Why setting goals is a load of boll***s, you need to think about this too!

Katie Bell: [00:00:00] Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Treat Your Business Podcast. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Katie Bell, and I’m so glad that you are choosing to tune into me today, because if you’re listening to this live, it is the 1st of January, 2025. And I don’t expect you to be listening to this live because I’m hoping that you are all monging on the sofa, having had a wonderful New Year’s Eve and I’m reflecting on a great Christmas period, a great Christmas break, and you are feeling slightly more rested and recharged than you were a couple of weeks ago.

So if you’re a clinic owner who wants to kick start your year, we have all these great intentions, don’t we, at this time of year, that I’m going to come back with focus, with clarity, I’m not going to stand for anybody’s shit anymore, I’m going to be this bold leader, I’m going to have these difficult conversations, then.

This episode is just for you because today we’re going to be talking about the power of prioritisation. I’m not going [00:01:00] to be talking about setting your January goals and New Year’s resolutions. I’m going to be talking about how you can have a clear priority list that will transform the way you run your clinic because Without that priority list, those goals that you may have set and that vision board you may have created at the end of the year will never come to fruition because you will just get busy being busy.

So before we dive in, I have a little announcement that I’ve been wanting to make for so many weeks, but today is the day. We’re talking about priority lists. If you haven’t already signed up for my priority list for the upcoming book that is launching today, On the 14th of January, just two weeks time, it is called Thriving.

You are going to want to be on this priority list because by being on the priority list, you are going to get access to certain very exciting bonuses. The first thing is [00:02:00] that you will get a 50 percent off the book price, whether that is Kindle or paperback, that is going to be available for you. Don’t panic everybody.

I’m also doing an audio version that is going to release around the same time. So you’re going to get 50 percent off your paperback or your Kindle version. You’re also going to get access to a book in action workshop with me, which is where I’m going to bring the book to life and help you implement The unbelievable amount of stuff that is in there that is going to help you run a thriving clinic.

And there is something else, but I forgot what it is. Oh yes, you’re going to get a digital copy of the book so you can get started straight away, if you want to, as soon as you press order. So if you want to be on the priority list, I would very much love you. Love you forever, and you would make me very happy.

There is a link in the show notes. Finally, it is here. You can go to the link in the show notes, just pop your details in there, and you’ll be added to our priority list, which means you will get First, the first email, the first launch out there of the [00:03:00] book and you’ll be able to get it at 50 percent off.

Anyway I’m going to share a little bit more about the book as the episode goes on, but let’s talk about why prioritisation is so important in your clinic.

Welcome to the Treat Your Business podcast with Katie Bell. I am Katie and this is the place to learn the strategies, tactics, tools and mindset needed.

To build your clinic or studio into a business that gives you the time, money, energy and fulfilment you want and deserve. My team and I work every day with overwhelmed and exhausted clinic owners like you to shift them from a business that is a huge time and energy drain and is not giving them the income they want, to confident clinic owners that are making money, saving money and getting time back in their lives.

So if this sounds like something you want, Let’s dive in. This podcast is sponsored by HMDG, the leading digital marketing agency for clinic owners in the UK.

How often do you feel so overwhelmed by everything on your to do list? I know [00:04:00] for many of us running up to Christmas this feeling was strong and I always smile because the week before Christmas we had two Q& As. We normally have three but we decided because we’ve done this for many years now we know patterns and we know behaviours and I said people are very busy at this time of year they’ve got like Christmas carol concerts you know the joyous activities.

They’ve got the f ing elf on the shelf to wrestle every day. They’ve got every client they’ve ever seen in their whole life to fit in their last week. They’ve got 265 million exercise plans to write. And weirdly, all your staff start to piss you off at this time of year, don’t they? Wow. This is all going on for you all, I know that, and so I said maybe let’s not give them any more pressure, let’s just put two of the Q& As on rather than three in the final week leading up to Christmas, so people can still drop in and ask any questions that they might have, but it’s gonna, it’s gonna be quiet.

