Author: webadmin

Running a PT clinic is a challenging task that requires a great deal of skill, dedication, and hard work. It is easy to fall into the trap of perfectionism, striving for flawlessness in every aspect of your business. While striving for excellence is admirable, it can also be a double-edged sword that can hold you back from reaching your full potential. 

“Perfectionism is a symptom of something,” Thomas Greenspon PhD, an expert on the topic and a recovering perfectionist himself, told me. “It’s not the disease.”

At its core, perfectionism is about anxiety — you’re afraid of failing or afraid that making a mistake means that there’s something wrong with you. “Perfectionism is more than pushing yourself to do your best to achieve a goal; it’s a reflection of an inner self mired in anxiety,” he adds.

According to Greenspon, the most highly successful people are actually less likely to be perfectionistic, because perfectionism can leave you overwhelmed by doubt and indecision and make it difficult to bring any task to a conclusion.

So what’s driving your perfectionism? Is it about proving your worth to others? Is it about avoiding feelings of shame or judgment? While you may think you’re trying to impress a boss who seems judgmental, oftentimes we’re proving ourselves to our parents — who may or may not still be present in our lives — or to an internalized critic we’ve learned to hear above all others.

Like a lot of anxiety, perfectionism can become a comfortable habit. If we’ve been leaning into it since childhood, maintaining the self-talk that powers our perfectionism feels like a superstition or an indispensable ritual. As entrepreneur and startup cofounder Sehreen Noor Ali says, “Our self-talk becomes like an old friend that maybe should’ve been ditched a while ago.”

Your perfectionism, your old friend, won’t go away overnight. Nor will exercises alone assuage it. So my goal here is to help get you on the road to recovery by suggesting new ways of thinking. Here are three to try:

1. Find the motivation

Like breaking any unhealthy habit, it helps to feel really motivated before you start to tackle your perfectionism. I find this question really helpful: What are you missing out on because you’re scared to be less than perfect?

For example, my fear of being shamed for public speaking held me back from applying for a TED talk. For years I’d made fun of TED to anyone who’d listen. I even wrote an article about how overrated TED talks are. But in truth, I desperately wanted to give one, because I knew they lend credibility to speakers and authors and help you get to the next level in a speaking career.

Voilà, there was my motivation. I also realized that if I was going to be a perfectionist, I’d never reach that level, so I applied to seven various TED and TEDx talks. I got rejected from all of them. It hurt but frankly, I wasn’t ashamed. It felt like a badge of honor; it became a punch line for me.

And then one day I got an email from the TED team asking me to do a talk. Turns out they had seen my submissions and enjoyed them, even though they passed on them at the time. If I hadn’t found the motivation to “ditch that old friend,” as Noor Ali put it, I would’ve missed my chance to land a coveted TED spot, which opened a lot of doors for me.

So what are you missing out on because you’re afraid to be less than perfect? Identify and name that experience, and you’ve found your motivation.

2. Isolate your inner critic

You wouldn’t be a perfectionist without the thoughts that keep you there. Many perfectionists have common barbs we like to fling at ourselves.

Here are some examples of the perfectionistic self-talk I’ve heard in heavy rotation:

• Mind-reading: “If I don’t give it 110 percent, my boss will find someone who does. They’ll just fire me”;  “My parents gave up a lot to send me to excellent schools and prepare me for a successful career, and I can’t let them down”

• Labeling: “The typo in my article wasn’t a careless error — it happened because I’m lazy and didn’t spend enough time proofreading”; “I can’t be mediocre; it’s not who I am”

• Avoidance: “I’m never going to be able to write a good book, so I’m not even going to try”

• Catastrophizing: “I don’t deserve what I have, and I’d better work harder if I want to keep it”

• Should statements: “If I don’t run at lunch today, I’m going to get out of shape … so I should go, even though my knee hurts”

What voice speaks those lines in your head? Is it a specific person? Is it you? Can you take a moment to notice the next time you automatically chime in with a justification for your actions? How do you feel when your inner critic takes over? What emotions precede it? What could help calm your anxiety in the moment?

Here’s one way to calm your negative self-talk, and you’ll love it because it involves a little self-criticism. I say this with love, but being stuck in our heads — ruminating and focusing on our flaws all the time — is very self-centered.

For this method, I have my former therapist Wilma to thank. One day when I was anxious and frazzled about bombing something, Wilma said, “Why do you have to be so special at everything? Whoever told you that?”

I looked at her and said, “I’ve always been special, since I was three years old.”

To which Wilma replied, “Well, who says?”

Who says, indeed? Where did I get the belief that I must be special and outstanding at everything?

