Mindset | YOUR TIMELINE TO "DOMINATING DENTIST"
IF YOU HAVE A FUTURE-FOCUSED MINDSET, you are always trying to stay one step ahead. You now understand that it takes action to move from being At Risk, Struggling, or Searching to reach Dominating, and everything you learn here will lead you to become a Dominating Dentist.
One of the main attributes of a Dominating Dentist is their decisiveness. Unlike the other dentists in the Bell Curve, the Dominating Dentist is making the right decisions, and more importantly at the right time, never hesitating or waiting to see what others do. This is imperative to pave the way for the future of your practice. As a future-focused dentist, you understand that the decisions you make today will decide what your practice will be in 3, 5, and 10 years. If you need to make a change to your practice, you know that if you wait a day, a week, or a month to make that change, you may have a very different practice down the road than if you implemented that change today. While every tool and piece of advice you will learn here will arm you with the actions you need to take to become a Dominating Dentist, you still have a question to answer, How soon do you want to get to Dominating?
Take a moment to sit and reflect on your dental practice and your current situation. In 12, 24, 36 months from now, you will be faced with your future reality. The timeline of decisions you make during that period will determine your future reality.
The dentists without a future-focused mindset believe that if they make absolutely no changes to their practice, they will remain on a straight timeline between their current situation and their future reality, essentially ending up in the same situation. The truth is, that period of time between now and your future reality will be a journey, a timeline of decisions that creates a trajectory with either positive or negative results. The timeline you choose, based on your actions, will determine which outcome will be the future reality for your practice.
You may find yourself At Risk down the road. This is a sign that you are on the downturned Drift timeline, at the bottom.
Picture dentistry as a bell curve, where each dentist (that owns a practice) falls somewhere among the curve. Their mindset, results, and decisions all contribute to where they are on the bell curve. Taking the time to identify which type of dentist you are and what decisions, fears, comfort, and results have led you to believe that, will help you become more self-aware in your role as practice owner, and help you better understand how to use the knowledge and tools you will learn in this book.
By taking no decisive action as time passes, you will drift away from your goals, away from what you ultimately want your practice to be or what you envision for your practice. The practices that follow the Drift timeline to At Risk are the ones that made no changes during that period, and let the market decide what happened to their practice. For example, the dentist who watches their competition increase over months or years, choose to do nothing, and become a commodity or invisible to their ideal patients. At first, the At Risk timeline seems somewhat stable, so most dentists don't realize they are on it, but over time the trajectory downward steepens, plummeting their practice into a desperate position.
The next timeline is a less drastic, but still a downturned curve that leads to Struggling.
While this decline does not drop as quickly as the Drifting curve that leads to At Risk, it portrays that little or no changes are being made over time. This is often due to a tendency to wait and see what choices everyone else in your market makes before making your own decisions for your practice; always on the defensive, in a reactionary position. This timeline marked by hesitant actions will only result in a Struggling situation as your future reality.
The next line leads to Searching.
Your practice follows this timeline if you are consistently marketing, making regular changes to your practice, and are receiving some positive results. Maybe you are not hitting every goal you want to achieve, but you are moving in the right direction. There is still a bit of hesitation, which is why the incline is slow and steady over time, so when you reach your future reality, your vision for your remarkable and rewarding practice may still be out of arm’s reach.
Finally, there is the top timeline, which leads your future reality to Dominating. This is an exponential upward trajectory, moving towards a Dominating dental practice in 12, 24, or 36 months.
This timeline is marked with Decisive Action: you are consistently taking the right steps at the right time, to move towards your goals. The key to riding this exponential timeline upwards to achieve phenomenal results, is abandoning hesitation, being decisive, and making the necessary investments in your practice.
Whatever timeline you are on today, 2, 3, or 4, your first step is to jump the lines to timeline 1. As you can see from the graphic to the right, the distance between the lines only grows farther and farther apart as time goes on. This indicates that jumping onto timeline 1 will never be more attainable than it is today. If you wait 12, 24, or 36 months to see what your future reality holds, it will be much more difficult, riskier, and more costly to jump to timeline 1 (if not impossible altogether).
So, how do you get onto the timeline to Dominating? The answer is: you take action now. You make a mental commitment to yourself to take everything you learn in this book and apply it to your practice immediately. Often, this is the most difficult step. But once you’ve done so, you will jump to timeline 1.
Once you’ve jumped onto timeline 1, your second step is to ride the curve up to Dominating. You will do this by consistently applying everything you learn in this book to your practice month after month for the next 12-36 months.
If you begin your timeline to Dominating now, you will start exponentially growing your practice, instead of worrying about trying to get back on track in 12, 24, 36 months down the road.
Because, if you don’t take decisive action today, if you’ve already self-identified that you are drifting away from your goals, or you are a Struggling or Searching dentist, then how long, realistically, can you wait before you jump onto that Dominating timeline and take decisive action? Can you and your practice really afford to wait?
You can learn exactly how to make those decisions and what to do to achieve your remarkable and rewarding practice. And you won’t be alone.
