In this episode of the Practice Profit System podcast, host Matthew Gillogly explains what he calls the "science of transformational success," drawing on concepts from the book Liminal Thinking. He outlines a pyramid model where experiences form the base that shape needs, assumptions, conclusions, and ultimately beliefs. Gillogly argues that to change limiting beliefs—especially for cash‑based medical practice owners stuck in insurance‑driven mindsets—one must first change their experiences. He illustrates this with a personal story from his college days at Rochester Institute of Technology, where a four‑hour immersion in the world of deaf students dramatically altered his assumptions and beliefs about that community. Translating that lesson to business, he notes that many practitioners have narrow, negative experiences (e.g., dealing with insurance, low cash‑based sales) that reinforce beliefs that high‑profit cash practices are impossible. His solution is to create new, positive experiences: sell the first ten services quickly, join mastermind or group coaching programs, and consume business‑growth content. He promotes his own resources—the book The Anatomy of a 7‑Figure Medical Practice and the Business Mastery Fellowship—as vehicles for expanding experiences and thereby transforming beliefs. The episode ends with a call to action to join the fellowship, listen to more podcasts, and apply the experiential approach to achieve 7‑figure success.
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Hey everyone, it is Matthew Gillogly with the Practice Profit System, and we're back with more of your favorite podcast and how to scale up your cash-based practice, be it med spa, medical practice, whatever it is, we're here to share with you. So today what we're going to be talking about is I'm going to talk to you about the science of transformational success. Now, what in the world is the science of transformational success? Now, before I go any further, I think it's always important for me to give credit where credit is due. I'm about ready to share some of the teachings that I've learned from a book called Liminal Thinking. I highly recommend you get it. It's a very easy read, Liminal Thinking. But this is where we're going to start today because it has a lot of application as to why you're not getting the transformational success, or you might struggle to get the transformational success that you so desire. So what is this concept of transformational success? Well, in the book Liminal Thinking, they talk about the concept of Beliefs. All right, now we've all heard about belief systems, right? If you want to change your future, you change your beliefs. But what makes it so difficult to change your beliefs? Well, it's difficult to change your beliefs because your beliefs are rooted in the foundation of your experiences. Okay, so I want to say that again. The reason why it's hard to change your beliefs is because your beliefs are rooted in the foundation of your experiences, of what you observe. When you go to the book in Liminal Thinking, they actually have this little pyramid. I'll lay it out for you visually here. I'm not going to draw it out, but at the base of all of this is your experiences. And then what happens after that is what is your needs, then on top of that, what are your assumptions, and then on top of that, what are your conclusions, and then that creates your beliefs. And what happens is that beliefs create this cone of beliefs, if you will, all right? Now, think about this from a political standpoint, right? You know, really, on a lot of times, if you look at a moderate Democrat and a moderate Republican, they're pretty similar in a lot of the same ways, but their belief systems make it difficult for them to hear what the other side is saying. Or if you think about it in terms of religion, or sports teams, or whatever, right? There's always something that in that belief system, we create this cone, or this bubble of beliefs, okay? So, what has this got to do with your success? Well, in order for you to change your beliefs, you actually have to change your experiences. You cannot change your belief system unless you change your experiences. It's why the whole concept of, if you want to be a millionaire, hang out with 5 people that are multimillionaires, because your experiences of how they think, how they believe, how they act, how they treat their day, is going to be dramatically different And it's going to change your belief systems, okay? So, I want to tell you a quick story about this, about how I came to this. So, back in the mid-'80s, when I went to college, I originally went to school for photography to a place called Rochester Institute of Technology. And at that school, they had a National Technical Institute for the Deaf. It was known as the NITD. NID school is that— that was the acronym. Now, NID was quite frankly a little bit derogatory, if I'm going to be very frank, okay? I'm gonna be very open with you. I'm gonna share something. So please understand that this is in the context of me being a 17, 18-year-old white kid from the suburbs going to upstate New York to go to this school, who really didn't have a whole lot of other experiences other than hanging out with kids that were like him. Okay? So we go to this— I go to this school and I join a fraternity. And our fraternity house used to look out on what was known as the NID building. Okay? And this was a 12-story building that was their dorm building. Now, here's what's interesting about people that can't hear, and I never thought about this, is when the phone rings, and this was back in the day when we had landlines, when the phone rings, you can't hear the phone ring. So what happens? A strobe flashes. If somebody rings the doorbell, you can't hear the doorbell. So what do you have? A strobe flashes. If the fire alarm goes off, it may be loud. They can feel sound if it gets really, really loud. But mostly it flashes. It's a really high-level strobe. And so there were these different levels of strobes and all of that. And so we used to call this building the Christmas tree because people would go over on a dare and they would pull the fire alarm and the building would blink off and on like a Christmas tree. I know this is horrible.