Anxiety expert Alice Boyes notes that this narcissism is self-protective. “You end up believing, ‘The only way I’ve succeeded in life or the only way I’m being accepted and loved … is by being excellent, by overdoing everything,’” she explains.

But that’s another thought trap of perfectionism. The truth is that “not being the best at everything isn’t a threat to you. It isn’t a threat to you getting what you want out of life.”

Sometimes when I’m stressing about a looming failure on my horizon, I’ll just tell myself, “Why can’t you do bad work or have a bad day like everyone else?”

Reminding myself that I’m no more special than anyone else is not self-denigrating, and it isn’t a way to let myself off the hook. It’s an act of self-compassion and a way to gently but effectively expose and address the underlying narcissistic tendencies that power perfectionism.

3. Learn to set “enough” goals

Dare yourself to set “enough” goals and practice using only appropriate effort — rather than going all out and putting in extra effort. Appropriate effort is about doing something well but removing undue emotional investment in the outcome; it’s the opposite of our culture’s expectation to always go above and beyond and always do our very best.

Buddhism teacher Sally Kempton writes that appropriate effort is any effort that doesn’t involve struggle. For Kempton, the secret of acting with appropriate effort is to ask herself, “If this were the last act of my life, how would I want to do it?”

How can you bring appropriate effort into your life? Why not practice being a C+ student? I know that probably made some of you gasp, but just hear me out. Not every project demands your best work. What if you gave only 79 percent? What if your next report doesn’t have prose that rises to the level of greatness? The key is to acknowledge the outcome. Will what you do be good enough for your boss? Will what you achieve be good enough for you? The answer to both is, almost surely.

Think about some happy accidents. Was there ever a time when a meeting was canceled or a deadline was extended, and you magically struck upon an idea or a solution that you’d been striving for? When the mind is free, creativity tends to happen. Remember that the next time you’re inclined to overwork and imagine brain space literally opening up as you decide to stop for the night.

To try this, practice on something outside of work. You could use exercise as a stand-in for setting limits on work time. Science shows we need only a certain amount of cardio and strength training every week to achieve our goals. So if you normally exercise for an hour a day, cut it to forty minutes. See what happens. Is the process less stressful? Do you dread the gym less? Here’s a heads-up: if you’ve been conditioned to achieve, as most of us have, this will make you feel like a failure for a short while. But only for a short while.

You may just find that what you gain — more calm, easeful workdays, more unimpeded time and headspace — is worth what you’ll lose in so much anxious striving. And is that such a loss anyway? Of course not. Know that it’s OK to do some things less well in order to have the complete and healthy life you want.

Perform Practice Solutions helps you navigate the challenges that come with running a PT clinic. From selling your physical therapy practice to social media marketing, we are dedicated to helping clinic owners achieve their goals. Give us a call at (833) 764-0178 and visit our IG @performpracticesolutions.

Reference: [https://ideas.ted.com/3-ways-to-break-the-perfectionism-habit/]

You know how important it is to create a positive experience for your patients. But did you know that engaging your employees can play a crucial role in this? According to a recent study by Harvard Business Review, engaged employees are more likely to create better customer experiences. Learn how by reading below. 

An organization’s employee experience (EX) has been connected in recent years to how it delivers its customer experience (CX). Given changing dynamics in the labor force and all the ways technology makes it possible for companies, employees, and customers to be connected, I believe it’s time for leaders to double down on the idea that EX is now the key driver of CX and to find smarter, strategic ways of connecting the two.

Consider the workforce challenges that currently vex most companies: the dearth of workers skilled for the new demands of business, high turnover rates and the associated costs of recruitment and training, and difficulties in engaging employees given hybrid and other new ways of working, people’s elevated expectations for authentic DEI, and broadscale shifts in workers’ values. Amid all this, companies struggle to ensure they have a knowledgeable, experienced, and motivated workforce – one that is equipped to deliver a good customer experience.

And EX has grown in importance to customers. As more customers look to align their purchase decisions with their values, they have become increasingly interested in how companies engage with employees and tend to prioritize doing business with those that value their employees, treat them fairly, and prioritize their well-being. And employees are interacting with more customers more directly – and because of that the nature of employee engagement has more impact on customers.

According to PwC, companies that invest in and deliver superior experiences to both consumers and employees are able to charge a premium of as much as 16% for their products and services. And MIT researchers found that companies in the top quartile of EX developed more successful innovations, deriving twice the amount of revenues from their innovations as did those in the bottom quartile — and their industry-adjusted Net Promoter Scores (NPS) were twice as high.

