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It may seem counter intuitive, but I believe that some people may be more afraid of being successful than failing. When you look the flow charts of failure and success, failure is easy. A successful flow chart is more complex, however. In this episode, I address common fears of success and provide some action steps and tips to overcome the fear of success and self sabotage.
In this episode:
01:32 – 31,182 listeners to show
03:21 – Fear of Succeeding
03:55 – Flowchart for success
07:18 – Grow your reputation in the community
07:38 – Improve your savings account
08:18 – Increase your Patient flow
08:38 – Take care of yourself, physically or mentally and emotionally
10:45 – How to deal with negative feedback
12:29 – Fear of becoming Business Owner
I always wanted to start my own Speech Therapy Private Practice and it took Hurricane Katrina to throw me out of my comfort zone to push me into this realm of starting and growing and scaling a Private Practice, so again it’s for a specific type of person. And I’ve also talked to people who say you, I want to do this, I want to open my own Speech Therapy Private Practice and then they join the community or they start getting coaching and then after a couple of months they get a little complacent. They don’t interact with the group. They start doing other things or not being as accountable to their own actions. They’re not being honest with themselves and they kind of just fizzle out and it’s just the same idea over and over.
[Commercial]Hello everyone you’re listening to the Speech Therapy Private Practice StartUp Podcast. This is episode number 37. My name is Kyle Meades and I’m a speech pathologist since 1993. And these podcasts are designed to help you improve your business and your life one Podcast at a time.
Welcome back to the show everyone. Thanks again for all the emails, questions and all the feedback. And as of today, today is Sunday April 8th 2018. We have well over 31,182 listeners to the show and I’m super happy you guys are out there getting good valuable free information and I say it every single episode, “Value is what you get in the absence of money”. These podcasts are absolutely free for you so if you wouldn’t mind please go to your Android platform or your iOS platform of choice and leave some good 5 Star feedback that way other people just like you can get the same valuable information that you’re receiving. And I would really appreciate that that way other people can get the same help and assistance that you’re getting off of these podcasts.
Again when I first started out I just didn’t see or hear or find anything on the web except for some PDF and things like that, so I wanted to change that. And as I slowly grew and improve my own business I wanted to just go ahead and share that information. So that’s what I’m doing on these podcasts. And we have listeners now from all over the world. It’s really cool to see who’s out there. United States is topping the charts, but lately the Japanese are coming up there and we’ve got Australia on the top the list. We have India, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, South Africa and The Republic of Korea. And when you break it down in the United States from the state standpoint, we’ve got California topping the charts, then Texas, New York, Florida, Arizona, Illinois, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Georgia. So again I’m happy you guys are out there if you have any questions or if you want to know more about Speech Therapy Private Practice just simply go to privateslp.com/contact. You can reach me there and I’m willing to help you.
So I wanted to talk to you today about the ‘Fear of Succeeding’. Now that might sound a little bit counter-intuitive because a lot of people are just scared to fail. But when you start your own Speech Therapy Private Practice or when you’re growing it and scaling it, there’s a lot of fear because when you do something one time you need to do it over and over and over. So the stakes just get higher and higher and higher. And if you look at success, success is actually more complex than failing. The flowchart for failure is simply you try something you fail and you’re done. But the flowchart for success can be really complex. For example, you start your own Private Practice, you see some patients in the home or the home of community setting or your office and then you might lease a space and then you start to make a small profit. You save that money so you can hire other employees and then you hire an employee and then you save more money and you grow it. That’s success, that’s when you just opened yourself to a new set of growth opportunities. And those growth opportunities, for me those things are very scary.
They makes a person sort of fearful. You’ve got employees and you’ve got management, you’ve got compliance issues, I speak to a lot of people in the private practice world and they have fear of compliance issues, service delivery, taxes, problems with billing and credentialing, payroll, legal issues and employment issues. And the list goes on and on. But that’s success. That’s what’s going to take me obviously to another level with my own Private Practice. But also it’s going to help me grow and push me into those areas that I really don’t want to be pushed into. And again let me say this being successful and having your own Speech Therapy Private Practice it takes a certain type of person to want to do this.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with being an employee working for the same company or multiple companies for multiple years. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s a simple good consistent life where you can go to work for a set amount of days and a set amount of time, you get a paycheck and you get benefits. You get your caseload and you get everything done for your schedule and it’s very convenient. And there’s nothing wrong with it. And I did that for years. But there was finally a piece of the puzzle, I always wanted to start my own Speech Therapy Private Practice and it took Hurricane Katrina to throw me out of my comfort zone to push me into this realm of starting and growing and scaling a Private Practice, so again it’s for a specific type of person.
And I’ve also talked to people who say you, I want to do this, I want to open my own Speech Therapy Private Practice and then they join the community or they start getting coaching and then after a couple of months they get a little complacent. They don’t interact with the group. They start doing other things or not being as accountable to their own actions. They’re not being honest with themselves and they kind of just fizzle out and it’s just the same idea over and over. And so that’s something that when you do start your own Private Practice you want to make sure that you get over those humps and that you get over those problems of getting distracted. I’ve mentioned that another podcast going after those bright shiny objects, those BSO’s, spending too much time on Social media, Facebook, Insta, Twitter, YouTube and its just distractions. So here’s some tips on how you can overcome sabotaging yourself when you’re starting or growing your scaling your own private practice.
