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. Why should you have a coach? That's the question that came up from my ponderings after thinking about this, which was largely inspired by the conversation with John Gallagher and this idea of what's enough pain to make change. And if you haven't listened to that episode, it's a great episode, but he opens up with a story that really just is, I think, a great metaphor for how we are in our lives, and I want to unpack a little bit about how we make change. Before I do that, though, just a quick reminder if you're stuck, if you want help, if you imagine a great business, great culture, and you're not there, or you're stuck and you're imagining having a business that gives you the life you deserve, but again you're stuck, please don't stay stuck. Please reach out, hit us up at practicefreedomcom slash schedule just for a quick conversation to see what a first step or next step could look like to get you on your way.

So back to the topic at hand why have a coach? Well, it's really about what deserves your attention, what deserves change and how much of what's going on in your world is acceptable. I think on one end of the spectrum, we say what you allow, you encourage, you know, what you accept, you encourage, and there's a whole lot of truth to that. At the same time, we have to prioritize. There's a lot of things that aren't what we wish they were, and life gets busy and we accept a lot of things. What's enough? What's enough for you to make a change? Have you taken the time to ask yourself this conversation has so many facets to it because it involves lots of variables, lots of inputs and, most confusingly, time, because time changes things. What we think we want changes over time and what we are willing to accept can grow over time. And what I mean is if it's a minor inconvenience today and over time we don't address it, we grow accustomed to it. We may not realize that it's twice as painful as it was when we first encountered the pain and have never done anything with it, but we're so in the habit of dealing with it.

This can be pool maintenance company, not that that can happen, but I've got that situation. I'm not sure if I have the right pool company. I'm pretty sure I don't. But is it what needs my attention right now? Do I want to go find a new pool maintenance company? Well, I don't want to do that, so I'm putting that one off. How big a problem is that? And I don't know. I don't have the answer to that one and it weighs on me and I know it takes cycles.

But you know, in the organization you got some people that you don't think are the exact right person in the right seat. How do you know when? Today is the day that I'm no longer going to take that Now, in theory, I mean, I teach a system that will tell you the answers to those questions of we want 80% right people in the right seats. I can walk you through the tools to tell you exactly what that means, so you don't have to deal with that culture. And then, if they're in the 20% who are not right people in the right seats, we have conversation with them and work towards getting them in the right seat, even if it's in another organization. But in reality, we're going from wherever we are now to wherever we're going to be, and when we look at if we're overwhelmed in the moment because we are always overwhelmed in the moment we just get good at filtering and that takes away the overwhelm. So by mean overwhelmed, there's always more things going on than we can address and we filter, sometimes better at times than at other times.

And so I guess this kind of goes into the coaching question, because, say, you run an EOS and you're six months to two years into the journey, you're probably not thinking exactly this necessarily. You might be thinking I've got right people, right seats, it's working, it's great. But if you're not. You haven't even implemented a business operating system and it still feels a lot messy in this idea of clarity and order is a bit foreign. Where do you start?

I think it's part of where this is at, and it does start with what do you want. You must know something about what you want, and this, too, has a time effect, because if you do the work for several years, I can probably ask you the question and get a pretty precise answer of what you want right now and what you want in the future and some unanswered questions for you. You're very early on in the journey. I say what do you want? And you say like something better than this, anything better than this. And what does that exactly look like? Not sure just yet, and that's okay, that could be enough. But if that's the case, if we're somewhere in the middle between absolute clarity and absolute unclarity, how are we creating that self-awareness of what the first step is? We know a lot of those things are going to have to stay there for a while.

Where do the priorities come up? And I think it's very simple finding a coach, and I think that I am speaking from a perspective of being a coach, a coach of leadership teams, but it doesn't have to be me. It doesn't have to be a professional coach when you're, because some of the stories that John and I talked about at different times are that some of the coaching we offer is our perspective on someone's performance in terms that they don't necessarily want to hear Meaning. Somebody might ask us to rate them and a high performer. If you're a high performer you probably are, you're used to performing at a high level, and part of the job of coaching is to what are we rating? What are we looking at? What are we assessing? Well, what do you want? A good coach is going to be on that journey with you asking the question what do you want? And then hopefully there's some alignment around the types of coaching and types of outcomes that coach brings. But the question should be there what is it exactly that you want? And the coach will bring back usually some perspective on the things you're doing.

That might need some attention and one of the things that has to happen is the pain has to be bad enough. It has to really be worth getting your attention and that's kind of the gift If you're going through life trying to figure out what your priorities are some of the things that have helped us in the past is you know when it's really urgent, it's really on fire. The due date is tomorrow, the homework is due, the IRS is calling. Those motivate us, the urgency motivates us, and so sometimes what we need is, once we've gotten past that is, a better sense of importance, more than urgency, once urgency is no longer the best indicator and if you believe in what Stephen Covington says, it's rarely that great an indicator of long term success.

