Last week, I spoke with a clinic owner who shared that she has been working almost seven days a week and has had to give up her hobbies. Running her clinic has become so overwhelming that she feels like she has become a piece of furniture in her office. This conversation got me thinking, and I want to deliver the following message to our listeners.
So, in this episode, I am going to discuss nine disciplines for managing and maximising your energy. As a clinic owner or practice manager, it is essential that you allocate your energy and attention to the right things that will move the needle forward more quickly.
Before I do that, the assumption is that you’re a self-motivated, driven and ambitious person, and that you’re doing the basics — eating right, exercising and getting enough sleep.
Assuming that’s true, you’re a race horse and you’re ready to run. Now, I’m going to show you how to harness that energy, manage it and maximise it so that you can become the best version of yourself.
You’re a ball of energy (we all are), and your energy burns bright or it doesn’t. It’s all about mobilising that energy.
Below are each of the 9 disciplines, followed by the benefit to you, if you apply the discipline to your life.
These principles are taken from one of my favourite books, EOS life, EOS stands for Entrepreneurial Operating System which provides a comprehensive framework that businesses can use to clarify their vision, align their team, and achieve their goals through a set of practical tools and processes. This is what our agency is applying to improve our operational excellence.
Each discipline is fast, simple, powerful and fully customisable. They will help you expand, focus and manage your energy.
1. 10-Year Thinking:
Time slows down, a peace comes over you, you make better decisions and, ironically, you get there faster.
This first discipline will literally transform your life. It transformed mine.
You are going to shift your mindset to thinking in 10-year time frames. If you’re like most human beings, you are preoccupied with today, this week, this month, maybe this year at the most. This shortsightedness is limiting you.
When you shift to long-range thinking, time will suddenly slow down. Peace will come over you. You will start to make better decisions. You will become more consistent. You will be a better leader to your people. And the irony is that you will get to where you want to go faster.
I learned this discipline when I was 29 years old, and it altered my life. As has been said many different ways, “People overestimate what they can accomplish in a year and underestimate what they can accomplish in 10 years.”
The reality is that you can accomplish anything in 10 years. As motivational speaker Les Brown once said, “All you need is a good decade.” So, commit to the following three steps:
Step 1. In your journal, write the exact date 10 years from now.
Step 2. Write the age you will be on that date.
Step 3. Take yourself there mentally, 10 years from now, at that age.
Write down the number-one most important thing that you will want to have accomplished on that date. (You can write additional things that come to mind as well.)
You might have an income goal. It might be net worth. You might have a goal you want your company to accomplish. You might want to improve your physical health. There is no wrong answer. Yet, for this discipline to be productive, you must write down a long-range goal.
Next, think about everything you have going on right now. All of your goals, plans, activities, and what is on your current to-do list. Do they all align with that 10-year goal? If not, you have some course corrections to do.
Ten-year thinking is not so much about goal setting. You’re reprogramming your brain to think in a longer time frame. You’ll make better decisions, and you will get to those goals faster.
Ten-year thinking will help you to burn less energy, because you’ll stop worrying about the short-term small stuff. And it will increase your total energy because you’ll have a long-range vision to motivate you.
2. Take Time Off:
You have to recharge your batteries.
You can’t go, go, go all the time. You have to turn your brain off. As Stephen Covey said, “You have to ‘sharpen the saw.’”
You have to rejuvenate and recharge your batteries. You must work hard and play hard.
Your phone dies off after a certain number of hours. Similarly, your body operates on the same principle – you need to recharge your batteries to perform at your best. I honestly believe that working all the time isn’t healthy or particularly productive. Your body is designed to function optimally for a set number of hours with high focus. Taking some time off allows for white space in your head, fostering the generation of brilliant ideas.
Therefore, it’s important to calculate the number of hours you work per week and per year and commit to that. This isn’t just about achieving work-life balance; it’s also about optimising your time to work less and produce more.
When you unplug and then come back to the business, you view problems
differently. You see them better. You see them clearer. As the old adage teaches us, “When I go slow, I go fast.”
Decide on the number of days off you will take per year. Commit to that figure in writing. Here’s the simple math: if you’re taking every weekend off, you’re already taking 104 days off. Now add in your vacations and you’ll have your number.
3. Know Yourself:
The discipline is to be yourself in every situation, but to fully be yourself, you must first know yourself. Because you can’t be yourself until you first know yourself.
To start, you need to be comfortable and ready to let your freak flag fly, which simply means you being fully, unapologetically you. When we are fully ourselves, we appear quirky to others. The fact is that the world wants to judge us, and that squashes our light.
The sooner you decide to be yourself 100% of the time, the sooner you’ll have more energy. Because you won’t have to fake it anymore. Being something you are not consumes a lot of energy.
Knowing thyself is a matter of understanding your strengths, weaknesses, personality, you can use profiling tools like DiSC, 16 Personalities or my favourite, Kolbe.
Another way to know yourself better is to get therapy. I’ve never met anyone that didn’t need a little bit. I did it this year, and I’m grateful for what I learned. Another way to know thyself is to get honest feedback from the people in your life. Ask them what they see as your strengths and weaknesses. Ask them what you do well and where you could improve.
