Episode 6: Using a strategy to master your goals

We all set goals, monthly, quarterly or annually. We set personal and business goals, but how often do you break it down into daily goal setting? Once you master your goal setting, you will begin to crush your business!

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You're listening to the Functional Medicine Business Podcast featuring Dr. Deb, one of the most creative functional medicine business practitioners in her industry. She shares the wisdom and knowledge that she has gained over 25 years of functional medicine, a pioneer in functional medicine, scheduling, leadership and Practice Management. Dr. Deb has a wealth of knowledge and is eager to share to help functional medicine become more productive. And for the practitioners and patients to live better lives. Our podcast shares the good and the bad of our industry, because Dr. Deb knows the pain you live every day building a functional medicine practice with practical tools on how to manage money, taxes and patient care, she will discuss it all with you. 

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Today, I want to talk to you about really figuring out how to master your goals. You know, goal setting is so important. And to some extent, I think we all do it, whether we write it down or we keep it in our head or we plan. But there's a really great strategy to mastering your goals. And I want to talk a little bit about what I've learned in mastering goals and then I want to help you apply it to your situation. So for years and years, I would always sit down at the end of the year. And I would write down my goals and plan for the next year. And then I'd somehow put them away and I would forget about them and I wouldn't look at them again until the end of the next year. So that is not the way that you want to set goals. You want to actually work on your goals throughout the year. But what I would find is I look through my goals at the end of the year, and I'd see what I accomplished. And then I would see what's been put off. And what I didn't accomplish in the year, I would just push over to the next year. And so I would find myself pushing off goals five, six years sometimes. And I would never re-evaluate the goal to see if it's a goal I still had and I still actually wanted to do or was it just something I felt like I wrote it down as a goal five years ago, I need to do it. So I just keep pushing it ahead. And I don't do anything to make the goal become successful or come to life, so I wouldn't pay attention to that. Well, about three years ago, I looked at my goal sheet, and realized that I had written down a few things I had wanted to start a podcast, I wanted to start a education program for practitioners to learn to be successful in business. I wanted to start a gluten-free flour line. And I wanted to grow my practice to a place where I could sell it. Those were my four big main goals. And three years ago, when I looked at those goals, I said this is ridiculous. I keep pushing off all these goals, I just need to do them. Now, I am going to preface this and tell you that I do not recommend this at all. But this is what I did. I decided that I was going to make all these goals happen in one year time. So I launched my podcast, Let's Talk Wellness Now, because I had so much information and knowledge to share with patients that I couldn't do it in the hour time that I spent with them. But I could do it in a podcast and they could consume it when it was convenient for them. And this way they could get knowledge for me in a different way. So I launched my podcast, I set out to create a gluten-free flour. My daughter has celiac disease, and we had been working in crafting a gluten-free flour for many, many years, finally perfected it and decided we should bring this to market. So I launched my gluten-free flour line. And I started launching my program 15k A day doc, which is a training program for practitioners all in the same year. And set out to sell my practice. 

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Now I'm going to tell you all this is not the way you want to accomplish goals. Not at all. If you want to drive yourself crazy waste a lot of money and a lot of time and energy to move the needle just a little bit in every area. Don't do it this way. Really look at your goals and decide what you want to accomplish. What do you want to do? Is this a goal that still is important for you? Is it moving you where you want to be? Or is it just something your ego wants you to accomplish? In some of these things, it was an ego thing for me. The podcast was an ego thing my gluten-free flour line was an ego thing. And I thought they were simple and easy. And they're really not as simple as easy as people make it sound. You can't just throw a product up on Amazon and expect to make a lot of money or have it sell. It is a challenge. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of money. So what I do now what I look at goals because I don't ever want to be in that position again. I stretch out my goals, so I have my six-month goals, my one-year goal, my three-year goal five years in 10 years. And I know where I ultimately want to be in 10 or 15 years. And I work backwards. So if I want to be here at 10 or 15 years, what do I have to do along the way in those incremental time slots to actually accomplish those goals. Like I knew when I set out with my flour company, I had a very specific end goal in mind and that was just to have my product and company be bought out someday. And I wanted it to be bought out in three to five years. So I knew what I had to do in that three to five year time to make a mark in the industry to have somebody look at me and consider acquiring my company. That was my goal for that particular thing. My podcast really just was more about connecting with other like minded people that were really bright that were dominating it in the functional and alternative medicine world. And that could bring knowledge and interest to my clients, so has become more of a fun thing for me than something that I earn money off of. And my 15k a day program really became more important to me, as I started to see more and more local practitioners, functional medicine practitioners, leave our area or retire out, I got to the place where I needed to make sure that we had high quality trained practitioners there to treat patients because we are now one in five in our state that do what we do. And yes, we have space in our practice, but I won't have enough space for all the patients that are needed, or all the people that need care. And so I wanted to assure that we had young, bright people coming up under us that wanted to do this kind of work, that could make a decent living at it, that loved what they did didn't get burnt out, didn't get frustrated, and had everything that they need to get started. I tell you, when I started out 25 years ago, I would have loved to have a guidebook something for me to look and say okay, I have this patient with high viral Epstein Barr, herpes family virus thing going on. What do I use to treat them with? And what are my options? And what are my doses? And how long do I treat them? And what kind of questions do I ask before I transition them over? You know, if somebody could have given me that information, it would have been so valuable. Like I've learned that now over 25 years, and it's truly an art. But if I can help convey that information to someone else, it'll make their life so much simpler, if I can teach them the tips and the tricks that I've used to hack my business so that I'm not putting in 14 hour days anymore. And my business is successful, and we're treating patients and my patients are happy. That's a huge difference for people at this point. That makes all the difference in the world between somebody staying with a large organization or transitioning over to a private practice, especially if they can make money. You know, doctors don't want to leave their jobs at the hospital making $200,000 a year to come to an independent practice to make $100,000 a year. But independent practices don't have that kind of cash flow like the hospitals do. So it's harder to get them to come over. But if we can give them a full practice very quickly, their salaries can go up much faster, and they can be successful, and patients are happy. And so I put this program together specifically for that reason to teach people not just business, but also the functional medicine side to it, because I think it's so necessary, and it's so needed. So that is what I did every year before about the last three years. Now I do goal setting very differently. My friend Pete Vargas taught me how to do goal setting every single week. So I do three business goals. And I do three personal goals. And I try to aim to accomplish all three of those goals in business and personal every single week.

