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Hello and welcome to today’s show growth without risk. My is Dr. Janice Hughes
And I’m excited and proud to be your host today, and just want to take that opportunity to thank ChiroScure for sponsoring this series for engaging and including me in it. Um, I come to you with a background in basically practice management, practice growth, the business business enhancement. And I think here we are, it’s the beginning of September and I kind of laugh that it’s actually really fourth quarter. And I get that technically fourth quarter, doesn’t start until October, but this is an ideal time to talk about how you focus this fall, ending the year strong, but already, also even beginning to think about next year. So I wanted to talk today about goals because I know from a chiropractic perspective, it’s a really hot topic. People love it or hate it. And so there’s a lot of emotion around goals, you know, particularly if in the past you’ve set goals and say, for example, you haven’t achieved some of your goals.
Now, some of you in an excited way are used to achieving goals. So there’s just a whole wide variety of ideas and approaches around goals. I also know that different people, different coaches, um, practice growth groups. We’ll talk about goals in different ways. Some call it the six piece, you know, do your goals in, in the areas that all start with P personal professional play goals and so on. I’m a great mentor of mine and coach of mine from years ago had me do seven areas of life. There’s a whole bunch of systems or strategies around goals. All of them actually work. What I want to talk about today though, is a little bit more about the energy, the emotion behind goals, and how to actually really embrace. And whether you have some negative ideas about goals, how you can still harness them. So I know it sounds a little crazy.
It’s a bit of an oxymoron to say pandemic and growth, but you’ve heard me saying in some of the shows, I’ve had the opportunity to be with you, that the pandemic has actually been a really good time for growth depending on your mindset. But recognizing that sometimes it sounds really crazy to say goals in the year 2020, because it’s like we keep getting hit with one thing after the next. I do want you entering this fourth quarter with some really concrete goals. How do you finish the year strong and more importantly, how do we already set you up for 2021? Now, when I start working with someone at say, a coaching client, a business, a chiropractor, I like to talk about where do you already envision yourself by the end of the year? So here we are, it’s early September. Let’s already pretend it’s December 31st.
And I want you to write a statement that says, you know, I’m finishing December 30, first, 20, 20, thrilled. We’re through it. Let’s not recreate it, but here’s what has allowed me to have my best year yet. Here are the things I’ve created and accomplished in fourth quarter and start to list some of the things. So for many of you, it’s say getting a better flow, getting so that you can process people, you and your team more efficiently, even with some of the accommodations you’ve had to, you know, meet, but let’s start to talk about some financial goals. Let’s get you putting things in writing about, could you end the year as if there was no pandemic? What would that take? So with goals, the reason that I like to start to talk about this, I like you getting very specific. I like you putting a number or a target or a timeline because when we do, it’s almost like we pull in resources, things from our subconscious things that we may not even be able to figure out.
I use a mantra in my own life that says with any of my goals, it’s not my job to figure out the, how it’s my job to hold the vision. So if I put a goal in writing, if I put something in writing that I’d love to achieve, it’s almost like I can walk backwards and do some actions. I like concurrent actions, but I also like you just being willing to launch some amazing things out there. So if, for example, even with some really strong goals, you won’t be able to hit say a target to more than recover from 2020. That’s already what we start to put and envision for 2021, that 2021 is your most incredible business year in practice. Yet. What I like though, is that you get these things in writing. Now there’s a bunch of different approaches. You know, we can put it in our Google drive.
We can put it in a document. I actually like physically writing some of the goals, manifestation. How do we manifest a goal? One of the keys is actually things in writing. So it’s okay. If you like to use technology, if you want to be able to pull that up on your phone, you could make that in a note just where it’s right on your phone. You know, even just adding a little bit in the written format, you know, sticking that somewhere. I really like putting things in writing. So then no matter what system you use, I’m not going to suggest that there’s one, right? If you have clearly done business and personal goals, great keep doing it. I even like for some of you listening, if you don’t typically have categories, I even like you starting with three categories, I like to label them personal professional and play. And the reasonable often, if somebody isn’t typically used to putting goals in categories like to talk about those three is if you build those three, it’s already engaging a more balanced life, the play goals, the things you’d love to enjoy, engage in trips. You’d love to go on because those to me are every bit as important as your personal goals and your professional or business schools. So start getting creative, start putting some things down specifically for fourth quarter, and then even maybe a little dream sheet for 2021.
