Engagement

A friend of mine recently got engaged. He and his fiancé will be married within the next month. It is refreshing to watch them because there are some lessons which we all need to be reminded of personally, as well as professionally.

When engaged to be married a person is:
Committed
Totally focused on the opportunity at hand, and
Not entertaining other offers!

Contrast those characteristics to a professional I met recently who said, “If I could find something else that paid as much as what I am doing now, I would quit what I am doing now. In fact, I am looking.”

This professional could have used some reminder lessons in “engagement.” Just look around the next time you go out to eat. There will usually be a couple sitting all by themselves, looking longingly into each other’s eyes, with no clue or awareness that there is anyone else in the room. They are either dating or engaged!

Look around a little more and you’ll see a guy who is totally into his PDA while his date’s eyes wander to find the man…she WISHED she had married!

When engaged to be married or engaged in work, the characteristics are the same. You…
Dream of how wonderful things are going to be,
Plan to make amazing things happen,
Dedicate your time and your energy to making it all work.

Failure to accomplish the end objective has more to do with engagement than perhaps any other characteristic. When you are engaged, your time, attention, thoughts, dreams, aspirations, plans, and nearly every waking moment is focused on making IT work. Whatever IT is.

So, get engaged! Recommit to your work with the same passion that my friend has for his upcoming marriage. With that level of commitment, everyone else will get out of your way so you can get to the alter. The alter of your accomplishment!

Who is your competition...REALLY???

It is a question I ask groups nearly every week. Who is your competition? If you are in dentistry for example, you might make the mistake of saying that your competition is the dentist down the street. That kind of thinking might be seriously limiting your success.

Think about it:

· Over 50% of the people in any market do not go to the dentist on a regular basis.

· 80% of the population has some type of periodontal disease.

· You’re not everybody’s “cup of tea.” Not everyone is going to like your personal style or your way of doing business. They will go somewhere else. That is the bad news. The good news is that other people are not going to like the dentist down the street and would rather come to you.

“Competition” in a healthy sense of the word may be the best thing that can happen to any business for several reasons:

· To one extent, the more competitors there are, the more educated the market becomes and the more likely more people are to buy.

· Healthy “competition” creates the opportunity to differentiate and tailor your service to a more specific clientele that will be more satisfied because you are more closely serving their needs.

· “Competition” makes everybody better because you have to stay on top of your game to stay relevant.

I have always thought how much better dentistry would be if dentists, especially in the same market, were willing to share their clinical data. If they would compare and help each other improve clinically, the entire market would benefit as well as the patients in it. Besides, patients rarely make the decision about their dentist based on clinical quality. Unfortunately, they are not very good judges of clinical quality of care. Quality is the moral and ethical responsibility of the dentist.

So think of the vast untapped market of patients that are waiting to be served. In most markets, there is plenty to go around for everyone if you are properly positioned and move forward with a defined purpose instead of being threatened by the “competition.”

The Opposite of an Idea

Today while speaking in Colorado Springs, a dentist came up to me at the break and thanked me for improving his golf game! I questioned him since we had said nothing about golf. He shared that he had always tended toward putting short. He realized that the biggest reason was because he always said to himself while putting, “Don’t land short.”

The principle we discussed was the fact that you can’t focus on the opposite of an idea. By telling himself NOT to land short, the only thought he really heard was, “Land short.”

If I say to you, “Don’t think of the Statue of Liberty,” you can’t do that either. The mere mention of those to words, Statue and Liberty, and the image immediately pops into your mind.

Consider always talking and thinking in terms of what you WANT, not what you DON’T want. Turn “I don’t want to run late” to “I hope we run on time.” Turn “The problem is that nobody shows up” to “We want more people to show up.”

Tell yourself and others what you want to make happen. When you do, you create a picture in your own mind and the mind of others of what the most desirable outcome is. And when you do, every mind will respond by working on how to make that happen.

It all starts with the picture that you paint with your words. So paint carefully so you get want you ultimately want.