EX is defined as the sum of everything an employee undergoes throughout his or her connection to an organization, from the first contact as a potential hire to last touchpoints after the end of employment. It requires a holistic, focused, and purposeful approach, but most companies design and manage EX as a set of discrete elements of employment, e.g., flexible work arrangements, rewards and recognition programs, or wellness initiatives. That mode of thinking is outdated. Today’s EX is created through the overall company culture, and all the in-between moments, including the ways managers engage employees on a daily basis.

With all its moving parts, the customer experience requires the consistent, cohesive engagement throughout the organization that EX excellence can foster. To tap the power of EX to create compelling CX, business leaders must align the two, directly connect employees and customers, and use tools and processes to identify and report on the impact each has on the other.

Identify the parallels between the employee and customer experience.

So how do leaders design EX to better align with CX? First, identify where the biggest gaps exist. A company cannot expect to deliver a tech-enabled, seamless, and intuitive CX, for example, if everything it does with employees is on paper, slow, and bureaucratic. And it’s unlikely that employees will deliver highly empathetic, caring, and personal service if their employer doesn’t cultivate an organizational culture that embraces those values.

But when employees understand that their experience is aligned with the desired CX, they intuitively start contributing to it through their own actions and decisions. For an example, consider the fun and freedom that empowers Southwest Airlines employees to make its CX so enjoyable.

Second, to improve CX through EX, companies should find creative ways to directly connect employees and customers regardless of whether “customer service” is in their job description. Adobe, for example, uses listening stations where employees can go either virtually online or physically in an Adobe office location to hear from customers directly and learn about their successes and challenges.

By shortening the distance between employees and customers, managers enable employees to cultivate the customer understanding and empathy needed to identify and make CX improvements. It also increases employees’ sense of purpose and agency because they see the impact they make, which also leads to better customer experiences and could also positively impact employee retention to boot.

A third way to leverage EX in CX efforts is to integrate customer and employee journey maps to identify and diagnose customer problems. Some CX problems result from gaps or inconsistencies in employee skills and knowledge – or ineffective policies and outdated systems that negatively impact employees’ attitudes and their ability to do great work.

A map that correlates and calibrates the journeys of customers with the journeys of employees helps identify employee pain points that negatively impact the customer as well. Insights into what employees are experiencing provides a unique perspective on customer processes and systems that can’t be derived from customer data alone.

For example, when Best Buy mapped its employee journey, it discovered that employees were having trouble adopting a new point of sale (POS) system it had rolled out.  And at the same time, the company knew customers were complaining about long waits at checkout — and could have written it off as a standard customer service issue. Instead, Best Buy used employee research and an experience design approach to improve the system and to bring in new technology that reduced POS training and transaction time.  At the time these changes were rolled out, they reduced frustration for employees, which improved employee retention, while improving CX.

Have a single view of performance across both dimensions.

Finally, providing visibility into CX and EX performance together further advances CX efforts. Companies can provide a complete view of the interlinked employee and customer experience by integrating KPIs from both areas into a single view with a dynamic report instead of using separate datasets and dashboards.

With simplified, integrated reporting, managers can better diagnose and track issues.  Healthcare facilities services provider Medxcel uses a composite site-level metric to assess how each of its sites is doing on customer relationship health, customer transactional performance, and employee engagement.

Also, when employee performance is reported relative to customer metrics, employees tend to become more engaged with the organization and adopt a stronger orientation to business results.  When O2, the telecommunications business that is part of Madrid-based Telefónica, wanted to transform from a mobile service provider to a digital telecommunications brand, it published an employee dashboard that summarized customer results from activities related to the initiative and reported the results in weekly leadership team presentations. This prompted employees to feel more ownership for the transformation and to want to develop innovations that advanced the company’s new identity.

When you have better employee understanding of the desired CX and their impact on it, you can also inspire greater commitment to the organization and its goals. Even more evidence that it makes sense to prioritize EX in CX efforts — especially now.

Ready to take your PT to the next level? Perform Practice Solutions helps you reach your goals and save money. Connect with us today to learn more about how our physical therapy marketing solutions can help you drive success for your business. Give us a call at (833) 764-0178 and visit our IG @performpracticesolutions.

Reference: [https://hbr.org/2023/04/engaged-employees-create-better-customer-experiences?ab=hero-subleft-1]

Every entrepreneur dreams of scaling their practice to new heights. However, simply growing your clinic or practice is not enough to achieve sustained success. To truly make an impact, you need to approach growth strategically. Check out these ten successful tips for scaling in a sustainable and effective way. From building a strong team to utilizing technology, these strategies will help you take your business to the next level. 

Are you looking to grow your business or scale it? In order to highlight the difference, an article by Harvard Business Review highlights the main difference: “Growth means adding revenue at the same pace you are adding resources; scaling means adding revenue at a much greater rate than cost.”