Aye.
When you put something in writing to start ask yourself a whole bunch of questions. I used to be the director of a really high end group in chiropractic called the winners circle. And I actually used to make them all send me their goals. And they’ve laughed because everybody will say, Oh, goals are such a personal thing. And I said, well, as a coach, I’m not gonna question your goals in a way that you can’t say achieve them. I’m going to ask you questions to help to solidify them. So the questions I always ask people were, you know, who, what, where, when, why and how, so if you have a goal to hit a certain money amount, a certain business target by the end of the year, then we want to break that down. You know, what actions do you need to take every day? Do you track your goals consistently?
If you don’t? Well, then that could be an action. So that every week you begin to say, how could I see one more person per day? I have never seen an unrealistic goal. When somebody even says to me, I want to double my practice. That’s not unrealistic often. It’s just that people either have unrealistic timelines or unrealistic action steps, so you can achieve any of these things. So for example, even doubling a practice, you know, if you’re talking about over three months or six months, well, what does that number look like? Break that back to what does that mean per month? What does that mean per week? And then what would that mean per day? And you’ll often find that it’s asking yourself questions. Like, what would it take for me to see one more person a day? What would it take for us as a staff right now, still doing all the accommodations, the safety and required things for COVID.
How could we speed that up or be a little bit more efficient so we could see one more person per shift. You start doing that. Now I realize that may not be suddenly five more every single week that you start to track that, and you’ll be shocked and pleasantly surprised at how often you hit those targets. Just imagine if you hit that three days out of the week, start to think about what that means per month. Start to think and envision, and imagine the growth that that represents. So I want you to hold the vision and I want you to stay connected to it because I can also show you people that do fantastic jobs of writing goals down and never look at it again. Now there’s entire other schools of thought Tony Robbins used to talk about, you know, your top three goals and literally carrying it, you know, in a note on your, on your phone or putting it in writing and sticking it in your wallet or in your pocket, you know, and only zooming in on those three goals.
You know, other people just say, wait a minute, I need to read that whole list of goals or create some affirmations related to it. I don’t want to complicate it. But what I find is that we’re a lot of people get frustrated or where the breakdown comes is not even taking the time to review them. And let me give you an example, years ago, as a young practitioner, I was really fortunate to go to a Tony Robbins event. And in those days, Tony really was talking about, put down your goals for one year, two years, five years in 10 years. And obviously you scratch you’re in a workshop and you’re putting that all down in writing. And I had sheets back then. We didn’t have our cell phones that we could just do it in a document. And how I know the timeline is because from the seminar, the program, I was at two when I moved was two and a half years later.
And of course I pulled those papers, those sheets out of a binder of a file that I have. And I sat down to take a look at them. And the amazing and intriguing thing is, is that I had achieved all my one year, two year, five year and 40% of my tenure goals. So for me though, instead of going, Oh wow, that’s so exciting. And you know, I’m, it’s something about me. Remember I never looked at them. I was pulling them off a shelf that I never looked at. So my brain went to two things, okay. The power and importance of what you put in writing. But my second thing was, I wonder what I could have done and created and achieved if I had actually paid attention to them. Sometimes it’s even things as you review or take a look at things where you begin to realize you’ve put a goal in writing and then you come back and you sort of go, wow, that’s not really what I want.
Or sometimes you can ask yourself, is that my goal? Or is that someone else’s goal? Because a lot of times we see other things, well, what someone else has, you know, wow, I’d love that. Well, that’s great. If that’s really authentic for you, a lot of time, coaching people about values and the clear you get on the things that mattered the most to you, because that’s what a value is. A value is like your fingerprint. You leave your fingerprints on everything you touch. Well, your values. If you can get so clear on them, you’ll begin to find that often you have less goals, not more, but the unique distinction is those goals become much more clear or authentic to you. They’re not necessarily someone else’s idea they’re yours. They’re the things that matter really deeply to you. The advantages that clear you get on your values and start to align and create some goals related to that. What you can then do by asking those questions that I just said a minute ago, you know, who, what, where, when, why and how
Huh.
