy and powerful. So those might be what you need to rely on, and if you were to take your childhood self and mentor yourself through that lens, what would that do? 

And the flip side, though, is, if you're very far along and you are really running a great business with a lot of belief in optimism and the fear doesn't creep in as often, but it does it does come in. You know, you do think about what happens if I have this hard conversation too early and a great surgeon, a great doctor, a great healer leaves, or if I upset somebody and I don't, I I'm not ready to handle that. We feel high growth organizations very often feel like they're just one person away, or one bad choice away from a real problem because they are. That's real. The truth of the matter, though, is that you're always one choice away from bad outcomes. The problem is most of those choices and decisions and consequences are left unseen. You don't know they're there, and they oftentimes find you when you're not ready, and so making those good, value-based choices are kind of all we have to work with to put ourselves in control. 

Really making hard choices that 10 years from now, as Shirzad Shamim, the positive intelligence guy, talks about if you flash forward 10 years, looking back, what choice would you make, regardless of outcome? You know you're trying to make a choice now. That's sort of expedience-minded. You want it to be right. But if you flash forward and say, what if you don't know? If it could be right? What if you didn't know? What if it might be right, might be wrong? What choice would you have preferred to have made? And maybe a way to say it is even if it turns out poorly, what choice would you have preferred to have made? And those are the things that really accumulate abundance, they accumulate reputation, they accumulate goodwill, those are the things that allow you to create resilience when you've built trust, when you've shown people who you really are and you really care for them. That's what gives, creates that ability to tolerate bad things, because people care and people will help you and you will help them. 

And I know I'm kind of conceptual here. So let's, I'm going to wrap this up and let's try to make it tangible. It really is talking about those doctors. Let's start with people. If there's I mean, there's all kinds of things that go wrong in an organization. But man, I'll tell you what, if I had to really summarize it as the biggest bang for the buckets people. And it is understanding that we are. 

We generally do a terrible job of clarifying expectations, especially the more sophisticated roles in the organization. The bigger they are, the more we are sort of figure it out and don't mess it up. So, getting crystal clear on exactly what expectations are and in US terms, it's definitely the five roles, the five roles of the seat, every seat in the organization, every person in your organization needs a crystal clear seat and you've got to have clear roles and if you haven't adjusted them in a while, you need to go back and make sure you're being crystal clear about expectations. But this sits on top of culture. We talk about the culture all the time. Got to have that front desk person I got. Everybody in the organization needs to be one of us needs to believe what we believe in details matter and healing matters and fun matters and whatever our core values end up being. But we don't always apply that to this really expensive, scarce resources, the ones that are so hard to get. We offer exceptions and we just were hypocritical, frankly, and we got to go back to those people and say are we holding everybody to that highest standard of excellence or are we afraid that if they leave we won't be able to run the business or we won't be able to make the money or whatever that goes from that and that abundance mindset all comes back down to. 

Do you believe, do you believe, that what you do makes a huge difference? And if you don't, could you again? And what would it look like to give more of yourself? Not necessarily in money and time. It could be in risk, it could be in coaching, it could be in mentoring, but certainly making choices that you know will build on your values, build on who you are, who you will want to have been. That's a complex sentence. 10 years from now, who will you want to have been Making those decisions, and it's not always easy, it is scary, and I urge you and I see this a lot, so in empirical form, like I mentioned a minute ago, there's always danger lurking. 

If you're afraid by telling the truth, if you're afraid that by telling the truth, a key resource, somebody who is falling short of your needs and expectations and putting your organization at risk, putting your patients at risk, if you're afraid by telling them the truth of that, that something bad could happen, then I get that. But the truth is that that person can leave. For all the things that you don't know about, there's plenty of other reasons that they could leave and bad things can happen and your inability to make money could manifest outside of your control. Take control of what you can and at least be in the driver's seat of what's going to happen. If this person does not want to live by your core values, does not want to meet or exceed the standards of excellence that the organization needs to perform, then at least you're creating an opening and a space for somebody to do that and your hand is at work and you're not blowing in the wind, waiting for chaos to decide your fate. So have the faith to move forward on that. And so I guess I just want to summarize this. 

I don't know if this is valuable or not in terms of how I described it, but it is so powerful to keep thinking about the aspiration of more and more abundance. And what can you do today? What's one thing you could do to give that doesn't cost you anything. What's one more reason to believe that there is more than enough for you in your organization beyond money. You don't have to pay everybody in the organization tons of money to feel like it's abundant. 

You can give them. They can head home a little early. You can say something nice to them. You can give them some positive coaching. You can get some developmental coaching. You can say hey, you opened to some feedback. 

It seems like you're somebody who really wants to do a lot with your life. You want to be a high performer, you want to be promotable, you want to be something whatever. Hey, can I give you some feedback. Maybe you don't even want to hear this, maybe this is going to sound harsh, but I'm only doing this out of love. That's abundant. That is I promise you, because you have to sacrifice your fear to do that. So there's always something to give, and I hope this inspires you to find some way to give some feedback, some love, something that moves in the direction of more and more giving higher and higher excellence and more and more of what you want the world to be. That's our time for today. We'll see you next time. Like I said, don't get, don't stay stuck. Reach out to practicefreedomcom. Slash schedule. Give us some feedback. I hope you live an abundant life on your path to a truly free practice, living your best life, making your best impact. We'll see you next time.

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