3: HOW TO ACHIEVE UNBALANCE

Welcome to DSO Secrets. I know what it's like to be

an entrepreneur in the dental industry.

I've had my ups and downs, just like you. There's so much opportunity to be excited about, but so few resources to get answers. From here on DSO Secrets, we get you those answers so you can change the lives you're meant to bless and achieve your personal success.

When I was working as an associate rat at a school, I never imagined I could own these many practices with this amount of support. So thank you.

You have helped build my marketing mind

to a whole new level. You have this natural talent, this unique ability.

Hello, everyone. This is your fearless host, Emmett Scott. And I'm glad to have you here for another episode of DSO Secrets. Now, today's episode, I think is going to be one of my favorite subjects to discuss, maybe because the discovery of this secret, of this concept took so much effort and work and life experience on my part. And this is something that not only applies to the dental industry and building your dental support organization, but really you can apply to most any business model and to other areas of your life. And it's an area that or it's a discussion point that I think anyone who is married or has a significant other has dug into this discussion. And sometimes it can get really heated and controversial internally. You're always digging in and saying, okay, is there a way that I could be doing this better? And it's really under this topic of finding balance in your life that is the most common phraseology, I'll call it, around this concept that I think we attack completely wrong. And I only say that because I have attacked it from so many angles with so little success for many years, until I found a totally different approach that allowed me to get everything that I wanted. Now, to set this up, I think it's worth maybe telling you a little bit about myself and my experiences, not because yours will perfectly align, but there will be some similarities and you'll find some, I don't know, metaphor, if you will, towards how to utilize this principle in your life as you're trying to achieve greater and greater levels of success. I graduated in accounting, which for anyone who knows me, does not align well with my personality. But I heard that it was the language of business. And after one internship of doing taxes, I knew that I was done with that. I did have the choice as I was graduating, kind of two career paths. One was kind of the sure thing in a large accounting firm called Arthur Andersen. And the other was much more treacherous entrepreneur business, which was to go into financial planning and I took the more treacherous path. Now, a year or so later, Arthur Andersen was gone. But I started into financial planning firm which was really my first entrepreneurial endeavor and quickly found out that it was about selling mutual funds and insurance. And, and it really got me into what do, what do I need to do to do what's best for the customer. So there was a lot of good learning from that. But anyone who comes right out of school into the workforce, which, which most people do realize, and I was married and had kids quickly and so the pressure of that man, I was all in trying to do the best I could with my business. Well, I ended up selling that business, another financial planning firm that was more around financial planning and selling plans and ended up working with a lot of business owners, which was so perfect for me in my life because I realized one, I was a business owner and interfacing with all these entrepreneurs. They were all solving for their business and then as soon as that got any level of traction, they were trying to solve for time or this concept of balance. I eventually sold that, that financial planning firm and went into consulting entrepreneurs on how they move from a hub and spoke entrepreneur type system to an executive team structure to give them leverage. Now at this point, I'm learning tactical things and consulting on tactical things around business. I really, I didn't understand some of the core things on a personal level, but I understood them on a business level. And I started a radio show called the Entrepreneur Life and we talked about how do you solve for entrepreneurship and everything we're trying to achieve in that passion for success and contribution to the world. And that's when Dr. Evans and I, who have been friends since we were two, kind of rejoined together and started helping him build his first practices and then built out a dental support organization. Now, something else you have to know as I get into this principle is that a Mormon, which, if you know anything about that church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, it has a couple of attributes that there may be important for this podcast thing. There's no paid ministry, so members do all the responsibilities on a volunteer basis. And in the past, you know, just to give you an idea of some responsibilities I've had, one was to teach a Bible study class every morning at 5:50am for the high school students. They go for four years that they're in high school. And I did that for three and a half years preparing a lesson, getting up. I did this while we were building out our dso and I've done other Responsibilities like that along the way. My wife has responsibilities. It's basically like having a part time job. I mentioned I had kids early on. I have five kids and we don't like to do anything easy. So we're homeschooling all of our kids except for our oldest who at 15 decided he wanted to start going to community college. But here's the point to all this. It wasn't whether you judge whether I'm doing as good or insane or whatever else. The point is that all of us are super busy and we have multiple things going on in our life that we're trying to accomplish something in the community, maybe something spiritual and definitely something in the business and professional world. Contributing to our patients, contributing to customers, whatever that that means. And oftentimes we hear from people as we really get into our passion. Is your problem, Excuse me, is balance that you need to get more balance in your life? Here's the problem I found with balance. As soon as you go to try to attack that from a place of I need to find more balance in my life, your first step is to cut back on the area that you're most passionate about. In other words, if you feel that your work life is taking up too much of your time, you're not getting to your family, etc. What do you do when you try to find balance? You start cutting back at work. And the hope there is that somehow magically these other things that you kind of know are important, like family, etc. Health will just kind of seep in and overtake this area where you were really passionate. But now you've cut back your time. Here's