As a practice owner, you have probably gone through periods of negative thoughts regarding your business at some stage. Here are some examples we have heard:
- what if I can’t make my payments this month,
- where are all the potential new patients everyone talks about,
- are there no good staff anywhere,
- why can’t everyone work together smoothly,
- where does all the income go … my take-home sucks,
- is it really worth it to have my own practice … I could make more as an associate with less stress,
- marketing doesn’t work,
- I hate my patients,
- And so on!
Have you ever had someone say to you as a solution to those thoughts, “Think positive thoughts” and you wanted to hit them because they don’t really understand what you are going through? Then what is the answer or handling?
Don’t Hit Me
I am going to say something similar (so don’t hit me) but I’m going to change it up a bit. The mantra should be: Positive Thoughts = Positive Results. We are all potentially able to make positive thoughts, right? I’m sure you’ve seen it in your own life when you were totally positive about something good that you wanted and then you got it. So there you go … it works!
Positive Thoughts = Positive Results
How can you make this work for you? The first step is to decide to make positive thoughts about future actions. If you sneak a negative thought in, make yourself look at the flip side … what would be the positive way of looking at that problem?
For example, take the negative thought, “Marketing doesn’t work” and turn that around and think positive: “A lot of practices have enough new patients coming in, so there must be some good marketing methods that do work. I need to find out what they are.” (At AMI, we have many hundreds of marketing ideas that are inexpensive and have worked for our 1,800 clients.)
Another example, negative thought: “My take-home pay sucks.” Positive thought: “I would like to increase my profitability. Let’s make an appointment with my bookkeeper or accountant and take a good look at what can be trimmed from my overhead.” If you have already done that process, then: “Let me look at how to increase the income of the practice by getting with a good management consultant. (Try us … we offer a free, in-depth Practice Analysis to show you where you’re losing potential income.)
You Get the Point?
The real trick is to first catch yourself thinking a negative thought. The secondary trick is to force yourself to turn it around and think positive and then take the pro-active steps to achieve the positive results.
Have fun with this!