Wow. Those Q& As were not quiet. [00:05:00] Because in our head, we’re trying to do all of the shit that we need to do to be able to end on whatever it was, Friday the 20th of December, or maybe Monday the 23rd. We screech to the deadline, we screech to the end, and we want everything ticked off, don’t we?

We want all those things we’ve been meaning to do all year to be ticked off. I get meeting requests, I get podcast requests, I get people sending me shit on the last week of December, and I’m thinking, hun, why have you not thought about this? For the entire of 2024, why do we need to do it now? I had a message from my studio manager in my clinic.

I share this with you because I want you to know that I’m also going through this. I get it. And it said, Hi KB, I hope you’re good. I just need to have a talk about your plans for handing over your classes in 2025 because I’m gonna, I’m gonna come out of teaching. And have you got any time this week?

And a part of me was [00:06:00] like, This week, like when I was reading this email, this was the 19th of December. It’s like that finishing on Friday. And a part of me was like, actually, I could just get on a call, have a chat with her about the plan, and then that’s another thing boxed off. But then I had to stop and was like, is that a priority this week?

If I do something about this week, is there anything then going to be done about it for the next two weeks? No, because people are going to be downtime, off, whatever. So I just said, I actually don’t have any capacity this week to discuss that. So let’s talk about it in the new year. Send me some options.

Give me two or three options that I can choose from, please, to book a meeting with you in your diary. So you’re going to feel overwhelmed by everything on your to do list and you’re going to come back with great intentions. It’s the 1st of January today. You’re going to be thinking about what you want your life and business to look like in 2025, I hope you are, but running a clinic is no small task.

It is hard. You’ve [00:07:00] got patients to see, you’ve got staff to manage, bills to pay, increasing bills to pay. Thank you to the And let’s not even get started on marketing and like business growth and strategy and all these other things that you think you should be doing. And it’s easy to feel like everything is urgent and everything is important, but here’s the truth.

Not everything deserves your attention. Right now. I’m gonna say that again. Not everything deserves your attention right now because you’re the leader of your clinic. You are top dog. You’re the boss and your time is really precious and so sometimes when you don’t respect your own time then nobody else shows any respect of your time because the energy you give is To your time is that of, Oh it doesn’t really matter if we run late or meetings go over or people turn up late to this or whatever it [00:08:00] is and not everything.

deserves that precious time, even though often the other people who’ve got the monkeys that want to pass the monkeys to you, for you to deal with, think that it does deserve your attention right now. And I’ve seen this time and time again, both in my own clinic and in the clinics that we work with. When you try to do everything at once, you end up not doing anything really well.

And so prioritization, discernment, being able to decide what requires my attention now, what are the key things that I need to be focusing on, my time, my energy, so that I can make meaningful progress rather than just feel like spinning your wheels all the time. And there’s a quote that I love, I don’t know how to say his surname, Greg, I couldn’t write Scottish this would be It’s so cross.

McCown. That is totally not how you say it. Anyway, he writes. Author of. He is the author of Essentialism. I talked about this in a podcast a few weeks ago. If you haven’t listened [00:09:00] to it, go back to it. It’s really, great. And he says, if you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will. Wow. And if that isn’t, the truth, then you’re not clear on your priorities and you’ll find yourself saying yes to other people’s demands, to other people’s wants, to other people’s needs, to other people’s priorities, and you never get to the things that move the needle for you.

One of, in fact, our marketing team, TestTube Marketing, they are fabulous people, said on stage when I was watching at something last year, strategy is the art of sacrifice. And so for clinic owners, It might look like that you spending so much time creating your social media content, instead of refining maybe your customer journey, or maybe that you’re jumping from one marketing idea to another with absolutely no clear strategy whatsoever, or you’re not tracking what’s working.

Maybe it’s that you’re focusing on like the urgent admin tasks, like you’re just [00:10:00] firefighting on a day to day basis, rather than neglecting that big picture planning. Maybe that it’s your spending so much of your energy and time dealing with toxic team members or team members who are not on board with.

Your new initiatives your, new priorities, the new ideas that you’ve got within the clinic and when staff are, when you, me and my business manager and KB have a rule, when we start talking about them on a weekly basis in some format. It usually means they’ve got to go. And that sounds a bit like wild, doesn’t it?

