Tips on making New Goals in the New Year


 

Do you know how to make personal and professional goals that motivate and drive you to make important changes?  Every New Year, millions of people set goals for themselves that are unrealistic and impossible to achieve.  And once those goals have failed, they decide to wait until next year to give it another try.  However, if these individuals only understood how to make goals that were practical with a plan to follow, then they most likely would have accomplished their goals.

Dental professionals everywhere are taking stock of their own aspirations and establishing personal and professional goals for the New Year.  Perhaps this year you want to focus on improving customer satisfaction or increased marketability of the practice. Whatever your professional goals are, it is important that you understand what it is that you hope to achieve from reaching your goals.  Once you have that answer, you can begin to build an outline of steps that can help you attain those goals.

If your goal is to boost your practice's customer base - ask yourself "what is a realistic increase in new customers that I can measure my success by?"  You may decide that it could be a 5% or even 50% increase in customer numbers that is your goal.  Now that you have a specific result you want to see, it is time to establish a deadline date.  The date could be a few months or several years - you determine what timeline makes sense for your unique goal. 

The next step is to create an outline of the actions needed in order to reach your goal.  Your outline is basically a breakdown of the main goals into smaller, more manageable mini-goals.  Each of these mini-goals, or steps, can have deadlines as well.  The purpose of the outline is to keep you on track.

Using the goal example above, your first step may be to come up with five new marketing strategies to reach potential customers for your dental practice.  Ask yourself: what is my budget and resources available to complete this step?  When do I want to implement these new strategies and for how long?  The point is to ask yourself the questions that will further clarify the mini-goal.

Use this same procedure for each additional step you create in your goal outline.  Most people make the mistake of saying "I want more customers in this year," with no further thought of why, when and how they plan to reach this goal.  They do not take advantage of the benefit of creating an action plan to guide and motivate them; consequently, they never achieve their goals. 

The New Year is here and is a blank slate for the goals you want to achieve.  You can reach the goals you've always had for your dental practice - it just takes a little imagination and a lot of planning. 

Happy goal-setting in the New Year!
Written by Cathy Warschaw, Director