Dr. Tea  0:01  

Practicing medicine without insurance is possible. Imagine a private practice where you get to see your best patients every day, providing medical services you truly enjoy, all without the hassle of insurance. My name is Dr. Tea Nguyen, and I'm a recovering specialist who was completely burned out from insurance based medicine. I pivoted into direct care, where patients pay me directly for my medical services, and have never looked back. If you're a private practice owner or planning to become one who's looking to be free of the grind of insurance and you're craving it, simplicity, efficiency and connection with patients, you are in the right place. This podcast will help you map out your exit plan and uncover the mindset needed to thrive in today's economy. Welcome to the Direct Care Podcast For Specialists. 

Dr. Tea  0:53  

What do you do if you're doing everything you can and it still feels like it's just not working? I just hopped on a call with a doctor who wanted to know what they can do to see a return on their investment. They had paid for other consultants, systems, apps that they need to set up processes, hiring help and so on. And a lot of doctors come with these four things that I found to be true. Number one, many doctors are over generalizing or catastrophizing, making things look much worse than they really are. Number two, they are not doing the reps, but they are expecting the gains. And number three, they are doing new things, hoping that the answer is somewhere out there that somebody will come to save them, that the solution is somewhere hidden under a rock or some place majestical. So they're constantly looking out there, but never really refining what they already have done that is working, that has been proven to work. And number four, they're not allowing this secret ingredient to fully mature their business for success, which is time plus consistency. So let's get into each one of these topics over generalizing, making things look worse than they really are. So how you speak about things, including yourself, even the thoughts that you have are so important because they influence the actions that you take. So things that I often hear time and time again are things like I've already done that it's not working, and when you make statements like that, they end up being a dead end, because they don't give you a way or the ability to creatively solve the problem that you're currently in. So when you say, I've already done that, it's not working. It's incredibly damaging, not just to your ego, but to your ability to grow. So it stops you in your progress, because you have already decided that doing one rep or 10 reps, or even 50 reps, is all that's needed for your desired outcome, right? A runner who achieves a four minute mile to many, many years of training, many ups and downs within those training, many injuries and so on, for a few seconds of glory, whereas some just want the glory, but with less training time. And that's not how it really works. Business is a long term game, and so many people want the shortcut that short sightedness will cost you so much more in the long run, or it's going to cost you a lot of money, because you buy into something that somebody had promised, and at the end of that journey, you still don't see that return on investment. It's very frustrating. And this type of thinking creates unnecessary anxiety or fear or a sense of not being good enough. But the reality is, when you don't do the work, you don't get the results.

Dr. Tea  4:00  

So the one advice that I've received was to focus on the habits which will always have a positive net effect. Do not focus on the outcome. And I'm visualizing a scene at the Olympics a few years ago where swimmer Michael Phelps kept his head forward, focused on what he needed to do in order to achieve gold, a gold medal, and the competitor next to him kept looking up to see where Phelps was at, and that little distraction might have been the thing that cost him that gold. The lesson is, the reps that you put in consistently always count, so don't stop just because you don't see the results, and really stop dramatizing every day. Make it a habit to count your efforts. It's never wasted. It accumulates like an antibiotic. Taking one pill won't make the infection go away, but if you take them sequentially, as it's prescribed, it will work. You. And if you need a little bit of help here, you can purchase a nice gratitude journal. Or what I have right now is a planner that has all of the weeks out, and each day I'll write one thing that I did that either made me happy or something that I accomplished, so that I always have something to reflect back on when I look through my journal and think to myself, how did that year go for me? Or how did that week go for me? Sometimes my weeks are blank, and that's me simply being lazy because I wasn't keeping myself accountable to making sure I counted all of the work that I do do. And so I want you to be able to have that tool so that you can find that the progress you are making will count. You just can't see it right now. I also use stickers as a way to decorate my journal, just to keep it lively, to make it fun a little bit for me. But whatever you do, document the things that you are doing so that you can remind yourself that you're doing the work this journey is meant to be fun, and if you skip that process, if you skip over the part of all of the work you're putting in, this makes it really hard, but if you keep track of things, you make sure that you have fun and you appreciate and you have gratitude for what you are doing and and you make it fun for yourself, you'll See that through these challenges, you can also evolve as a human. 

