Do you believe in yourself?????

Snap Out Of That Slump!


To help you snap out of a slump and get your year back on track, if it's been off base a little or the practice is in a slump, try some of the following ideas:

1. Reconnect to your plan. Review your goals and either recommit to the action plan you set for yourself at the beginning of the year – or create a new one! One client recalculates his plan after every month he doesn’t hit his quota, to ensure his quota for the next month includes both what he was supposed to do PLUS whatever he missed last month. This helps him redefine his actions and gain clarity on exactly how many calls he needs to make, meetings he needs to secure and business he needs to close to get back on track. If you had a really bad month, you could perhaps work your underage into the next 2-3 months to make it more attainable.

2. Get to work earlier. Yes, I know, you’re already screaming at me: “Dr. Carney, I need balance!” Not while you’re in a slump, you don’t. Right now, you’re behind, and you need to do something about it and you need to do something now. Only the mediocre doctors use balance as their battle cry during a slump. So suck it up for this short period, and save the balance until you’re back on top.

3. Change your environment. This could be as simple as de-cluttering your office. Mine gets cluttered rather easily. It’s impossible to feel fresh and excited about what you do if you can’t see your desk. A chaotic work environment will make you depressed to be there, and if you’re depressed to be at work, you won’t snap out of your slump. Clean up on schedule. If that is weekly or even daily, Do It.

4. Follow a leader. Trail the best sales person you know on their calls for a day. See what they’re doing differently than you, and how you can incorporate those ideas in your business. Note that this doesn’t have to be someone from the office. You can learn a lot from watching sales people in other industries, too.

5. Prove that money can buy a little happiness. Buy something you can’t afford. This is radical, I know, and not many of you will like this idea or think it’s responsible of me to suggest it. But it works better for me than any other “counter slump maneuver” I know of, so I felt it wouldn’t be right not to at least share the possibility with you.

Of course, I don’t mean racking up all your credit cards to the limit buying gold toilets, and then spending the next twenty years paying them off at 21% interest. What I mean – and what you could do – is book a first-class trip for 6 months from now. Then, I have to make more sales to earn the money to go. Or book a training class 9 months from now, and again you’ll be motivated to sell more in order to pay for it. I don’t know about you, but for me, the “coming into work early” and all the other hard tasks on this list get a whole lot easier to embrace when I know that I have a trip to Hawaii coming up in a few months, which I really don’t want to cancel and what you'll find is your planning and you have a goal and you have to become part of that goal by making it happen.

Having a slump is not the end of the world, so long as it’s short, temporary and you know what to do about it. Know what motivates you. This is key. Yeah it's 6 AM here now, but I'm focused on writing this. When I woke up this morning I decided my goal right now is to have one hundred of these blogs written asap, and I'll do that by doing a blog at least three times a day, and really more like 4 or 5 of these a day. That way I get it done, so all my friends and chiropractic colleagues can be helped by this blog. Be disciplined – it’s the one thing that separates the best from the mediocre – and stay focused on those marketing activities that you know will pull you out of the slump. And remember to keep it all in perspective. Marketing is marketing. If you're doing something in the marketing field every day you're going to come out of your slump very rapidly.

You are responsible for your slump, and only you can change it. If you didn't know that about your marketing, read that last sentence again. But you can change it, by changing your marketing, and your daily approach, and once you accept the fact that you can reverse your fortune, you’ll already be on the road to recovery.

Believe in yourself. I know you can do it.