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My friend, Dean Grazioso and Tony Robbins taught me that we overestimate what we can get done in a year, we underestimate what we can get done in 10 years. So I break down my goals now in 90-day sprints. It's much easier for me to do that. So if I have a goal of say seeing 60 patients in a month, new patients every month, I know that I need to break that goal down into steps and I need to say okay, how much marketing do I have to do? Where am I going to get these clients from? Who's going to see them? How are we going to get them into the practice on a monthly basis if I'm scheduled out three months in advance I look at all those things to see if my goals are realistic. Can I meet them? And if not, what do I need to change to make that goal a reality? Because the reality is, it's great to have this idea that you want to see 60 new patients in a month. But if you're booked out for three months, how are you going to bring in 60 new patients in a month in your practice? You can't do that. So they have to be realistic. And then we have to look at what do we have to set in place to make that goal successful? Do we have to hire new staff? Do we have to train different staff? Do we have to take more insurance? Do we have to get rid of insurance? Do I have to do a program? Do I have to do it individually? Look at all of those things that are included in how you're trying to accomplish this, because that's where you're going to find the goals. That's where to find the sauce, the secret sauce, I call it in mastering your goal setting. 

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The other thing that's important is to leverage other people's time in your goals, you cannot be responsible for making every single thing happen in your goal. You cannot be the person that schedules the patient sees the patient checks the patient out, does all the follow-up. Not with big goals with little goals. Yes, you could probably still do that. But with big goals, you're going to have to enlist the help of other people. Look at what your what you do best. Look at what other people do best. And then transition, your schedule, and your goal setting so that you give off to somebody else what they do best. So I'm really good at big picture ideas. I am a creator, I love to create things, I love to design things. And I in ideas in my head. I'm not an implementer, I'm not an operator, I don't implement things. Well, I don't communicate well, with my staff, I don't operate well. So when I have a goal, I have to make sure I have an implementer and an operator on my team. Because I want to just spit out the goal and say, This is what we're doing. I'm not exactly sure how we're going to do this. But this is my idea communicated to the rest of my team. And let's figure out how we're going to make this happen. I know that of myself today. I didn't know that of myself 20 years ago, I thought I was great at communicating, I thought it was great at telling people what to do. I thought that all I had to do was come up with this idea. And everybody else would know how to do it. And they don't, we have to tell them, we have to teach them or somebody does if it's not you. So it's really important to understand what kind of person you are, and how do you work from setting your goals, what's successful for you what's not successful for you. 

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And you also want to set very specific goals. So you want your big broad goals, you want to break those down into 90-day sprints, or monthly sprints, or weekly sprints. And then you want your big goals of financial stuff, set financial goals, you want your company to earn 60,000 in a month, or 100,000 in a month, or you want to bill 1 million a year, whatever that is, and then work backwards to try to figure out how you're going to do that. The last year and a half businesses have had to pivot tremendously with everything that's happening in our world. Some of those pivots, had made new businesses, some made older businesses more refreshed and exciting and successful. And some killed some of these businesses, you have to be able to pivot on the dime, you have to be able to turn yourself around, turn your business around, and make sure that you're constantly evaluating what that goal is so that you're reaching it properly. So what I want to encourage you guys to do is if you haven't looked at your goals in a while, bring them out and truly identify the goals that you have on your list that are still goals that you're excited about, that you wake up wanting to do every day, and then break them down into 90 days, 30 days and weekly. What do I have to do to make these goals be successful for me? If there's anything on there, that doesn't resonate with you anymore, take it off for this year, you could always leave it on a big picture goal, because you might want to come back to it some other time. But take it off for this year, because then it's not in your conscious and subconscious mind causing problems with what you're trying to actually accomplish this year. Just get rid of it for now. Doesn't mean you give it up forever, but for now. And then I want you to make sure you verbalize your goals to someone else. Tell them out loud what your plan is, and brainstorm with that person how you're going to make these goals successful for the year. That solidifies them when we say them out loud to someone else that solidifies them that makes them real and it makes us accountable to them. And so I want you to find a partner to do that with and if you don't have someone reach out to us, we have a network of people we're building a free membership on Facebook. Let us be your support people. Let us help you be successful in building your goals the way you want to.

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I hope this episode has been really helpful for you. If you have specific questions about goal setting, or anything else in your business, please feel free to email us. We're happy to answer your questions directly online. 

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Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it with others. post about it on social media, or leave a rating and review. To catch all the latest from me. You can follow me on Facebook at FMBI, join our free group where we support one another and share our struggles. Thanks again and I'll see you next time.