Every failure brings with it the seed for equivalent success.
I am sure you are all familiar with the story of Thomas Edison in his inventing of the light bulb. He did not simply wake up one morning with the knowledge and ability to produce light. He had an idea, he had a drive, determination, and enthusiasm to pursue something he believed in and knew would help others. His pursuit did not last a day or two, he wasn’t third time lucky. He persisted and failed and failed again. But in doing so he edged himself closer to his goal, the goal of bringing light to the world. All in all, it took Edison over 100 failures to find his success, and as I sit here writing this in the dark with the light on, I am glad he did.
How many times have you been discouraged by failure, stopped short of what you want to achieve, how many times have your patients stopped short of success in their care, not seeing the big picture through long enough to achieve their goals?
Success is the opposite of failure and the beauty of failure only becomes apparent in hindsight. However, we can help ourselves by thinking about why we want to fail in the first place and see it as simply a steppingstone, or even a progression, on our path to where we want to go.
And the same can be said for your patients, see the setbacks, the soreness, the slow progress, all as normal and necessary parts of their care and journey to success.
So how do you do that?
1. Know where you are heading?
What is the goal? Where exactly are you trying to get to. With your practice this could be a set number of visits per week, a number of days you see patients, or a profit margin. For your patients, it could be running a 10k, tying shoe laces, or playing with the grandkids.
Whatever it is, make sure you have a clear and measurable target.
2. Acknowledge where you are now.
Be aware of where you are, your current skill set, your current performance compared to where you are heading. Do not inflate your ego or kid yourself. Be humble and real. If you are seeing 50 patients per week but had one week where you saw 80. Make no mistake, you are currently seeing 50. Then measure that against the aim. And in doing so you will find the gap.
Maybe you are aiming for 200 visits a week, you now have a gap of 150 per week. Maybe you want to go from 20% profit to 50%? Is it your patient who wants to go from bed bound to running a 10K.
Be sure to measure where you are compared to where you are going. Find the gap.
3. Identify the missing skills.
Now you have the gap, what are the skills you need, or need to improve to get there. What is the help or guidance you need to make it happen? Maybe you need to improve your ROF script. Does one of your patients need to understand the long term care plans and trust you as their provider (then you need to improve your ROF).
Is it financial acuity that you need to know? This is the humbling part; it is time to figure out what is really needed to jump the gap.
4. Start to fail.
You are now going to work on the gap, start to do the things you are not good at. Your patient is going to start something they are not comfortable with. And as you embark on that journey, like trying anything new, you are going to fail. Simple as that, you will not strike gold first time. However, because you have identified what needs to be done, and you know where you are going, these failures simply become steppingstones along your path.
5. Pause to look back.
When you get head down in the ‘work’ and the failures, it is often demoralising. Therefore, it is important to regularly stop and look at how far you have come. You may have set a target to go from 20% profit to 50% but keep ‘failing’ at 30%. Pause for a minute, this is still a 10% increase and on a £200’000 practice, you’ve just put another £20k in your pocket.
So, there you have it, five simple steps to hep you fail in the right direction.
With love,
Tom