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. 

Welcome to another episode of Practice Freedom and one of my shorter little rants that are sometimes random, hopefully, often useful. The topic today is earning and deserving, and there's a couple lenses we can talk through on that and this. There's a couple of yeah, parallel concepts survival versus dreaming, work life balance they all kind of come into the same bucket. I want to talk about the hustle mentality and the dreaming mentality and the live as if mentality fake it till you make it. I have some thoughts on thinking about that. If you're in one of those buckets, probably you're in the survival bucket, if you're even questioning this, but we'll see so. Quick reminder, of course, though, if in anywhere in this conversation, you're in the survival bucket, if you're even questioning this, but we'll see so. Quick reminder, of course. Though, if in anywhere in this conversation you're feeling lost or stuck or confused, reach out. If you're stuck in the process of creating this amazing high value organization that you love and everybody else loves, that gives you the life you deserve. It's making a massive impact. Please reach out. Practicefreedomcom slash schedule. Love to take a couple minutes and talk about what a first step or next step could like for you in the process, and if there's a way for me to help or not With that. 

Though this concept, it comes up a lot. I'll tell you. The first time I really was aware of it and consciously and then I could see back in my past I'd experienced a lot of this. The first thing was where does you know working with a client, where do you see this organization three years from now? And I could see the leader thinking I don't even want to think about that right now. I don't like that question and I was kind of resistant at the time. It's like we got to think long-term. You know, this is very this is Stephen Covey. You know you got to begin with the end in mind. But as I sort of questioned him and talked about the room, the room was sort of like you know, there's other leaders in the room, you know three or four folks and like yeah, yeah, I don't want to go there either. And what I realized was this team had really suffered a lot of losses and it was just a matter of we don't want to dream right now. We've dreamed before and our hearts were broken and so we just want to work on some progress. That makes us feel like we can make some progress and that I was like you know what that makes? Perfect sense. And we did that work and it was very powerful to realize that, like Jocko Willink very much painted in my mind the idea of morale improvement. 

How do you improve morale? It's very simple formula you must win. Winning is the only answer. Winning is a simply simply a way of describing giving feedback to your culture that what you're doing pays off. That's all. Winning is the effort paid back, and you need that positive feedback loop of effort equals results, and so, using that formula, you've got to take it all the way back to look. 

If we need to improve morale, we need to win, and if winning is hard, we need to find the largest win we can come up with, which might be a tiny win. It might be show up tomorrow, it might be reduced turnover, less people quitting. It might be somebody we're on time to a meeting for once. Whatever you have to do to get things back to the point of, we can set an objective and we can hit the objective, and that's a win. And so always keep that in your back pocket to turn things around. Go to as small a win as you have to come up with until you can eventually start doing them and prove to the culture, prove to your team, prove to yourself that your intentions come to life. You can point yourself in a direction and do something, and Jordan Peterson talks about this at length. You must set the bar low, as low as you have to to create a positive reward sequence that shows that a millimeter of progress, one thing done and we can build upon that, anything else, erodes morale, so that is a potential ingredient in this sort of dream versus survival mentality. It doesn't always show quite that strongly, though. 

I think a lot of what's at work is understanding, is creating some self-awareness. I love when a team comes to me and they're saying you know what we need to do. We need to increase sales, and what's on the table is very often well, we need to increase our marketing. Okay, great. This effort in terms of whether we're we need to do more email campaigns, oh, great. How long is it going to take for an email campaign to get crafted, launched, how is it going to fill the pipeline? What is your sales cycle? When are we going to start seeing results? 

One quarter, two quarters, three quarters, and very often there's some humbling that happens in that moment. People realize that that's not what's at work and, god forbid, we're doing brand work. You know, this is a year out, right, we're going to have to tell a story and figure out what the story is, and so, all right, well, well, we don't want to have this problem in the future. So we need to solve for the future, right, okay, maybe, well, yes, definitely actually, but where are we in the survival future continuum, and maybe we need two objectives, and maybe we need to think about what we're doing right this moment, and our objectives might be more sales-oriented. We've got to work with what's right in front of us. 

We have to do better with our existing opportunities, whether this is we've got a booked, I mean in any business. We can imagine this as sales, like who is in the pipelines, and we can those people right now. We know their names. Can we, can we close them? Or are we marketing and getting that, those names into the pipeline? That take time and when, every time you do anything more marketing oriented, it always takes longer than you want. So, if we're talking about in a practice, what's your sales? Your existing patients, the people who are on the schedule, the people who are already scheduled? Maybe they're in consult, depending on how your practice works, maybe their existing past patients from last year need to be rescheduled, and so what levers do we need to pull in that, and I'm getting too specific. The idea, though, is making sure you're very well aware of, in real terms, where are you in the continuum of building a better future, because today is great or today is not great. Today we need to take some strong actions, which flows into, I think, the core of this. I think that you think that when we think about these things clearly and those questions are asked are we in a spot of survival or creating a better future? We can generally answer those objectively. 