For example, learning and embracing that I was an introvert was incredibly freeing. I have never loved small talk and social gatherings, and I thought there was something wrong with me. Instead, I was just being the introvert I am, and knowing that was liberating.
The more you know yourself and live that way, the better you will function. You’ll stop feeling apologetic for being who you are. You won’t waste energy trying to be someone you think you’re supposed to be. Have you ever felt you are one person at work, one person at home, one person out with your friends, and so on? You’re trying to be all things to all people.
Now I am simply myself with everyone. I am hardworking, hard-playing, passionate, intense, obsessive, introverted, gritty me. And being that way makes me feel a thousand pounds lighter.
Being someone you are not saps your energy.
So, who are you?
Please commit to one step you will take in the next week to move closer to knowing thyself. Maybe take Kolbe or one of the other profiling tools.
Schedule a session with a therapist. Reach out to a friend, a family member, or a peer, and ask, “What are my three greatest strengths and my three greatest weaknesses?”
4. Be Still:
Enjoying 10 to 30 minutes of silence every day will transform you.
Whether you call it meditation, prayer, silence, or breathing, spend 10 to 30 minutes every day in silence. Being still will be transformative.
As an entrepreneurial leader, you go hard all day, every day. But at intervals, you must stop. Literally put on the brakes and just breathe.
I have been amazed at how closing my eyes and breathing shifts me out of my head and into my body. It centres me. It grounds me. It helps create absolute clarity on the project I’m working on, or the problem I’m trying to solve.
Think of it this way. Imagine a glass jar full of water and a little bit of sand. Imagine shaking that jar. The water would be cloudy, murky, and unclear —like most of us when we go, go, go all day, every day. But if you let the glass jar sit for a few minutes, the sand settles and the water becomes clear, lucid, and calm. Just like what will happen to you, if you are still for a few minutes.
This discipline will increase and focus your energy. You will feel like you just drank a cup of coffee, but without the jitters or the caffeine crash 60 minutes later.
Tomorrow morning, before you start your day, take 10 minutes. Sit quietly in a chair. Be still. Pause and breathe. See what happens. Do this for 30 days and see for yourself. It will have an incredible impact on your energy, your mood, and your relationships.
5. Know Your 100%:
Understanding your work capacity and protecting it will increase your productivity.
Knowing your 100% meaning you should know the exact amount of time you will devote to your work if you want to maximise your energy. This is known as your “work container,” which you must protect. What makes this discipline different is that it also works in the context of managing and maximising your energy. You need to protect your energy. Deciding your perfect number of working hours will determine your peak energy. It’s when literally one more hour of work would be less fun or start burning you out.
Think about your ideal time to wake up and what time you prefer to get home, along with how many days a week you want to work and how many weeks per year. This discipline, when followed religiously, maintains your high energy.
One of the principles from the EOS is the ability to Delegate and Elevate. Making more money goes hand in hand with spending all of your working time on doing the things you love and are great at doing. That’s because every time you elevate yourself, you provide more value to people. The more value you provide, the more you are worth.
For over 12 years of running the agency, I’ve been delegating tasks, at least one every quarter. I make a list of things I love doing and providing the greatest value to our clients and my team and things I don’t enjoy doing as much and potentially get someone to help.
I ask my leadership team and team members to do the same things allowing our whole team to do what they love. Imagine if you just do what you love every single day, the same thing for your team member, how much more productive your organisation could be?
Every time you free yourself up to focus more on adding value for your clients or patients, your income will go up.
Grab your journal or use the following Notes pages. Please write your answers to these questions:
- How close are you to doing what you love 100% of your working time?
- What would it look like to be at 100%?
- Why aren’t you there yet?
- What would it take to get to 100%?
Write down one thing that you will do in the next seven days to advance you toward doing what you love. You might complete the Delegate and Elevate exercise for the first time. You might pick what to delegate this quarter. You might have a tough conversation with someone holding you back. What will move the needle for you?
6. Say No … Often:
As Warren Buffett says, “The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say ‘no’ to almost everything.”
With the first five disciplines in place, this discipline becomes easy. Your long- range plans are now clear, your time commitments are now clear, you know who you are, and you are taking time to be still every day. With this clarity, it becomes obvious what you should not be doing.
In Essentialism, a great book on the subject of simplifying your life, author Greg McKeown addresses the necessity of saying no. He states, “The very thought of saying no literally brings us physical discomfort. We feel guilty.”
He goes on to say, “Either we can say no and regret it for a few minutes or we can say yes and regret it for days, weeks, months, or even years.”
Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have become mega-wealthy individuals and they once revealed the 1 trait that made them both incredibly rich. As told in the documentary Becoming Warren Buffett – which is must-watch TV – Gates’s father once asked them both to write down a single word to describe their success. They both wrote the same word: focus.
It is the focus that separates the pretenders from the game-changers. Those who move the needle in this world have an extreme focus on something. To run a successful practice, you can’t afford to split focus.