These days, it’s not easy to be an entrepreneur. So if you don’t want to become a statistic, ensure that you tap into these 10 ways to scale your business:

1. Create and follow a plan.

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. The most successful businesses have a vision for growth and then reverse engineer the steps required to achieve each goal as part of their planning process. And then—most importantly—they follow their plan.

All too often, companies set goals at the beginning of the year, getting people excited and pumped up. But by March, hardly anyone is following a cohesive plan. Building various lengths of objectives will help keep you focused and aligned.

My company follows the entrepreneurial operating (EOS) system, where everything is broken down into “rocks,” which are the most important things we need to accomplish in the next 90 days. We also have a one-year plan, a three-year vision and our 10-year target; this last one being our North Star for our company and our employees.

It’s important to note that when creating your plan, you don’t aim so high that you can’t meet your targets, nor do you want to make things too easy that you don’t challenge yourself.

As you evaluate your methods to achieve your goals, if you find yourself saying: “it’s the way we’ve always done it,” this is a clear sign you need to revisit that process and innovate your plan.

2. Maintain focus.

As an entrepreneur, it’s easy to get distracted by shiny object syndrome or be tempted to offer many products and services. Instead, have a core focus and niche so you stay in your lane and deliver what’s promised to customers.

Determine what your key revenue drivers are and double down on those. And if you’re interested in launching a new product or service, test the market first to see if people want it and will actually pay for it. Too many companies spend money on R&D and marketing a new product or service only to find out it’s a failure because no one wants it; don’t let that happen to you.

3. Document your processes.

It’s tough to scale without established, documented organizational processes. To ensure everyone is working off the same page, develop KPIs and SOPs that break down the steps and strategies you follow as an organization and within your teams. Once documented, they are easily accessible by new hires or team members, reducing ramp-up time and training.

4. Have proper lead gen and marketing plans in place.

Without a healthy and growing pipeline, you won’t be able to scale. Inbound and outbound marketing is a must for brand awareness and new business growth. Work closely with your clients and use them as raving fans to attract more business. Asking them why they value your product so much and sharing this feedback is the perfect way to bring in new clients.

5. Be a squirrel when it comes to funds.

Yes, you’ll need to spend and invest in the business, but be intentional when you do and learn to save where you can. Do not buy things you don’t need that won’t directly correlate to a proven ROI for your business.

For example, you can be the CEO but don’t have to take a CEO salary; you should be the last person who gets paid and will often be the lowest-paid employee on your team at first.

In addition, don’t plan too far out or count on money you haven’t closed yet. Always work within the current operating income so you don’t overextend yourself. Finally, track your burn rate consistently so you know how much runway you have with your reserves.

6. Partner with financial professionals.

Managing our business’s finances is crucial to your ability to scale, so ensure you have a solid bookkeeper and CPA to lean on for counsel.

7. Invest in yourself.

Becoming a better leader and businessperson takes work, so don’t be afraid to invest in a coach. Do your homework and be clear about how and in which areas that coach can help. Also, consider joining a community like Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO) or Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO), which can connect you with other entrepreneurs with similar scaling goals.

8. Strategically hire FTEs.

If you need to have FTEs, hire people who may cost more money but bring the skills to perform and immediately put speed on your side.

Most small businesses trying to scale make the mistake of trying to hire, train and onboard entry-level employees to save a few bucks, but they often end up spending more overall in the time it takes to achieve the same results with a more experienced hire.

Also, ensure all teammates have a number or metric you can measure them by. This way, their role is very clear and they know what success looks like.

9. Outsource when you can.

Not every position needs to be an employee. Consider hiring fractional CFOs, COOs or contract workers for positions or jobs that don’t have full-time work—or when client contracts may be short-term. This ensures you get an experienced professional aligned with your capacity.

10. Learn to delegate.

It’s tough to create and execute your vision if you’re in the weeds of your business. Learn to delegate so you can work on the business instead of in the business. Trusting the professionals you’ve hired to do their jobs will free up your time to focus on your number one goal: scaling your business.

Following these 10 principles can help you move from growing to scaling your business and avoid being a casualty of a challenging entrepreneurial climate.

Perform Practice Solutions helps you understand your customer’s needs, reach your goals, optimize your time, and save money. With our innovative coaching platform, transparent billing platforms, and marketing services, we provide frustrated and hard-working PT, OT, and Chiropractic owners with an alternative way forward. Visit our Facebook page or give us a call at (833) 764-0178.

Reference: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2023/03/01/the-top-10-ways-to-strategically-scale-not-just-grow-your-business/?sh=32f3dc84f9e4]