Where it gets harder is in the bucket of deserving versus earning, and I talk about this a bunch and if you've heard me talk about it before, I apologize. Hopefully it lands. Deserving is an absolute watchword, for I'm about to make an impulsive decision that I will pay for later. I deserve a beer. I deserve a second beer. I deserve a third beer. I deserve a beer. I deserve a second beer. I deserve a third beer. I deserve a break. How do you deserve to feel in the morning? Are you going to pay the price for that? 

And I understand you know you got to do the math on something like that, and sometimes that manifests outside of alcohol and late nights. It really does. You know I deserve a new car. Do you have you earned it? And maybe feeling like that car is falling apart and you don't want to be seen in that vehicle anymore and it's really going to make a difference. It's possible. You need to run the math on that in terms of can you truly afford it? Have we earned it? And I love the polarity of those words Deserving. Everybody deserves a great relationship. Everybody deserves to be happy. Everybody deserves time off to be well compensated. But have you earned it? Is it there? Is the money in the bank? Are the consequences of having this thing or doing this thing you want, are they going to be survivable? Are they going to put you in a position that are going to be advantageous to you in a month, a year, 10 years? And I get it. It's not all about delayed gratification, but being crystal clear on the consequences of this is so important and thinking about have you earned it and where you're at? Have you earned it and where are your kids? 

Because I think I have definitely been very humbled by times in the business and various businesses that I've been in of how bad things can get and the mindset of got to act as if, got to believe we can be there. I think sometimes a lot of the coaching teaches us to pretend and to feel like magic is going to happen if we start thinking more positive things, and that has never my experience. My experience has been believe it will work, honor the fear that it won't and do the work you have to do now, because I think I was just pondering that before I started recording this, thinking back about, in truth, how many times I've been running a business that has entered a state of trauma and thinking about what I had to do in those times to get it to work. And I just had to get my hands dirty and get a little freaked out and start paying a little more of the price of doing work that I didn't maybe want to do, a little longer than I wanted to do it on weekends, evenings, going to those events I initially want to go to, not all of which panned out. But I look back and I'm thinking man, you know it works every time Thinking about how blunt and clumsy and inelegant it was at times just to go to work and make the phone calls and build it up and get back into a sales role, and think, man, it was scary and like, what did I even do? 

Like, did I even know what I was doing at that moment? I just knew something had to be done and, looking back, like, well, it worked, I figured it out, I got the reps and it always works in that regard, and I want to balance this. You know you really have to go to work and do work for a long time sometimes and just being aware, I think probably what inspired this was a recent podcast conversation talking about how this leader made the choice to be at home a couple of days a week. You know, working three days a week, two days, not totally makes sense. When you can, you have to look in the mirror and say you know what I can pay the price, you know what I can pay the price. We can intentionally level out growth or I can work on developing my leaders better and maybe my hustle would make a little more profit in the short term, but long term is not going to make a big difference. And so I'm going to take a step back and I'm going to be more with my family right now because I can and if you can do that and understand the costs and the outputs of a calm and balanced life, of somebody else, you see, who looks like they've got the calm and balanced life, who has a different life than you. 

It will not pay off if you are lying to yourself. Is the business healthy? Do I have the right leaders? Have I earned this or do I simply deserve it? Because if you simply deserve it, you will likely find that not tending the business and trying to do those things you deserve will get you whiplash back into the practice, back into the organization, having to do that hard work you knew you needed to do in the first place. So, going inward, am I being too controlling? Am I freaking out? Can I take a step back? Can I learn to relax? That's a great mentality, if that's you. Or am I frustrated, worn out, still haven't figured it out? The business is still struggling and I just want a break. Okay, let's take a break. Let's figure out how to renew yourself properly to get you into the business. Don't abdicate and check out. It will not serve you to do that Now. 

Of course, along the way, finding a coach, I'm happy to help, but there's all kinds of people in your world who can help you sort of assess Am I in the deserving mindset or am I in the earning mindset? And there are things I can do that will make a bigger impact with my time getting that feedback, getting that self-awareness if you don't have it and if you don't, that might be normal. It's definitely normal. Most people find themselves lost. Most great leaders find themselves lost repeatedly and learn how to get unlost by asking for help and getting feedback and reflection from those great people around them. And if they realize that they don't have great people around, they go find some great people to put around them, one at a time, until they have that great community of advisors and reflection. I hope that's helpful. 

This idea is self-awareness of deserving and earning and being aware of where you are in that and the right behaviors at the right time. And hopefully you're hearing this, thinking you know what I have earned, this I can. I can step back. I can live a better life and put more on more people. But if you're not and you're in the deserving phase and you want some payback but you it's not there, it won't go well. Take some steps, get some feedback so you can unburden yourself and lead better and manage better and get some help. So I mean that's the bottom line. If it's not working for you, it doesn't mean you're a bad leader, it means you need some more people in your corner as advisors or leaders or managers on the team. Like I said, though, as always, if you're stuck, reach out. We'd love to help you. Practicefreedomcom slash schedule. If this is helpful, get in the hands of people who can benefit from it. I hope this is useful. We will see you next time on Practice Freedom with me, mark Henderson-Merry. Thank you.

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