Number one, what you can do is you can really grow your reputation in the community and this takes time. Wherever you’re working, whatever community you’re involved in. You can actually help and change a lot of lives for a lot of people and be of service. So that will help you overcome that sabotaging fear. The second thing is you can improve your savings account your bottom line. There’s no secret the more money you save in the bank the more money you’re going to have to grow your business and that’s directly proportional, you can go out and borrow money but there’s no guarantee that you can pay that loan back. You might be able to service that loan and make those minimal payments but again why would you want to borrow a lot of money when you haven’t tested the waters on a smaller scale. That way when you borrow a lot of money from the banks you’re working for the bank and when you’re borrowing money from yourself you’re in for yourself. So that’s another thing to remember when you want to overcome sabotaging yourself.
A third tip to remember you can just increase your Patient flow. I mean over time if you’re doing a good job and providing a good quality service you’re going to get more patients, more doctor referrals. You’re going to see that patient flow increase and improve. Also a fourth thing you can do to overcome fear and self sabotage. I mean you can just take care of yourself, physically or mentally and emotionally. Physically you can hire a personal trainer. You can work out, you can eat well, you can exercise, you can set off time, set aside time during the week to take care of you. I love to go to the gym. I’m not a big weight lifter but I do like to get my cardio on. I like to exercise and rhyme. I love to hit that treadmill, like to steam and I like to sit in a jacuzzi. I like to go to the JCC, it’s here in Tucson. It’s a place I’d like to go work out and I do that on a regular basis. And I do notice when I’m not taking care of myself physically, my mental state I get a little fearful when I get a little worried, I get a bit squirrelly they call it but I gotta get back into my routine.
Now mentally and emotionally, you can take care of yourself. You can attend seminars and there’s nothing better than getting on a plane going to a foreign country and working with others and meeting new people and working with other people and getting a new perspective on different ways to run and scale and grow a business. You can also meet other professionals through close communities like privateslp.com/membership there. You can get one on one coaching with me and also meet other professionals and receive feedback from others too. So also besides getting coaching or attending seminars you can block out time in your week and you can have a certain day once a month or you can just disappear from the office. If you’ve got everything in place you can disappear and take care of yourself. So that’s another tip.
The fifth tip would be maybe realize that you can’t please everybody. Now we are in a helping profession. We love to help people we like to fix things. That’s just what Speech Language Pathologist do. That’s her personality trait and if you go back to graduate school when they select people for our profession that’s something that they look at. Do you have that helping gene that helping trait?
So again there’s nothing more scary and worrisome and fearful when we get a negative feedback. I mentioned that on one of my previous podcasts dealing with negative feedback. We want to please and help everybody but sometimes you just can’t please everybody. But the more that you go through the more that I go through, these scenarios of negative feedback or criticism it really helps us grow. So we can change and alter our way we do business I mean recently we had a parent that came into the clinic and she was upset and she posted some negative feedback and my default is run and hide. Let’s just run and hide and pretend like that never happened. But it was six o’clock in the evening and I simply just picked up the phone and I spoke to the mother and I said, “Hey, this is Kyle, I’m the owner of the clinic and I really appreciate the fact that you left me some feedback”. She says, “Well I’m really sorry”. I’d normally don’t leave negative feedback and I said No I’m glad you did because it’s going to help me improve our overall service delivery and systems that we use and we have put in place to provide service.
So the mom at the end the conversation not only was she grateful that I took the time out of my schedule to call her but she got the help she needed. I got the help that I needed because we’re all learning at the end of the day. Nobody’s perfect and because of that it’s given me a chance to grow as a clinic owner and to do a better job to help our patients. So really negative feedback in itself or realizing that you can’t please everybody and you can’t do it all the time for everybody. I mean it’s not a bad thing. I mean good things come out of everything. I think maybe just not on the timeline that I want it to happen on so.
And lastly when I’m taking these notes and writing things down the Sixth tip, would be just the fear of becoming that person, that Business Owner. A lot of people are scared to succeed and become that crazy business owner, where you’re always attached to your phone. I remember the days of the Blueberry member folks way back in the day the big red light days to call it the Crackberry the red light with blink and it’s like Oh man, I got another message, I got another message, or you see people who work in long term care who are maybe going up the ladder not just speech pathologist but they might be in charge of an area or a couple of states and they’re always on the phone, emails, calls, webinars and dealing with problems. But it doesn’t have to be that way because when I put systems and people in place, that’s kind of a buffer between me, other people and consumers and so again that fear of becoming that person, that business owner is not always what I think it’s going to be.
It doesn’t have to be crazy and just always tied to the phone and always tied to the internet. You want to think about it as adding something. This ain’t homework folks. It’s not all about subtraction, it’s about adding value. And you want to think about it is adding you where you can help other people, families in need, entities in your community like donating money to a soccer team or a softball team or helping out a local charity or working in a food bank, given back to the local community. Paying taxes, yes paying taxes. What a blessing to have the gift of being able to pay more taxes right to be a part of the local community. A thriving business in the community so you help employees they get the insurances and health insurances and vision dental 401k with a match. They get what they need, they get a paycheck, patients that they can help. And again, this couldn’t be possible unless you start your business and do it the right way.
So if you need help with starting growing scaling your own Speech Therapy Private Practice, hit me up, go to privateslp.com/membership. Also if you’re kind of be in a right year in a you’ve got your own private practice but you’re having trouble with billing and collections or maybe even getting credentialed. We have a service we have a separate company that does that too. Just go to privateslp.com/billing. And as always I hope you’re getting valuable information out of these podcasts. If there’s anything I could do please reach out to me at kyle@privateslp.com. And as always thank you for listening.
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