Begin to break a goal down into a lot of really, really simple pieces, how everyone ends up knowing that I’m Canadian is when I say the word chunking, because I like to chunk a goal down as small as possible. I like to be able to ask myself, but particularly ask clients that I coach businesses that I work with. What is your next simplest action step now? What is the biggest piece? What is the most difficult? You don’t even have to sit and say, what will give us the greatest results or impact? We want you to ask the question, what’s your next simplest action, because it gets you in motion. And what happens is, as you get in motion with a number of little pieces that are all building or leading to a particular goal, that is very authentic for you. You look at the momentum that you begin to create, and that’s why you look at some people that they’ll almost make a statement.
And before you realize that they’ve accomplished something, it’s like they’re pulling or attracting a lot of the right people, places and opportunities to them. Sometimes we put those goals down or something that we know is really a dream or really authentic for us. And we actually have no idea how we’re going to create or accomplish that. That happened a lot for me. And I’m going to give you the example of when I was money raising for a biotech company, our first goal, our first target to basically be a company, begin our research, you know, be able to call ourselves a biotech company was a target of $5 million. I had no idea. It’s one thing to be able to ask a patient for a great fee. My fee is my fee is my fee. And I was very congruent with that. Chiropractically but to suddenly think about where am I getting $5 million?
You know, I had to stop and break down and say, who do we know? Who are we connected with? Who knows someone else? You know, I had to break it down and say, well, wait a minute. We could look for one investor with 5 million, five investors with 1 million. And I just began to break it down. And in our first family and friends round, we were willing to take investments of $5,000. We have a lot of early investors in that round in our, a round that were like five, 10, $20,000 investors. I had to do a lot of things to start to show myself that I could think about and attract money and the right people at that time in the world, I had a friend give me a $5 million Zimbabwe bill. And that was the phase where basically in Zimbabwe, they were burning money in the street.
It was worthless, but my brain didn’t know that I sat that at the base of my desktop, Apple computer, and all day, every day in my office, whether I realized it or not, I’m looking at $5 million. So I’m sending a message to my brain about that attraction about that accomplishment of $5 million. I started back in those days and I still do this periodically because I ordered a huge bag, basically of kids fake $1 million bills. And every now and then someone will get a card from me that says, you know, may you attract this year $1 million? And of course it’s a, kid’s $1 million bill, but our brains don’t know that when we have that posted, I had one upon a bulletin board, right beside my computer. I taped one on my mirror, in the bathroom. So that literally every time brushing my teeth, I’m looking at a $1 million bill.
So I just started to find ways to take these small, tiny, tangible actions. I, even though I didn’t necessarily know how to talk about money or money raising, I was practicing. I would call up people that I knew and say, I just need to talk to about who we are and what we do so that I can be working on that script. You notice there was no script written for me, but I had to write or practice it. I had to learn to talk about money. So all of these tiny little tools now that did not happen in an instant, but within a couple of years, we had seated our entire first round and we’re on our way to multiple future rounds. So when I say this, break it down as much as possible. I want you to know that less equals more holding the vision and then breaking it down to some big goals, some values goals, certainly before you know, it you’re able to take that goal or that target and break it down even further.
And then, like I said, you’re beginning to build this momentum, build this energy towards achieving your goals. So I just wanted connect with you today about the power of four months left in a year. I know it’s been a crazy 2020, but recognizing after coaching thousands of chiropractors, I know there’s a lot of emotions, good, bad, and ugly related to this concept of goals. What I wanted to share today are some simple strategies, some ideas to get some things in writing about really finishing this year strong. What can you accomplish? Some of you have been studying entire online courses and learning new things during the pandemic. What are your business? Is there a way you talk about adding other business units or things to the practice that aren’t as dependent on the physical adjusting. So start to get creative and think about putting things in writing that are gonna allow you to finish this year strong.
And let’s also get excited and start talking about 20, 21. I don’t know about the rest of you, but in some ways with the chaos of 2020, I’m actually really thinking about peace and harmony and some of those kinds of goals and energy for 2021. So just in finishing, I want to, again, thank ChiroSecure Dr. Stu Hoffman for supporting not only myself and the profession for supporting us as chiropractors, even through these absolutely crazy times. So please reach out, ask me some questions. I’d love to see every one of you finish 20, 20 incredibly strong, thanks and have a wonderful day.
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