I get it.
All right. And so you'd walk around campus and there was a pretty large contingent of these students that were deaf and they were always speaking sign language and they were very demonstrative and You're always like, what the heck? Right? So, be as it may, we had a party one night at the fraternity, and some kid got drunk and passed out. Not a kid that was in the NID program. Some kid got drunk and passed out. And as we do in fraternity houses— apparently not supposed to do this— we duct taped him to the couch and drew on him with magic marker and locked him on the balcony. That got us in a lot of trouble. Apparently you're not supposed to do that. If you're listening to that, if you were the person that we did that to, I am so sorry. And I do apologize for my actions in 1985. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have done it. Well, technically I wasn't involved. Somebody else in fraternity did. Anyway, we had to go on probation. And so being the outgoing, gregarious person that I am, I was put on the public relations committee. And so we got the idea that we should do something with this list of things. And one of the things we could do is we could do— A function with the deaf people, right? So what we did is they have these things called white noise maskers, and you literally stick them in your ears and you can't hear a thing, okay? Literally, you cannot hear a thing. You have a hard time hearing yourself talk. It's that difficult. And so the white noise maskers really— it creates this buzz of white noise and you are deaf. And so we did a bowling tournament with a fraternity, a deaf fraternity, and it was awesome.
Right?
We had a great time. And then they invited us back to the fraternity house, and we had a mixer with their fraternity and their sorority, and we had a great time. Their music was really, really loud. It was really bassy because, like, that's how they listen to their music, right? It's like, boom, boom, boom, boom. It's like, wow, this is a great time. And they love to do all the things that we love to do, okay? And so from that point on, anytime somebody else in one of the other fraternities or sororities would be kind of derogatory Or, you know, speaking out against this group of people, our fraternity started standing up for them, and we were kind of the bad boy fraternity, right? Now, what has this got to do with the science of transformational success? You see, my belief systems about people that are deaf, that have— that are hearing impaired, changed dramatically when I did 4 hours of what it's like to be deaf. I can't even explain to you how big that transformation was. And that lesson has always sat with me, okay? And what happened, if you think about this in the context of what I shared with you at the beginning, in liminal thinking, is my experiences changed my needs, because I had to find a different way to communicate. It changed my assumptions about people that were deaf. I found that these people who were hearing impaired to be incredibly brilliant. They had brilliant ideas. They had really cool things that they were doing, right? They had a different set of skills developed. And my conclusions, which led to my belief and those of my fraternity brothers, changed dramatically. We had a great time. Now, what has this got to do with your business? It has everything to do with your business, especially if you are coming from the insurance area, okay? So, let's take a look at this from the context of insurance-based business. For medical practice owners. Your experiences are, is that insurance companies suck, medicine starts to suck, you get paid last, you can't get paid premium rates, all of these things. So your needs change, you lower your needs of what you need to live. Your assumptions about people or medicine or money probably changes. You come to different conclusions that, well, nobody will pay any money for this because people are always in my office complaining about how expensive their copay is. And that changes your beliefs that you may have the desire, right? You may have this desire to start a cash-based practice, but your beliefs are, my people don't have the money, they're not willing to pay for it, they're too far gone, right? Because your experience is, is that you've never sold somebody into a cash-based procedure. It is why the biggest challenge I have as a coach isn't the client who is already doing $50,000 a month. They're actually pretty easy to work with for