It’s a fact of life that you can’t do it all. You do not have enough hours in a day, days in a week, or even weeks in a month or year, to do everything. Time is limited, and so are you. Yet so many business people—and doctors—find themselves stretched thin, overworked, and exhausted as they do their best to “do it all” themselves, whatever “all” looks like for them. This could mean tons of commitments to friends or hobbies, trying to see more patients than you can handle on your own, doing the billing or marketing or whatever else in your office all by yourself, or any number of things. The bottom line is that saying “yes” to everything actually makes it harder for you to achieve your goals.
That’s why saying “no” can be a strategy that allows you to succeed.
Many people think that to achieve more, they need to be doing more, but that’s not really the way it works. The way to achieve anything is to have a laser-like focus on your goals and say “no” to the distractions and outside commitments that would get in your way. This doesn’t mean those things themselves are bad—only that you can’t do everything.
For example, say your goal is to spend more time with your family in the evenings. To achieve this, you might set aside a couple of nights that are off-limits for other hobbies or work that isn’t an emergency. Or imagine that you make a goal to improve your health by working out twice a week at the gym with a buddy, or to have a productive weekly meeting with your practice marketer. To succeed in any of these areas, you have to have a laser-like focus on them and not let other things, even good things, take up the time you’ve set aside.
This may mean saying no to other good things, and that is ok. Good things that would divert your time away from your goals and spread you too thin simply become distractions. You’ll find you’re doing too much and you don’t have enough time to devote to any one thing, so you never actually achieve anything. This is part of why goal setting and reviewing is such a crucial aspect of the Top Practices Mastermind group. We want you to succeed, which means learning how to use your goals to say “no” sometimes. If you’d like to get started on actually achieving your goals today, check out our Mastermind group application. You can also contact us with your questions by calling (717) 725-2679 or e-mailing [email protected].