CYNTHIA GOERIG
CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER
At 200 days per year over the course of a 40-year dental career, you have 8000 work days to look forward to. That number alone is an incentive to get things right as early in your career as possible. Allowing for the fact that different doctors will have different visions of success, here are the four universal elements that go into having a great day, everyday:
Arrival Energy
A great day starts before you even arrive at the practice, when you wake up feeling engaged and excited about the opportunity to help patients and do the best you can for them. This happens when you are free from stress and you feel that your practice offers you a meaningful and worthwhile purpose for the day.
You know the practice is aligned to your personal goals, and you walk in the door feeling happy to be there, and confident that you will have fun regardless of how challenging the day may be. Equally important, your team members arrive with the same positive forward-looking mindset.
Flow and Teamwork
A great day is one where you are usefully active with patient care all day. Your time feels like a valuable resource, but you never feel needlessly pressured or overwhelmed … nor do you feel idle with time to kill. You move smoothly from patient to patient and experience a satisfying productive rhythm and flow. You spend the right time with each patient, doing each procedure at the right pace and feeling like you are “in the zone”.
At the same time, you are confidently relying on your team. They are trained to the highest professional level and you trust that each of them individually is a qualified, examplary representative for your standards when interacting with patients and referrers. Everyone on the team is choreographed and synchronized. They are in the right place at the right time, and they know what is happening and what needs to happen next. As a team, you feel fit and capable to enjoy yourselves during the day without stress.
Schedule and Productivity
A great day is when the practice performs at a high level of efficiency and productivity. This begins in the days leading up to today, when the framework for a great day was programmed into your patient schedule using a template designed to accomplish your goals while creating flow. Patients are properly prepared for their appointments, so they arrive on time and prepared financially to accept treatment today if diagnosed.
Downtime and lost time are avoided. Not only did you complete the cases scheduled in advance, but you and your team adapted with effortless court sense for same-day emergencies. You feel everyone on the same page and making a positive effort to help patients and move the practice forward too. At the end of the day, you compare yourself to your goals and you knocked it out of the park, allowing you to easily achieve your daily economic goals for the practice while delivering high quality endodontics!
Completion Mindset
At the end of a great day, you and your team feel a sense of closure and success in accomplishing everything. You feel complete and satisfied, and your incredible teamwork ensures that everything today is finalized so that nothing incomplete carries over to the next day.
Most of all, far from feeling worn out, you feel as energized as ever. You leave the practice thinking, “What an incredible day!” and you feel pumped with enthusiasm. You go home to your family or personal activities as happy as you were when the day started.
Why You Need Great Days Everyday
Before you say this sounds like an unrealistic fantasy, let me say that not only is this how most of your days could be; it is how most of your days should be. Forty years is a long time in a career as demanding as endodontics. The saddest thing is doctors who feel de-energized, worn down and want to escape the profession. It’s so unnecessary.
Great days don’t happen by accident. They are created with intention. If you feel great days are few and far between, or need to be more consistent, give us a call and let’s talk about how we can transform your practice.