But in 10 years of running the clinic now, this has never not happened in that you can talk about it and you can give your energy to it. And I often have to look at all of the things that people bring to me within the clinic and ideas. And we have different departments and different service leads and et cetera.

And. For example, some of [00:11:00] our, departments might be contributing 25 percent of our total revenue to the pot. So therefore they’re, not going to demand more than 25 percent of my time and energy. And if I’ve got a member of staff that might be one of 28, then they’re going to get a 28th of, that energy because You can’t give everything and all of your energy and time to these staff members consistently without making a decision that something needs to change or that you are no longer going to tolerate it.

So if you feel like you’re juggling a million things and You are feeling overwhelmed even at the thought of going back to work because you know that it’s happened before and you know that probably you’ll just go back to being on the hamster wheel and juggling a million plates. You are not alone, my friend, because everybody listening to this will also be feeling the same, but the good news is there’s a way to fix it.

Woohoo! Let’s talk about the solution. [00:12:00] Let’s talk about this priority list. This isn’t your average to do list. A priority list is about Identifying those really key actions that will have the biggest impact on your clinic success. So let me give you some ideas of how to create one. We really encourage our clinic owners to have what we call a later base, which is like a book or a page at the back of their notebook of all of the shit that’s in their mind that they need to brain dump.

Get it out on paper, no filters, no judgements, write it all down. Who needs to get off the bus? Who is pissing you off? What external people have you got working for you that that aren’t actually working for you, that are causing you more hassle than it’s worth? , Thinking about your take home pay, thinking about ideas that you’ve got like building a cabin in the garden and putting an infrared sauna in it.

Like they, these may be great ideas, but we have to [00:13:00] get it all out. Particularly if you are entrepreneurial. If you are driven by creativity and ideas, you’re never short of ideas, but often we have too many and we try and move too many forwards all at once. So ask yourself, once you’ve braindumped, what’s the one thing that will make everything else easier or unnecessary?

And there’s a concept from Gary Keller’s book, The One Thing. I’ve talked about that on the podcast as well before, but it’s about finding your highest leverage activity. So when you brain dump all that stuff on there, it’s okay, this, it soothes your ego because it’s like, Oh, okay.

So you have so many great ideas. Look at you, aren’t you fabulous. But you can then also say, okay, but that’s not a now idea. And often when you strategically plan what it is that you need to do and perhaps not do, when you look back at your later base, Or your list of ideas. You [00:14:00] recognise or you realise that a lot of it has become unnecessary because the directions change.

You’ve had to pivot. You’ve had to go there. Or actually you look at it and think, what was I even thinking when I thought about that idea? It’s about brain dumping. It’s about not taking that action like right now. On, everything that is in your mind. And it’s using the 80 20 rule, focusing on the 20 percent of tasks that will drive 80 percent of your results.

For example, nurturing your current clients might be way more impactful than spending hours chasing new ones. And then about, then think about set clear deadlines. So it’s okay, here is my, page of shit that is all in my head that I need to get out. Part of that will just be soothed by the fact that you’ve written it down.

Your ego will be happy about that. But then you can be like, okay, what one, two, maybe three of those things in the next quarter or year, would move me towards [00:15:00] that ultimate goal, which should be, in my opinion, More take home income or more time, and then everything else follows as a result of that.

Your priority list then has deadlines of okay, this is going to happen here, and then this is going to happen here. And when you have that clear priority list you’ll just feel less overwhelmed, you’ll make faster decisions because you’re not trying to make decisions on everything all at once, and you’ll actually see tangible results in your clinic, which is what we’re all here for.

Prioritization is not just about what you do. It’s also about what you don’t do. And this is where strategic sacrifice has to come in. You might need to let go of things, people, that aren’t serving you, like offering too many services, or holding on to an outdated system that isn’t working for you, or holding on to a person that is pushing your buttons, for want of a better word, or doesn’t [00:16:00] align with where your clinic is moving and where your clinic is going.

