When you find what works, UPSIZE it
As a health practitioner, we often wear many hats.
Some days we are a Clinician, dealing with patients and their issues.
Some days we are a business owner, managing staff, ordering stock or solving problems.
Some days we are a Marketer, deploying advertising, creating content, spruiking our services.
And some days we are just confused… Wondering what to do next, why something isn’t working or where things went wrong.
If this sounds like you, then you are certainly not alone.
Regardless of the hat you have on, the challenges can be many.
Something that has become obvious to me over the years of being in the many roles that my career has required of me, is that we often find things that work well, but don’t often stick at them long enough to really see the true value.
I’ll give you an example…
You may be trying to attract new patients to your clinic by sharing posts into your local community Facebook page. You do it a couple of times and get 1 or 2 patient enquiries from it.
You then spend some extra money on larger signage for your clinic and hope that this helps also.
You then go and introduce yourself to the owners of the Pilates studio down the road, in the hope that there could be some cross referrals.
In other words, we try lots of things, but often forget to pay attention to what has ACTUALLY shown us results.
If we acknowledge the fact that sharing two posts into a community Facebook group got us two patient enquiries, then it seems almost stupidly obvious that we should do more of that. In fact, we should do MUCH more of that!
Maybe you give your patient with chronic low back pain some simple exercises to improve their strength, and they notice a small improvement in their daily pain levels. At that point would you decide to try something else, or would you take that as a sign that you are heading in the right direction, and perhaps give them even more exercise?
It sounds so simple, and that’s because it is!
Our brains are wired to help us look for the best route, the fastest way, the path of least resistance.
What we aren’t always good at is seeing what is working, and then doubling down on that.
This month, I took my own advice and decided to double down on something I hadn’t achieved a goal on.
At the beginning of 2023, I set myself the goal of reaching 10,000 downloads for the ACE Audio Podcast. We were on track for the ¾ of the year, and then due to us releasing less episodes toward th end of the year, I fell short of my goal by about 900 downloads.
Like most things, the more you do it, the more chances you give yourself of succeeding. So, I decided to release 31 episodes over the 31 days of January.
While that may sound not too difficult, let me tell you from experience – coming up with a new topic to essentially give a speech on every day for a full month is difficult. Then, factoring time to record them, edit them and publish them certainly has taxed my will power and focus.
But I did this because I know four things:
1) If I put in maximal effort up front, it allows breathing space later in the year to get busy with other things, without impacting my overall goals too much.
2) That if I produce more content for our audience, then more people are likely to connect with us and ultimately benefit from our stuff.
3) That with repetition I get better at things. As I get better at things, the quality of my work improves, and this spills over into everything we do.
4) That doing hard things, develops a bank of evidence in our minds that we are capable of hard things when required. This is the foundation of resilience.
So here we are, January has come to an end and I have published 31 episodes to our podcast!
This has also generated a tone of video content for our YouTube and social medial channels, it has sparked some great comments and conversations with people who have consumed it, and it has helped me solidify and clarify a wide range of ideas in my mind as I have worked through out to communicate them.
Am I looking forward to a break from recording? Yep!
Do I think this challenge was worth it? Absolutely.
I almost forgot to mention, my goal for 2024 is 30,000 downloads.
That’s a big jump I know, but I also know that doing more of what works, is the good way to get to where I want to go.
Now its over to you.
What have you done that works, that you could upsize and do more of too?