me because really at that point we just need to tighten up some things with regards to streamlines and systems and beachheads and, and our processes so that we can accelerate, so we can become scalable. The challenge is, is the one who is starting from either scratch or they've been struggling at like $10,000 to $15,000 a month for the last 6 They just don't believe it can happen, whereas right down the street, there's probably somebody right down the street who's doing $150,000 a month. What I have to do is I have to change their experiences. It's why, if you are starting up, the biggest thing you have to do is just sell one. You just gotta sell one. That's all you do. Then you sell 2, then you sell 3, then you get to 5, then you get to 10. That's right. Then you get to 6, 7, 8. Once I can get you to 10 sales, 10 sales is the magic number, okay? Once I get you to 10 sales, and hopefully that 10 sales is in a 2-month period, your belief system transforms that you can do this because your experiences have told you that it's possible. Now think about this. A lot of gurus out there talk to you, you gotta change your belief system. You gotta just believe it's gonna happen. Well, why doesn't it happen? Because your experiences haven't transformed. Right now, most likely, as a physician or a med practice owner or nurse practitioner or whatever, your experiences in running a business are very, very narrow. And so you've got this very narrow experience level, right? And if you've got a narrow experience level at the bottom of the pyramid, the top of the pyramid, your beliefs are going to be even smaller. You can expand your experiences. At the bottom, your belief systems change. You have a broader belief system. Okay? Somebody who grows up in a small mountainous village has a dramatically different belief system than somebody who grows up, who has moved up, moved around all around the world, because their experiences are varied.
Okay?
So what do you do? So how do you, how does this become than the science of transformational success. So what you have to do is you have to transform your experiences. If you want to grow and start a practice, you need to have experiences of being around other people who have the same desires. You need to be in a group. It's one of the reasons why I run a mastermind group. There's a reason why I run monthly group coaching. I don't want you to be in a vacuum. I want you to be in a group of other people who have the same desires. Think about this. If you want to learn how to do something in medicine, you go hang out with a bunch of other people and you expand your experiences and it changes your beliefs. I want you to do that with business. In fact, unless you do that from a business standpoint, your business will not grow. I know this because I've coached 4,500 people across this great globe of ours, and I've been doing this for 20+ years. And a lot of those people I've coached one-on-one, okay? So the science of transformational success begins with your experiences. If you want to make this work, then become a student of business success, okay? Read great books, sign up for great— listen to a podcast like this, Listen to business podcasts. Join join our group coaching program, Business Mastery Fellowship. It's designed specifically for this. Okay, so that's it. That's the science of transformational success. It's not about changing your beliefs, but it's about changing your experiences. Expand your experiences to change those beliefs. All right, that's it for this week. Have a wonderful, wonderful week. Go out there, crush it. Stay focused on your goals, get around other people that are gonna expand your experiences, and hopefully maybe we'll see you in Business Mastery Fellowship. There'll be some information coming out on it very soon. We'll be launching another group here in the fall. All right, have a great day everybody. This is Matt with the Practice Profit System. We will talk to you soon.
Thank you so much for listening. If you liked this episode, take a moment and share it with your fellow medical professionals. Or post a positive comment and rate it on wherever you just listened. Now don't forget, you can get a copy of my book, The Anatomy of a 7-Figure Medical Practice, for free. Just pay $7.95 in shipping and handling, plus you'll get over $1,197 in free bonus material. Simply go to srpmedicalmarketing.com/book. That's srpmedicalmarketing.com/book. Thank you so much, and we'll see you next week.
