Every doctor client I’ve worked with first came to me with one objective: to help them find more leverage outside their practices.
And maybe you’ve toyed with many of the same goals: You want to work less hours, see fewer patients – or at the very least choose the types of patients you work with. You want to spend more time with your family — and not be solely tied to hours for dollars.
And while we have plenty of proven strategies and tools to help you achieve those goals, there are typically just as many unexamined beliefs that can prevent even the most motivated doctor from achieving their most cherished goals.
I’ve identified three especially pernicious mind traps that have plagued the lives and careers of even my most brilliant and successful doctor clients.
1. The Altruism Mind Trap
2. The God and Family Mind Trap
3. The Harvard Mind Trap
1. The Altruism Mind Trap
I’ve seen this one sabotage projects time and time again. A client has built a stellar Authority Platform, has successfully created a product, and is ready to price and launch his new information product.
I suggest — based on data and experience — that the product’s actual and perceived value exceeds several hundred dollars.
And the client balks.
“What if my readers can’t afford that?” the doctor will ask.
“What if people think I’m selling out, that I’m just in it to make money?”
And as gently as I can, I’ll attempt to coach them through these treacherous narrows. In my view, “people” find ways to “afford” what they really want. When faced with a purchase that can genuinely benefit their lives, even those with the tightest of budgets often discover they have discretionary expenses (daily Starbucks lattes?) and they may forgo that purchase and choose your product instead.
I’ve seen products easily worth $200 or more sell for $47 because “that’s the right thing to do.” Actually, it’s not always the right thing to do: not if that product has more inherent value to your buyers; not if you have to continue seeing patients ten hours a day while your family continues to miss you, not if that choice leaves you little time to create content or additional products to build your business.
2. The God and Family Mind Trap
Many of us spent our childhoods learning that God — or mom and dad, or granddad — didn’t approve when we were greedy. Or too prideful. Maybe we learned that we must struggle, we must prostate ourselves to spiritual pursuit and humility, and turn the other cheek to the pursuit of money. The list can get quite long, depending on the flavor of faith.
I like to share one story when faced with this mind trap; loosely recalled from a speech I heard from new age guru Marianne Williamson many years ago.
She tells of her father driving the family sedan through the “poor part of town,” and young Marianne being taken with the plight of those less fortunate than her family. She decided then and there to dedicate herself to serving the poor by turning her back on money and living among them as one of them: Because it’s what God would want. Because it was the right thing to do.
After a few years in college dressing in hand-me-downs and being “one with the poor,” something dawned on young Marianne, and I paraphrase; “I discovered that I couldn’t help others by being as poor as they were. It actually required money to help people, lots of money.”
Frame this mind trap in any way you want. I have fabulously fortunate clients who’ve established foundations with their wealth. The choices are endless.
Nothing, however shuts down choice faster than throttling your dreams and goals with what you believe someone else may or may not think of your ambition.
3. The Harvard Mind Trap
I affectionately call this the Harvard Mind Trap in honor of one of my clients who landed a huge book deal, and promptly scheduled a call with me to share how conflicted and guilty he felt about it.
I came to find out that an article had appeared that very morning in the paper about his book deal, and my client was embarrassed his success was so public. He was seriously considering turning down the sizable publishing offer.
I listened as my conflicted client spoke of his colleagues: many of whom had never published a book, and especially his earliest mentor as a young student. His professor had leading-edge research published the world over, but had never had an agent, let alone a book published.
I asked my client about his manuscript, about his work over the decades, building on the earlier work of his mentor: did he feel his work had value and merit? He did.
I then asked him if his book honors his mentor by name? Indeed it did.
In the end, he agreed to accept the publisher’s offer — as long as he could establish a scholarship in his mentor’s name at his alma mater for promising students of the sciences.
When it comes to this Mind Trap, any institution of higher ed will do, this Trap is more about a cultural expectation that brilliant intellectuals – very much like artists – should never have to pander for support in the marketplace, or sell their work to the “highest bidder.” And if they have, they’ve somehow sold out.
Instead, their work should be sought after, they should be placed on lifetime retainer by Harvard, and write books and develop breakthroughs within the protected, safe bubble of the University system. Others will perform all that icky marketing and selling stuff to the silly, distracted, and largely stupid masses.
In other words, the bottom line with this Mind Trap is that common marketing should never taint genuine intellectual product. True brilliance will sell itself. I can only ask: How many great and promising ideas have never seen the light of day, or reached their potential to help others because the author was too proud to seek that wider audience?
In response to this mind trap, I’ll add one more thought: If you honestly believe your work can and will benefit others, even change their lives; and if others — agents, publishers, customers — honestly agree with you that your work has value in the marketplace, who are you to hold that work back?
How About You?
Have you encountered any of these Mind Traps? If so, the first and most powerful deterrent is awareness.
If you have dreams of achieving the kind of leverage you’ve seen many of your peers achieve, accept that this often comes with a price: The price of letting go of some of our often most stubbornly held limiting belief systems.
Find a trusted advisor, or a mastermind group of people with similar goals and ambitions, or those with whom you can talk through any challenges you may be having with any of the many ways we can sabotage our own success.
I’ve found one of the most helpful levers can be returning to your original goals, and remembering why you started your business in the first place. When talking with one client trapped in the quicksand of one Mind Trap, I asked him to recall the reason he first gave me for developing his online business in the first place.
“I wanted to spend more time with my baby daughter,” he replied, softly.
