Striking a Balance

Your patients, your practice, and your personal growth

By Mel Robbins

If you’re reading this, you’re dedicated to growing your practice and looking for ways to do so. A simple Google search will give you thousands of pages about the best marketing ideas. Yes, marketing is important, but there’s something else that’s even more vital to the growth of your business that most of us often neglect.

Right now, I want you to imagine there are three buckets. The first bucket is patient care. On average, what percentage of your time do you spend focusing on your patients, making sure that they are successfully improving their health? After you make a mental note of this number, I want you to think about the second bucket: your practice. What percentage of your time do you spend focusing on day-to-day operations and maintaining the health of your business? And finally, the third bucket: personal growth. What percentage of your time do you spend focusing on yourself—time that you’re working on your own priorities rather than the priorities of others? How much are you exercising, practicing mindfulness, reading, and improving yourself and your own energy levels and happiness?

For most of you, a large majority of your time is probably focused on your patients and the rest of it is spent on your practice. You’re probably treating yourself as the third spoke in the wheel. You’re filling the buckets of patients and practice–at the expense of personal growth.

In order to exponentially grow your business, you need to commit to spending more time on you. You need to take care of yourself in order to make your practice healthy. If you want to keep your practice in the best shape and get your patients into the best shape, you must do the same for yourself. It’s easy to neglect your own needs when you’re spending each day focused on others who are desperate to improve, but in order to truly level your business up, you need to increase your focus on personal care.

The reason is simple: When you’re feeling energized, excited, and renewed, you bring an entirely new energy to your practice. Usually, we’re all living on autopilot—or, in other words, we’re acting out of habit. When you break out of autopilot and form the habit of prioritizing your own growth, you begin to see ripples of change in your life. When you start breaking out of autopilot in your personal life, you can start doing the same in your business.

If you don’t think you’re on autopilot, you’re wrong. How do you spend your free time, outside of work? Do you spend time looking at your phone or zoning out in front of the TV? If you want to change your business, you must change yourself. When you replace the habits that don’t serve you with ones that help you reach your goals, you’ll find that the changes will reflect in all aspects of your life.

Here is a simple routine that you can start doing now to break out of autopilot and fill your personal growth bucket:

1. Stop looking at your phone at least one hour before bed (minimum). Leave it out of your bedroom when you sleep.
2. Set your alarm (get an alarm that’s not your phone) for 30 minutes earlier than usual.
3. In the morning, after you wake up, don’t hit snooze. Use the 5 Second Rule to help you wake up (I’ll explain exactly what it is at the conference!) and pop out of bed. Do not look at your phone yet!
4. Get ready as you usually do and then pull out a piece of paper.
5. Take those extra 30 minutes to do something for you. My suggestions: exercise, yoga, walk outside, listen to personal growth books, or take an online class that interests you.
6. Write down your #1 priority for the day and exactly when you will accomplish it.
7. Now, you can look at your phone.

By following this routine each morning, you will fill up your personal growth bucket—and you may be amazed by the effects that this routine has on your practice, as well.

Mel Robbins is the keynote speaker at this November’s PPS conference. She is a CNN Legal Analyst, best-selling author, and the most booked female speaker in the world. You can hear her speech, “The 5 Second Rule: Achieving Breakthrough Performance in Your Career and in Your Life,” on Thursday morning at the conference.