the thing that I found, it doesn't work. I've tried it a thousand times. And finding balance through this approach doesn't work because inevitably I start going working out every morning. And then I'm like, this is boring. I try to spend time with my family and I'm thinking about work. Of course, when I was at work then I was feeling guilty that I wasn't spending more time in my family. So with my family. So what is the formula that works better? And it's subtle difference, but it makes a huge difference on outcome. Number one, gain a bigger vision of success. Define your success more dynamically. Now, inherently, many of you may already do that. You say, yeah, I want to have a successful marriage, I want to have a successful family, Yes, I want to be healthy. But we'll talk about kind of taking that to the next level. But for those who don't get that clearly defined, how are you going to measure success? I will tell you, it is a slippery and treacherous slope to define success only on your business and your profession. Because the world has a way that at times, just serendipitously, things aren't going to work out. I mean, many of you have seen that meme on Facebook on how people think success happens and it's a straight line up and to the right. And then how does success really happen? It's a squiggly line that goes everywhere and, and finally ends at the end result. If you put too much of your emphasis and your success and your ego within the financial framework of a business, that's going to get ripped out from under you at times. And you've got to have other places that are your foundation. So number one is you've got to define your success bigger. Now let me drive this home from a personal experience. About eight years into our marriage and me full entrepreneurship, my wife's like, this isn't working for me. We need help. I go to a counselor and the counselor says something that impacted me dramatically because I still remember it many, many years later. And she says, all right, Emmett, you're going in every day and getting these kudos from work. Various ways that you get those kudos and those pats on the back and define, you know, success and milestones that way says, how is your 4 year old going to compete with that? And in that moment, I realized that my approach to just balancing, right, just hoping that if I cut back here, somehow magically over here would fill in that gap for me, wasn't going to work. So here's the real key is you've got to use the same formula that you use to develop your passion around your profession into these other areas of your life. For example, if marriage is important for you, well, let me step back for me, my formula. So you got to define your formula for me. My formula always starts with learning. I end up buying a bunch of books on Amazon and reading through them. In fact, they say if you'll read 12 books on a subject, you are an expert, you're in the top 5%. So it doesn't take a lot. I went on Goodreads a year or so ago and wrote down all the books that I had read around business and finance, etc. Marketing. And it was 120 books. So I knew that that was my formula. And I listened to podcasts, I get mentors, you know, I've paid. I've had times in my life where I'm paying 50, 75,000 a year for coaching and mentoring. I know what works for me that drives success. Then I looked at these other areas of my life that I was saying, yeah, I want to be successful in. And I wasn't applying that same formula, that same passion. I wasn't reading books around how to have a good marriage or how to connect better with your spouse. I wasn't listening to podcasts on that subject matter or on parenting or on health. And as soon as I started applying that formula, then it wasn't about balance anymore because frankly my life is completely unbalanced. Not trying to do a little bit of everything. There's certain things that my mission on this earth is for and there's a bunch of other crap I'm not supposed to focus on. So it's not about having a balanced life. If anything, it's about having an unbalanced life that's really focused in the areas that you're meant to be studying, learning and contributing towards. And it doesn't matter what your profession is. Of course here we're talking about the dental industry and the impact that we can have on patients lives. So we want to be the best we possibly can at that. But we want to define our success even bigger as well. And we want to capture whatever those might be recreation and hobby wise and we want to give it our all. See, balance is about doing, you know, don't do more than X number of hours every day. Passion, purpose. Those would be the two things that I would use to replace finding balance. Passion and purpose can make you think about it all the time. Wake up early. You know, the other day I was so excited about something I'm studying. I got up at 3:30am okay, there's nothing balanced about that. It's definitely passion and purpose. I have a better relationship with my family than ever. We were out building a chicken coop. We live on 25 acres. Building chicken coop together. I've been studying about chickens health wise. I've been studying about ketogenic diets for the last year and my health has never been better. So applying that formula, find those areas that you say I have to have more of a. I need to have more family in my life. I need to have more business in my life. Maybe I'm just, I'm not good at this marketing thing. I need to find a passion around that and really study that. I'm not good at this team thing. You know, it drives me nuts that team members aren't perfect and it's hard to hire competent people, whatever excuse on why you're, you know, not building out your team might be start studying that. What is it that you have to learn to get to the next level to be a better leader? So that's my thoughts. I hope this is maybe a little bit of a mind change as you start on your journey or trying to get to that next level and you define success big enough to encompass everything. I believe. I believe it can be everything that you want, but it doesn't need to be everything everyone else wants. It needs to be what your purpose and your passions are. Dig into those and then delegate everything else. Build a team. But you got to start with expanded vision of success. So this is the DSO Secret for leaders of of all kinds. Hopefully this will be a good thought provoking one for you. Give me your thoughts at Facebook so Secrets and thanks for listening. And until next time, keep smiling.

Thank you for listening to DSO Secrets. Join our community on Facebook @DSO Secrets and get answers and resources to some of your most challenging questions. If you want to get a copy of the seven secrets of any dso, go to our website at DSO

and

we will get that emailed to you. Remember, don't go at this alone. Let us be your team while you build your team.