Matthew Gallogly says doctors need clear boundaries to manage stress. He takes a 24-hour phone blackout weekly, reserves Friday afternoons off, and takes four-day vacations. He argues cash-based practices give physicians more control than insurance-driven ones.
All right, let's talk about how do you recover from the stress. And that's what I really want to dive into today because the reality is, is while you may think that you are Superman or Superwoman, most people overlook how to process the stress and how to get their body to recover from the stress more so than how to deal with it. Because not only is there a tremendous amount of stress in treating patients, there's a tremendous amount of stress in running your own practice. And having your own business and being an entrepreneur. All right, so how do you deal with stress? Well, remember early on in one of our videos we talked about some things that you can use to manage? This concept is going to be mind-blowing for not only just entrepreneurs but for doctors. Ready? Here it is. I want you to create specific boundaries in your life and your time. When you are an insurance-based practice. When you are a doctor in the insurance machine, you don't really control your time. If you're on call, you don't get to control your time or when they can call you. You work insane number of hours. You have to go do surgeries when they tell you to do surgeries, and then you have to go see patients because you have to see so many patients in order to make so much money. So you don't really have the ability to create any boundaries. When you own your own practice and it's a cash-based service, you can create the boundaries to your time. One of the best lessons I ever learned was about 15 years ago as an entrepreneur, young startup entrepreneur, and I was running and gunning. I was working 12, 14, 16 hours a day. I would work maybe 8 to 10 hours on a Sunday, same thing on a Saturday. I was working all the time, and I hit the place where I completely basically collapsed and thought I was having a heart attack. Like, my chest was bothering me. I think I was like 33 years old at the time, or whatever it was. 35 years old at the time, and I thought I was having a heart attack. And so I went to the urgent care and I walked in, it was like 2 o'clock in the morning. I said, I think I'm having a heart attack. The lady behind the desk looked up at me, she goes, no, you're not, fill this form out. And so I sat in the waiting room for like 20 minutes. I'm like, I'm having a heart attack. And they bring me back, they put the EKG on, and the doctor looks at me and he goes, how much stress are you under? And so the doctor explained to me I needed to create boundaries. It was the first conversation that I ever had about boundaries. So what I did was I started doing something very simple. Hey, I'm Matthew Gallogly, and I'm a Maverick. Well, what is a Maverick? A Maverick goes against the grain. We find our own way. And if you're sick and tired of being pushed around by the insurance companies, come join us. We'll show you the way out, and you'll love medicine again. I scheduled Friday afternoons, For me, I went and got a massage, whatever, took my cell phone, put it in the glove compartment, didn't look at it. Today, what that looks like is I have always, every single week, I have at least a 24-hour period, no cell phone, no email, no texting, nothing. I turn it off, I put it in the glove compartment or I put it in the desk and I don't check it for 24 hours. It gives me 24 hours of what are called free time that allows me to decompress. Second thing is when I go on vacation, if I schedule any type of vacation, it has to be a minimum of 4 days. And the reason why is it takes 3 days to completely detox. Okay? It takes me 3 days to completely unwind. Now, there's a lot of other things that you can do, but you have to create boundaries. You have to have boundaries in place that these are times that I work in the business, around the business. These are times that I'm focused on the other important things in my life, family, faith, whatever it is. Okay, so you have to, in order to deal with the stress, the more stressed out I get, the busier I get, the more free time I schedule for myself. I know that's counterintuitive to a lot of people, but I've learned over all these years that to manage that, when I go through very stressful times, I have to create boundaries. And I encourage you to do the same. If you say to yourself, well, gosh, man, I can't afford to take the time off, all the more reason to start more cash services. So you can see less patients get paid. Okay, would you like to get some training on the science of business along with the science of medicine? Would you like to finally learn how to marry everything that you've learned in medical school with what you need to know in the business world to be successful? Well, we have created the Business of Orthobiologics event. You can check it out at the link that you see below or with our button that you see right here. And we affectionately call it the BOB because it's the business of orthobiologics. It's The only event in the world where we spend half of our time talking about the science of medicine and the other half talking about the science of business. It'll give you everything that you need in order for you to start your own cash-based practice, whether you're starting from scratch or you're inserting it into an existing insurance practice. Join us. You'll see, it'll take you directly to the site. You can see where our next event is and learn all about it. We look forward to seeing you at the bottom.
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