Dr. Tea  6:24  

These challenges are intended to help you grow a little bit. Now someone is simply just not doing enough of the reps, and they're expecting the gains. Here's what I mean. Have you ever encountered a person, a pre-med student, or somebody who said, I wish I could just be a doctor without going to med school. That sounds ridiculous, right? I had a friend who said this to me, and it took all of the muscles in my body to resist responding in a sarcastic, snarky way. And you and I know that people who haven't gone through medical school simply don't know what we had to endure, all of the tests we had to take, all of the things we've had to sacrifice, even our mental and physical health were compromised just so that we can end up with a medical degree to practice medicine, which meant we also had to take classes we did not like. It's just part of the curriculum. You cannot skip things that aren't fun, unfortunately, but they are necessary in order to learn what you need to know about the human body and how to help people. So there is this process, and the process in medical school is not that different from business although we didn't go to business school, many of us haven't, the concepts are the same. There is a process for you to get from point A to point B, and you don't get the degree by skipping lessons. Right? These lessons stack on one another, and some doctors think you have to do really hard things in order to get a reward. And that's not always true. Sometimes it's something like learning how to delegate having other people help you letting go of that control and that power, or it could be prioritizing, because there's a lot of things out there ready to distract you if you take the bait, which means we have to discipline ourselves to learn how to focus on what really matters. We can't focus on putting out all the wires. We have to focus on the few things that we can work on today, and there are things that we can learn, like how to systemize a call or lead and a follow up plan, for instance. Or it's letting go of what you think, how things are supposed to be like, and accept that you don't know what it's supposed to be, or accept that this is a new frontier and be open to learning those life lessons. Maybe you are in the same situation where you're hoping that there's an answer somewhere out there in the world for you, and you're chasing this high, this novelty, this ability to like, discover something somewhere out there. But the reality is that you haven't really refined what has already proven to work. You're doing all the things, and that's not unusual for a business owner. We do have to do a lot of things, but when it comes to building your practice, stick with simple, simple works. Now, I'm not a gambler, but I would dare bet that many business owners are avoiding the thing that they have to do because it's boring, or they're saying things like I've already done that and it's not working. Just want to remind you that simple works. Every single business has something in common, and the way they're able to build the reputation of their business is through word of mouth. That was the initial way where businesses were able to grow. It's talking to their neighbors. It's talking to other social groups. It's talking to their doctors, who knows about it. About your business. Word of mouth works. So you might find yourself chasing a high for something new, something fancy out there, something that somebody else is doing that's innovative, but that high that you're chasing might actually be costing you in the long run, because you're not committing to refining what you already have, that novelty will wear off. That excitement will cost you now. Novelty and excitement is nice here and there I get that, but there is a lot of boring work that we have to do to make this sustainable. Those boring things might be something like refining a training protocol, creating a sales script, creating a system, making sure your protocols are up to date, making sure that they convey the message that it needs to for your ideal patients and so on.

Dr. Tea  10:54  

So what really works, what continues to work is meeting people in real life, and that seems to be getting harder with each new technology that gets introduced into our world, because everything's available at our fingertips, and so we think we can just build a practice without actually meeting more people. Again, simple works. Meeting people is the best way to build relationships within your community, and I really encourage you to kind of revisit this if you haven't already done it, or if you have done it and you're saying things like, it's not working well. It just means you have to cast a bigger net. You got to find the right people, and that's our job as a business owner, to find people who need us. And when you build these connections, I really want to highlight that you are not asking for anything in return. You don't want a transactional relationship. This is what will burn a lot of people, where they say, Oh, I met with so and so five times, 10 times, took them up to lunch, took them out to dinner, and they got nothing in return from them. So instead of building healthy relationships and having fun in the process of doing so, treating it like a transaction can be very deflating. I highly discourage you to view your relationships in such a transactional way, where you meet somebody and you expect something in return. That's not how it works. And the biggest lesson here is never stop growing and nurturing your network. We are in the service industry. We are here to be helpful, and the practices that do best are those who are nurturing their network, and they're not asking for anything in return. They are keeping the door open and saying, If I can help you, I am here for you, but they're not making that relationship transactional, because if you make that relationship transactional, you're basically saying you are of no value to me if you give me nothing in return. And I can't imagine you really enjoying that kind of relationship anyway, humans are not designed in that way. We really do like to bond over meaningful conversations and experiences. So keep it light, keep it just like that. Cultivate those relationships, make those meaningful. 

Dr. Tea  13:07  

The last thing that so many of us forget is the value of time, time and consistency, or consistency over time. The reality is, you might be doing all the right things, but maybe you haven't allowed time to do its thing, like if you're comparing your business with another time might be the factor of consistency, believing in yourself, falling love with your work, or some of the other ingredients. But if you don't give sourdough bread time to rise, or wine to mature, or cheeses to mature, or even fermented food like kimchi. And if you're hungry, this is just how I talk about lots of food and allergy but nonetheless, if you're not going to give these things time, it never really gets to fully mature, and thus you will not get the best outcome. All of these common issues that I mentioned here can be rectified by understanding what building a business requires, which is that, yes, your first business will be hard, but it doesn't have to be painful. This is why I always advise doctors to do the thing that they are obsessed about or become obsessed about, because you're going to be doing this for the long term. You can't just keep putting money somewhere out there for somebody else to solve for you and then look at the results and say, I'm not getting a return on investment. That's not really the best way to build your business. It's through the work that you have to do to become that version who is able to claim that success, or who has succeeded. So if you don't do the work and you don't enjoy the process, you got to learn what you need to learn. Stop catastrophizing, stop dramatizing, stop saying things like none of it is working. You got to give yourself grace that you are doing a new thing. And with that, I promise you that you will start seeing results in your business once you are. Frame the way you approach it. I hope that that was helpful. I'm so glad that you're here with me today. I can't wait to be with you next time. Take care. 

Dr. Tea  15:12  

If you enjoyed this episode, please give it a review and share it with a friend so more doctors can learn about direct care. Let's keep the conversation going on LinkedIn so we can help more doctors escape insurance and thrive in private practice. Thanks for listening. I'll talk with you next time, take care. Bye