From time to time, I receive invitations to join various ventures or projects. However, I diligently decline these opportunities. The reason behind this decision is our agency’s ten-year vision to become the world’s leading medical marketing agency, connecting over 1,000 top doctors and surgeons in their respective fields with millions of patients globally. Achieving this mission requires unwavering focus from the leadership team.
This principle extends beyond professional commitments and applies to your social life as well. When faced with an invitation or opportunity, ask yourself if it’s a resounding “Hell YES.” If not, then it’s a definite “hello NO.” Adhering to this principle may be challenging at first, akin to establishing any new habit like waking up early at 5 am. However, with time and consistency, you’ll find it easier to decline distractions.
You have to walk away from all the things that don’t fit. The decision
becomes as clear as someone asking you to eat a worm. You’d say no without hesitation. Every decision can be that easy. This applies to both your professional and your personal life.
7. Don’t Do $50-an-Hour Work… If You Want to Earn Seven Figures:
Enough said.
We talked about the concept of How to Buy Back Your Time and Scale Your Practice in the episode #11
If you want the highest impact on your business or whatever you are doing exactly, you’ve got to think about where you are going to invest properly to buy back your time; whether it is hiring people to do cleaning, cooking, driving, administrative, bookkeeping, website maintenance tasks…the list goes on.
And think about it, when you’re hiring people to help you do other things you’re gaining leverage and focusing on the things that will help make you more money in the future.
These are the really high level things that you can be doing whether it is spending time consulting with your patients or doing surgery or training your team so they can take over your tasks; it gives you time to dedicate to practice’s building tasks.
Assuming you work 40 hours a week, if your goal is to earn a million dollars a year, that translates to approximately $120 per hour. Therefore, you should prioritise tasks that are worth at least $120 per hour and delegate any remaining tasks to others.
Time is an irreplaceable and limited asset. To accelerate your progress towards your goals, it’s essential to master the art of delegation and focus on high-value tasks.
Please write a list of all of the administrative tasks you are doing. You’ve just written a job description for your new assistant. Now, go hire one. You might only need someone for 10 hours a week or 30 hours a week, maybe full- time. But that person is out there waiting to take those burdens off you. Because that is what gives them energy.
8. Prepare Every Night:
If you go to bed knowing exactly what you’re going to do tomorrow, you will sleep better, wake up with solutions and hit the ground running.
I’ve been practising this discipline since I was in college. You should go to bed knowing exactly what you’re going to do tomorrow. You have to hit the ground running when you wake up.
Every night before I go to bed, I lay out my entire next day on a planner notebook.
I use a planner notebook because I believe in the power of writing by hand. I time- block everything I need to do: the calls I need to make, the meetings I need to attend, the projects I need to finish. I list them all in order of importance and urgency so I can prioritise them first.
If you do this, you will sleep better. You will wake up with ideas and be more creative. You’ll wake up with answers to problems and projects you need to work on the next day. That’s because your subconscious will be working on them during the night while you sleep.
Carry out this practice for an entire week, and decide for yourself if it works. I get such great feedback when people first try this discipline. You’ll see right away how much it helps.
9. Put Everything in One Place:
Let’s take an idea from the last discipline one step further. I’ve been working from a planner notebook over the past 15 years.
You can execute this discipline on any technology. It doesn’t have to be a legal pad or notebook.
But I recommend paper. As I’ve mentioned, I believe in the science behind the power of writing by hand. When you write things down that way, you retain them better.
When I make somebody a promise, have an idea, need to remember something, or have to follow up on a task, I write it down in my ever-present planner notebook. I capture it there so that at the end of the day, I can pull all of those commitments and ideas off the pad and put them on the list for the next day.
The point is that you can organise all of those things at the end of the day when you have everything right in front of you. Also, by quickly writing all of the things that come at you throughout the day, you can concentrate on the task at hand and not get distracted.
Please try this tomorrow. Decide the one place you’re going to put every single workday commitment, idea, and thought. Then capture everything that comes up throughout the day in that place. Try it for a week and see how it affects your productivity and energy.
These are my agenda notebook that I’ve used over the years
Conclusion:
Each discipline is easy to understand. Doing them is harder. Please don’t underestimate them, as they will have a profound impact on your life.
If you do everything in this mini-book to maximise your energy and do everything in The EOS Life, you will be a force of nature. And when you are comfortable and ready, teach it to a few people.
My wish for you is that you maximise your freedom, creativity, and the impact that you have on the world.
You deserve to live your ideal life and let your freak flag fly. I wish you tremendous success!
Stay focused.
Ok that wraps it up for this episode.
If this was helpful to you, please subscribe to the OMD TV and Podcast Show so you don’t miss any future episodes. And please share this episode with your staff and colleagues.
If you want to learn more about Online Marketing For Doctors offers and how our team can help you generate more new patients and referring doctors via digital marketing for medical clinics, please reach out to us and book a 15-minute discovery call with us and we’ll show you the opportunities that you might have with your practice marketing. I’ll leave a link to it in the show notes below.
Thank you so much and hope to talk to you on a discovery call soon. 🥳
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