“Lack of the Power of Focus Results In Compromise of Your Productivity, Efficiency, and Profitability”

"Choosing and sticking to priorities for your medical career ambitions, is far more important than your ability for
successfully multi-tasking on issues of little value
for creating success."

Learning how to focus your mind on work and your personal and career goals empowers your creativity, passion, innovation, and success. The problem is that after you become deeply involved in the process of relieving your medical patients of illness or trauma, you unconsciously develop amnesia about the fact you are in a business.

Ask yourself how many times over the last 10 or so years have you taken at least an hour of time
to consider options for how you can improve your medical practice business productivity and efficiency—and then taken action on it? The overwhelming answer to that question that I hear from medical doctors, if you are being honest, is a resounding… never.

You forget you are running a business and your responsibility for constantly oiling its engine. Yet you easily remember to fill your car gas tank. When that happens, your focus on an unconscious level causes you to cease planting seeds for the future. What happens?

You lose your enthusiasm and passion for setting goals (way to busy to think about that stuff). This in turn leads to medical practice habits of not using your full potential, not using your talents effectively, and not using your skills in profitable and productive ways. It’s a quick, arcane, and subtle inducement for leveling off your performance as well as your motivation.

Without realizing it, you find yourself digging your own medical practice business grave. You find yourself practicing at a mediocrity level that seems satisfying emotionally. Michael Gerber, business expert, paints a clear picture of how this happens in his book, The E-Myth: Physician, that you would be wise to read.

Mediocrity leads to medical practice financial quicksand. Unless you are aware of the danger signals, you will discover that your medical practice is in financial difficulty, which you and it may never recover from. The evidence of that effect is very obvious in today’s economy. Medical practices are failing financially in never before seen droves. And that causes very serious damage to thousands of medical practices and physicians.

Why… because physicians don’t understand how to rescue their practice using the time tested tools of business and marketing for maintaining stability and continuing to grow. Those with good business knowledge know how to save their practices, but do you have any inkling about
how to do it?

What you focus on... expands...

What you focus on daily becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maxwell Maltz M.D., wrote a book in the 1960s, titled and now updated, “The New Psycho-Cybernetics,” which has remained authoritative in business circles for over a half a century. He describes in depth how our mind works to our advantage without corrupting our integrity and responsibilities in medical practice.  

You feed your mind daily with around five billion bits of information, almost all of which you don’t recognize—thanks to our 5 senses, maybe even the 6th. The information is stored in our subconscious mind warehouse--memory banks. So when you consciously have a need to make decisions or resolve an issue, the subconscious searches its data base for all the information it thinks will help you with your issue. It automatically becomes conscious thoughts and ideas.

“We become what we think about most”
                               ---Earl Nightingale

The cardinal sins of a diluted focus...

1. Most important, your inability to grasp the importance of the fact that you are totally responsible for your medical practice business management and doing it haphazardly—yet expect to derive great income simply by working harder, seeing more patients, and your belief in a perpetrated medical myth.
    
2. You avoid the critical importance of managing your medical practice business yourself. You created it--now manage it.
    
3. You expect miracles from your business while letting it run itself. No successful business in existence does that.
    
4. You intentionally started a medical practice and business that you never intended to manage...likely because you don’t know how, and not for lack of knowing the need.
    
5. You are not able to manage your time... or focus on the essential priorities that will make
   your career thrive.
    
6. You never set goals because you have no discipline for staying on track towards them.
    
7. You dilute your energy and focus by doing too many things at once... a matter of knowing your own capabilities and applying those to the few priority goals.
    
8. You consider goal setting to be of little value. What you don’t know is that the process of goal setting initiates many patterns of success behavior you will never learn otherwise.
    
9. You don’t focus your five energy systems on an ultimate goal because your lack the
   discipline and determination to stay on track.
    
10. You don’t trust yourself or have confidence in your own ability to establish goals for your medical career far beyond those you created using your self-imposed limitations. You have the skills but don’t recognize them.
     
11. You have internal fears about failing so you avoid decisions to move higher in your profession. So focusing on greater potential for yourself, you mistakenly think, has no value for you. It makes your career the victim of circumstances rather than the focus of your decisions.
     
12. You fail to understand that maintaining a focus on reaching small goals one at a time builds your self-esteem and confidence.
     
13. You will never realize that you have attained only a mediocre medical practice business in your life, until you are told that by someone else, or you read business expert’s books that show you it’s true. Like Michael Gerber’s book, The E-Myth: Physician, who for years has consulted with medical doctors on how to raise their belief in themselves and their capacity to surpass
    all limitations.
     
14. You lack the ability to discard your mindset about the practice of medicine... forced into your mind while in medical school and the ability to change your mindset by a focus on reaching your maximum potential, which most physicians don’t know is possible, and never reach.
     
15. You fail to recognize the importance of establishing a balance between your career and your lifestyle, family, and inside-medicine relationships (like how to get hundreds of
    medical patient doctor referrals).
    

Comments...

Most physicians fail because they pay no attention to the elements that drive career success. When you focus continues to drift, you make bad decisions that stonewall your medical
career advancement.

I have witnessed many practicing physicians who are victims of their own failure to focus on successful medical practice business career priorities because they never establish the goals, direction, and priorities that will get them to their top potential. They simply find a mediocre comfortable practice style and fix it in concrete. It’s because of their fears and self-limitations that they could overcome at any time if they choose to do so.

It is absolutely astounding to me that most doctors are so focused on the practice of medicine that they totally neglect the factors and priorities that can make them great and wealthy physicians.

It’s never to late to kick yourself into overdrive and accomplish miracles for yourself that will blow your mind. It takes passion and confidence in yourself to do that. Just tell me what doctor doesn’t have both. Then explain to me why you don’t use them from the start of your career. I asked myself the same questions and was disgusted with my answers.

R. V. Pierce, M.D. (1895), president of World’s Dispensary Medical Association, Buffalo, NY wrote, “The physician is expected to meet the grim monster, break the jaws of death, and pluck the spoil out of his teeth.” That would likely interfere with medical school recruitment in colleges today, should such statements be spoken. But, it might be a good way to weed out those students who are not serious candidates.

“The cause of man’s problem is lack of knowledge.
It does not stem from a shortage of information,
but rather from rejection of information.”
                                              ---Hosea 4:6

----Professional Probe----

"The truth is, when you look inside yourself, what you will
undoubtedly find is the result of thinking. If you talk to your
sock puppet or the image in the mirror, you will be increasingly
amazed about what you unconscious mind is hiding from you.

You can choose to be a mediocre jockey on a hell of a horse,
or you can tell yourself that you are done practicing below
your potential. Your medical practice business will not change
unless you change first. You have talents and skills
that you are unaware of.

Only by maintaining a focus on getting a tighter grip on
what objectives will offer you the greatest advantages
for your medical practice success, fulfillment, satisfaction,
and lifestyle, can you keep ahead of the game. Win by
putting on the new attitude and proving you are smarter
than your kids. You have a potential multiplier that comes
alive when you step out of your comfort zone."

Articles © 2013-2022/CGG INVESTMENTS LLC. All rights reserved. #42, 3-16-22