Sometimes, that’s all it takes.
Over to you: What “mind traps” have you experienced — in yourself or in others? Please let us know in the comments, below.
Keith Dear,
I believe you’ve hit the nail on the head. When I practiced with my mentor, I recall being impressed by how generous he was with the charity work he did, and the foundation he ran. And of course, you have to make money to give money away.
I thought of him after reading your piece: and how knowing that, when it’s come to my own business and pricing my information products, I’ve struggled to attach a meaningful value to my own work – judging it far more harshly than any of my readers most likely ever would. Thanks for the thoughtful reminder.
Hello Dr. Iala,
Thanks for your comment, good to hear from you.
Knowing the great work of your mentor — the kids he’s sent through school, for example — I can’t help but think of how clear he’s been when pricing his own products — he certainly doesn’t seem reticent about attaching a meaningful value to them, at all. I think he’s a great example.
Thanks for reading!
Keith
Keith,
I’ve made an observation over the years I wonder if you share? It seems to me that many of my MD peers have fewer challenges with money and value exchange than do my more “alternative” natural peers. It’s the Naturopaths and Acupuncturists I’ve known who’ve really struggled the most with valuing their services and products. Thoughts?
Thanks,
Mark
Hello Mark,
You may be on to something, and yes, this is clearly anecdotal: among my own clients over the past few decades, I’ve noticed the “alternative or natural” physicians as you call them do seem to experience more frequent challenges with valuing their own work than do the MDs. Not sure why this is — probably a cultural thing — there must be some study out there someone’s done on this.
Thanks for reading, Mark.
Keith
Hi Keith. Great work as always from you. Personally I think I have a combination of the first two mind traps. But I think there is a fourth one. This is the one where you never believe you know enough. You are always searching for more information – to “know it” before really commiting. For me this combined with the first two is a death trap. People pay me money for my advice and if it doesn’t work – I feel responsible and like I operated under false pretences – despite the fact that often there is a lot of other reasons for them not making progress. Thanks again for your excellent insights.
Hi Susan,
Wow, you’ve nailed a big one: The “never ready” syndrome. I do think more people suffer from this than we may be aware of, and from my experience with client work I think the difference between those who let this slow them down and those who don’t is the second group’s willingness to feel that sense of needing to “know more” and still march forward confidently anyway.
Let me ask you: Do you think that nagging sense you can never know enough may be part of comparing one’s self to others? If we look hard enough, we are always going to find people who know so much more than we do, and if all we do is compare our selves/skills to them, we’d never get anywhere. I had one early client who was blissfully unaware of how little she really knew. And with that, she confidently marched forward, developed courses and live workshops and charged hefty fees for them all, and was very successful. Wouldn’t that be great?
Maybe one answer is to remember that any any point along our journey, there are always more than enough folks who are a few steps behind us, and focus our services, our writing, and our products on them. And anytime we find ourselves drifting off to thinking about those five steps ahead of us, snap back to the people we serve.
Thanks for reading and your comments, Susan.
Keith
I’m SO GLAD that Susan brought up this topic…it’s a deep one for me as well. In fact, I could sign my name to her message! The feeling that if we can’t provide ‘a guaranteed result’ to our clients, then we must be somehow inadequate.
As someone who came to the healing professions as a midlife career change, from a field far away from the sciences, I find myself feeling like I’m ‘behind’ and ‘scrambling to catch up’ with those who’ve been at this for some time.
With that said, I’m sure that I also have other skills from my previous career, in which I enjoyed a good measure of success, that I can somehow use here. But I’m definitely struggling to overcome a sense of inadequacy, of being behind. And yes, I can see that the work here is ‘inner’!
Thanks for bringing this conversation to us, Keith. It’s an important one.
Interesting this subject came up again for me. I looked at CCFM fees and thought wow! How come the fees in Alberta Canada for naturopaths are much lower ($250/hour CAN)? And then I start comparing my fees for the chiropractic services I provide and thinking about what should I charge when I start adding/integrating functional medicine into my practice with less experience in this area than Chris or the naturopaths in my area. Internal conflict? You bet. I’ll figure it out in due time.
Dr Collins,
Great point you make: I had a client several years ago who insisted every time we talked about his practice fees that what he charged was “all the local market could bear,” even though he brought to his practice several additional healing modalities over others in the area.
During one of our sessions, my client reported that a new practitioner to his area had opened a practice and was charging double his rates, and had filled his practice within the first year. He was mystified at this. So I encouraged him to ask this doc out to lunch to chat about his practice.
Turns out, this other practitioner was very willing to talk about his fees and how he built his practice — turns out those were the fees he charged at his previous location, and he just brought those rates with him to this new town – he never even considered charging less. With that encouragement, my client increased his fees — although still not as high as this other doctor.
I do think the issue of what to charge for our time or our products may be more about our own internal scripts than anything else. This kind of inner work is part of what it is to be an entrepreneur.
As far as the investment you’ve made in CCFM, one of my favorite subjects: investing in our knowledge and our practices. A new book on this topic comes out on January 5 entitled “The Last Safe Investment” by Michael Ellsberg. In this book, he argues that while it used to be true that investing in a home or an IRA were safe long-term investments, that’s no longer always true. Today, “the last safe investment” may be investing in yourself – skills, leadership, marketing ability, etc. I’m looking forward to reading it — I’ll review it on this site once I do.
Thanks for your reading.
Keith