And it’s having that attitude that’s of abundance rather than lack, because sometimes we stop ourselves making decisions because of fear of lack. Oh my God, if I get rid of that person, then I’m not going to have this. What about. If we just reverse our psychology and say, if I got rid of that person, it would open the doors up for this new person, these new hours, this new way of payment that would give me more profit in the business dah, And all of those great things. If we focus on that, you’re more likely to make that strategic sacrifice. And I want to just talk about alignment, because one of the biggest mistakes clinic owners make is separating their personal and professional priorities. But I want you to know that your personal life affects your business and vice versa. So for example, if your health is suffering because you work in 60 plus hour weeks, your clinic’s going to suffer too.

If your family life feels chaotic, it’s hard to show up [00:17:00] as a leader. So that’s why I really encourage you on this priority list that you combine like both business and personal goals, like personal priorities. Maybe your top three priorities this quarter are increasing your clinic’s average patient follow up rate to five sessions.

It might be launching a new service like Reforma Pilates class, and it might be that you’re going to spend a minimum of six hours unplugged at the weekend. It needs to be a tangible priority, with a deadline, so that you know when it has been hit. By aligning your priorities, you’ll create a business and a life that supports each other, rather than competes against each other.

Because let me tell you, there’s no winner. If you’re trying to compete business and life, that nobody wins there at all. Now you might just be wondering how this ties into my priority [00:18:00] list, but let me explain. Thriving, my new book, haven’t mentioned it. It’s all about helping clinic owners build a thriving, sustainable business.

Now, when you join the priority list, you’re not just signing up to hear about the book. You’re committing to prioritizing your growth as a clinic owner. It is a, priority. Book packed full of value and it is broken down into using my framework called the clinic success tree. We talk about the roots of the tree, which is the the mindset, the personal performance, that the big shit that we’ve got to get right first of all.

I say it much better than that in the book. The trunk. All about your strategy, your values, your vision, your purpose, like where we’re going, why we’re going there, your growth plan. And then we talk about the branches. I talk about marketing, I talk about sales strategy, I talk about your numbers, I talk about your team, I talk about your operations that will create the fruits of your tree.

Which is time, energy, [00:19:00] money, confidence, fulfillment. You’re going to get access to a 50 percent off book. You’re going to get access to the book in action workshop with me, which is going to bring the book to life and help you implement the concepts we talk about, not only on this podcast, but within the book, and it’s a way to take what you’ve learned here and put it into action because knowledge without action is just a form of entertainment.

And I love to entertain, but I also want you to have. tangible results in your clinic. Let me take a moment to recap. Prioritize because it’s the key to achieving more with less. By creating a priority list, you’re focusing on your highest leverage tasks and aligning your personal and professional goals.

You’ll set yourself up for a year of clarity and success. I really hope today’s episode has been appropriate for the 1st of January. I feel like it is, and I’d love for you to take this next step, which is going to the [00:20:00] link in the show notes below this podcast, wherever you are listening to it and be the first to know when this book launches 14th of January, you’re going to get first access and you’ll get the tools that you need to start prioritizing like an absolute pro.

Thank you so much for listening. And as always, if you found value in this episode, please share it with a fellow clinic owner. I can’t tell you what a difference it makes to our visibility. Please leave me a review. I know that you’re all sat on your sofas doing nothing probably but watching The Holiday or The Grinch or something outrageous like Home Alone.

God, I love that film. So just get your phones out, leave a review, pass it on to somebody that you know. This would help as your gift to them for the new year. And let’s make 2025 your best year yet. Look forward to seeing you again next week.

Thanks so much for listening to this show. Remember content consumption does not make changes, so commit to doing something from today’s episode. Maybe it’s taking action on what we talked about. Well, maybe it’s reaching out to me and learning more about our transformational coaching programs, or if you have not [00:21:00] yet join our free treat your business, Facebook group, a free access to over 30 business masterclasses.

All of that is over at thrive businesscoaching. com or linked in the show notes. And the last favor I will ask. Because social proof is endlessly important, is to leave a rating or review. I would love to know what you think of the show, how the show has been helpful for you, and I can’t wait to chat with you.

This is just the start of our conversation. Reach out so we can keep it going. Talk soon!