Urgency, the immediacy of something, is not really an indicator of importance. What is an indicator of importance is the significance, long-term, how far out of integrity is it with what you're trying to do, which, of course, as I mentioned, you must know what integrity would look like. So you have to know the answer to the question what do you want? What is ideal, what are my priorities? And oftentimes that's where the coach's first sort of wake-up call is you don't know where you're going, and does that matter? And this idea of you may be failing right now can be that right wake-up call, the frustration, the disappointment that says well, I guess today's the day, and now that I know this, we can close the gap on that and start taking action and start beginning to filter and start reorganizing what I'm working on, and I realized I'm not going to mess with that pool guy. That is not the issue. We are focused on something else entirely.

I'll never forget when I first had a coach of sorts I knew she was a coach, but she was coaching the group and she sat next to me and she gave me some feedback that she actually, and like a good coach, asked if she could give me feedback on what she had seen in the group interaction with us that day and I said, sure, I'd love to have that feedback. And what she shared was that she thought I was very, very thoughtful in my communication and cared a great deal about the others in the room and the and the consequences of what we're talking about, and my caring was super high and my thoughtfulness was super high. However, in terms of my ability to communicate on an emotional level, she thought I was one of the worst she had seen. I don't remember her exact words, but that is certainly how I heard it and as somebody who had been very proud of his ability to communicate and lead an organization, who was very high on the compliments she had just given me. In that moment it was a very rapid crash to the bottom and someone actually at the table had heard it and knew me and immediately jumped in to sort of rescue me. Oh, that's not true, and I really appreciated her willingness to do that. For me that loyalty meant a lot. But at the same time I was shaken, and it began a conversation over many years to understand even what emotional communication was. I did not even know what that was, and so I feel I've gotten a lot better and I'm sure people have their opinions on that since then. But it was an absolute gift to realize that there was a journey, and so the pairing up of this failing grade levied subjectively by another human being whose opinion mattered to me, was a big motivation and has been a motivation since then. That's probably 15 years ago that that happened. So I would like to think lots of progress has motivation since then. That's probably 15 years ago that that happened, so I would like to think lots of progress has happened since then.

But this coaching idea of reflection, getting it from other people, I teach us a lot that internal introspection is very important. There's a lot of inner guidance, inner leadership that needs to happen. But in terms of self-development it's a very weak method. Our awareness of what we're doing in very broad terms is very low because we're so used to it. We've always done what we do and having literally anybody else who can look at us objectively from across the table, from across the room, give us a little reflection on what they see, without much real science, required magical interpretation. You know, it's nice when you have real expertise, but just getting somebody to tell you how something lands is coaching. It gives you an opportunity to reflect on, is what I'm doing, working and is in the amount of information you can get from an objective observer in just that sense of like.

One of my favorite questions is when I'm talking through something, working through something, and I'm working with someone who's maybe an unofficial coach in the moment, or even an official coach, and we don't really know where we're going. I just say you know what you can do for me. You can tell me what you're hearing and it's surprising what happens when I start talking about what's going on. This person's job is to do nothing but listen and tell me what they thought they heard and the themes that come out of that or where you're going. It's so powerful and the person doesn't have to do anything particularly magical, they just have to listen and say, well, it sounds like you're really getting frustrated with this and you're like, oh really, is that what I was saying? I didn't realize it. And when we talk and when we think at the same time, the words and the thoughts sometimes go different directions and it can be really really clarifying.

So the hope of this little rant is to give you an opportunity to think about the noise. How noisy is your life and what could the power be in a little observation. And what could that power, that observation, even be more powerful through if it comes through somebody else, and I can tell you it's 10 times more powerful just by doing that. And if you don't have a coach, of course need a coach. And if you don't have a coach, of course need a coach. And if you don't have a coach, you can find one anywhere and you can use it to give you a sense of what's actually going on and allow you to be in control of reprioritizing your actions and behaviors based on some subjective opinions and observations of somebody else, especially if they observe it negatively and gives you a failing grade on something that matters to you. It can start a very powerful change in your priorities.

So I hope that's helpful. That's just a thought on that. Give us feedback. If that's useful, I'd love to hear about it. If it's not, tell us that too. And, of course, if you're stuck in the process of making and growing this business, that's super high impact. That gives you the life you deserve. Please reach out, don't stay stuck. Practicefreedomcom slash schedule. We'll get some time together and we'll see you next time on Practice Freedom with me, mark Henderson.

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