Happy New Year!

By Stacy M. Menz, PT, DPT, PCS
It’s hard to believe that 2018 is already upon us. On behalf of the Impact Editorial Board, we wish you and your practice all the best in this New Year!
The start of a new year always feels like the first page of a brand-new notebook. As I stare at that blank page, I wonder what will be written on each page and how the story will unfold. One way that I work to steer that story is by setting both personal and professional annual goals. While some of those goals don’t always turn out the way I planned, they do provide me with a road map to motivate and inspire myself and my team to have purpose and achievements in the year to come.
While working on my goals for 2018, I looked back at my goals from 2017. Some of them our practice achieved and some we did not. I don’t know about you, but I have a tendency to be disappointed when we don’t achieve a goal we had thought was a realistic target. I have noticed, though, that is easy to focus on what didn’t happen and forget about the wins that did occur and built the year’s story.
To change my focus, this year as I looked back at 2017, I decided to create a win list. I looked back over the last year and listed every win that occurred. Some were small wins and some were big wins. As I wrote them down, I was re-reminded that I would like to be better about recognizing these wins and specifically recognizing those team members who helped make them possible. Knowing that seeing the positive and recognizing my team is something that I always can improve on, I decided that in addition to sharing the win list from the past year, I am also going to make time in my calendar to reflect within the year and recognize wins as they occur. Not only that, I am going to create a process for my team members to share their wins. I am sure that this will evolve as we go, but I am excited to make a point of celebrating the wins along the way and am confident at the end of 2018, I will have even more goals achieved with this new perspective of recognition among our team. I’m looking forward to letting you know the results in January 2019!
