Chiropractic Practice: Did you get “Fresh Thinking on Goal Setting”?

Hello everybody and welcome to Thrive in Five. I’m Dr. Dennis Perman, and I’ll be your chiropractic coach for today. This edition is called Fresh Thinking on Goal Setting. There is no more central concept in success than goal setting. The act of choosing objectives and working toward them is the foundation of all intentional achievement.

There are many ways to do this right. You may be curious about the system I’ve used for the last half century. I like to give my goals a chance to develop and marinate my subconscious. So I write my goals by October 1st for the upcoming year. I then put them away until Thanksgiving Eve, a time of maximum gratitude, making any adjustments that might be called for, and then back in the file until New Year’s Eve, for any fine tuning and to commit to take responsibility for their accomplishments.

I chunk my targets into five categories, personal goals, professional goals, people goals, prosperity goals, and play goals. And it’s easier and more meaningful to knit these targets together with a sense of purpose. Your goals may change from year to year, but your purpose tends to remain consistent as an underlying touchstone, keeping you engaged and on point.

Let’s start with personal goals. Your goals about you. This can include outcomes like hitting a target weight, or quitting smoking, or starting to exercise, reading a certain amount each week, changing a habit, or any other personal desire or objective. Get a notebook and make it your goal book. Leave space for your statement of purpose up front, and start a page for your personal goals.

If you’re new at this, then use questions to guide yourself. For example, ask the question, What do I want? And then just write down what comes up. Some of your ideas may fit better under other categories, but write it all down. You can reorganize it later. It’s okay to write stuff like peace of mind or balance or moral love.

Just remember, you need to come up with a way to measure that so you can tell if you’re getting it. So, personal goals are about anything you do to improve yourself personally. Let’s move into professional goals. These start with your practice goals. Office volume and new patients, for example, are easily calibrated because they’re numerical.

Also, include seminars you’d like to attend, techniques you’d like to learn, equipment you’d like to purchase, or anything you intend to accomplish professionally, such as writing articles, Being elected to office, winning an award, developing a mastermind group, hiring a coach, or expanding your staff.

Professional goals, then, are about anything you do to improve yourself professionally. Statistical goals must be in alignment, both by your capacity and also the fit with other goals you’re aiming at. For example, if you’re currently seeing 10 new patients a month, you probably shouldn’t expect 50 the very next month.

You’d have to ramp up to that. Or, let’s say you prefer to balance your family time with your work time. You probably shouldn’t schedule office hours until 8 o’clock every night because your kids will be asleep by the time you get home. Stuff like that. Also, be sure to align the three key parameters to managing your statistics.

So, let’s look at the different categories. New patients, patient retention or PVA, and collections per visit or OVA. For example, if your average patient comes in 40 times and you collect 75 bucks a visit, your case average would be 40 times 75 equal 3, 000. If you want to raise your case average 20 percent to 3600, you could work to improve your patient retention and raise your PVA to 48.

So 48 PVA times 75 OVA is 3600. Or you could add services or raise fees to increase your OVA to 90. So 40 times 90 is 3600. 3600 case average. Keep your goals in alignment and they’ll serve as critical milestones along your journey. Next, let’s look at people goals. These are not goals you set for other people, they’re goals you set for yourself in your relationship with other people.

Who would you like to meet? Who would you like to serve or to work with? Who would you like to learn from or teach? Who would you like to be closer with? Who would you like to get away from? Is there a family member you’d like to spend more time with? A hero you’d like to take to dinner? A community leader who could fill your entire office with patients you like?

These ideas will lead you to your people goals. Now we arrive at prosperity goals. How much money do you want to make? How much do you want to save? Do you want a new home? An expanded investment portfolio? By how much and how quickly do you want to reduce your debt? This section helps you clarify your financial desires.

Figure out what it costs to run your office and your home, plus your taxes. This number represents your fixed overhead, also known as your basic nut, what it costs you to run. Whatever is left over is yours to allocate as you please. Decide how much you want it to be, including savings. debt reduction and fund money, and you’ll have a good starting.

Then just figure out how many office visits and new patients you need to see to earn at that level. And that will give you your basic office goals. Create a plan based on saving an amount per week. That gets you to a yearly savings goal that you like. If you’re saving for college funds, that goes here too.

Anything about your financial plans is considered a prosperity goal. At last, we arrive at play goals. Fun stuff grows you as a person. Vacations that increase experience and culture. Automobiles that entertain and tickle the self image. Jewelry and watches and boats and clothing. There’s nothing wrong with wanting lots of nice stuff.

What you’ll discover is that the stronger your purpose, the more you develop personally, the more you accomplish professionally, the more likely you attract the right people, the more prosperous you become, and the more fun you have at play. This frees your mind to consider and refine your purpose. And that begins the cycle of self development all over again, which leads us to the glue that holds all these ideas and thoughts together.

Your purpose is simply the answer to two questions. Who or what do you want to be, and what do you want to do? Jot down your thoughts and form them into a statement or paragraph. When you focus or conceptualize this statement to a specific aspect of your life, it’s called a mission statement. Such as, My mission is to be a successful chiropractor, serving the community of any town with professionalism, clinical expertise, and compassion.

A statement of purpose, though, should be cross contextual, not limited to one mission. For example, my purpose is to be happy and to help others to be happy through positive learning experiences, good health, and entertainment. Whether you address a broad or a narrow scope, Keep it manageable because you want your purpose in mind at all times.

Who or what do I want to be? What do I want to do? This will help you formulate and maintain an effective statement of purpose. And don’t feel compelled to rush this exercise. It took me many years to develop my statement of purpose. So be patient and let the process unfold. Language your goals in the first person, present tense, and state the goal in the affirmative as if it were already true.

For example, You can say, I see 80 patients each day. As opposed to, I want to see 80 patients each day. The goal is to see 80 patients, not to want to see 80 patients. And if it feels somehow disingenuous to tell the truth in advance, when you don’t yet see 80 patients a day in your practice, you can still affirm that you see 80 patients a day, In your mind’s eye, you see 80 patients a day.

You visualize 80 patients a day, which is likely to move you toward actually seeing 80 patients a day. One last important thought. One of the best ways to achieve your practice goals is to learn how to effectively utilize the Functional Health Management score. It helps you to engage people by mastering how to connect with their emotional brain.

It’s designed to make the lifestyle challenges your patients are facing visible to them and then to you. A tool like the Functional Health Management Score is essential in today’s model of successful practice. So if you want more new patients, especially those who come to you understanding that they have a functional problem and not just a painful one, here’s how easy it is to do that.

Run your camera over the QR code you see on the screen and it’ll show you everything you need to know. You won’t believe how fast and how powerfully this will help you in practice. It’s so easy to implement and it will show you how to make the invisible visible in your practice and show you what you can do that no one else is doing.

The fundamentals of practice have changed and your focus and your business model need to evolve with it to influence how your staff, patients and community think and behave, you must reach them emotionally. And the FHMS will accomplish that because it makes prospective patients conditions real to them.

Finally, please remember that it’s who you are that determines how well what you do works. Invest in making yourself the best you possible, and your goals will magically manifest in all areas of your life. Thanks for watching. I’m Dr. Dennis Perman for The Masters Circle Global, where legends are made and legendary practices are built.

Through chiropractic care.

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