The Power of Choice: Control your Practice
Do you want to be more in control of your life, health, time, and referral process? Do you need to take better control your practice? If so, you need to be more in control of the choices you’re making.
Every day, you’re faced with choices. You go to the grocery store and enter the snack aisle. As a kid, there used to be maybe ten choices of potato chips on the shelves. Go to the store now and you are bombarded with at least 72 options of brands, flavors, packages, shapes, textures, styles, thickness, prices, and sizes. What should be a simple snap-decision becomes a major decision-making process. It’s a potato chip, for crying out loud!
Potato chips are just a tiny example of how we are barraged with choices when it comes to food and our health. Did you ever stop to think about what you’re eating? If you have, that in and of itself could make you go on a diet. Flash-frozen, freeze-dried, dehydrated, vacuum-packed, canned, chemically preserved, powdered… all such scrumptious words when associated with food.
Choosing what goes into your body is only one example of the choices you’re faced with daily. There’s no escape from making choices in your practice. When it comes to managing your time, do you choose to answer the phone as you’re leaving the office for a meeting only to arrive at your meeting 10 minutes late “because of traffic?” Do you choose to set appointments with clients on Saturday mornings because you choose not to have a few evening meetings during the week? Will you choose to spend time with COIs who haven’t referred anything back to you in three years? Do you choose to not ask clients for referrals because it’s uncomfortable?
How, then, do you gain control of your practice?
Choices, choices, choices. Fortunately, you are in control of what you put on your table and into your body. Equally, you can be in control of your time, who you spend time with, and the success of your referral process. It takes discipline, a willingness to change habits, a plan and someone to hold you accountable during this period of adjustment. Making new choices is easy. Sticking to them and continuing to make better choices is the hard part.
Take an opportunity to evaluate your time management and your referral process. Where are you making choices that impact you or your practice negatively? What would represent some better choices for you to consider?
You see, when it comes to your health and practice, the choices you make determine your success.