Your future: by chance or design?

It’s that time of year again, the time at Breathe Business where we talk to our clients about what they want in their future. After all, the purpose of having your own coach is to have a great life isn’t it? And therefore we all better know what we are shooting for!

So our first Business Clubs of the new academic year are all about personal and professional vision and for those who really want to envisage and plan a great future, we offer an annual four day life and business planning retreat every November.

From year to year the core material stays much the same; after all, why fix it when so many Breathe clients have already changed their lives by slowing down for long enough to discover exactly what they want their future to look like and then (with our help) building a plan to achieve it?

The great thing about being an owner of a dental practice is instead of just going to work you can organise your business so that it serves you (not the other way around). The whole point of being a business owner is to have the freedom to run your life your way and not have other folk tell you how many hours you must work or how much holiday you can take or even how much you may earn.

All of these things are within your control. However, many principals I meet feel as if they are chained to their practices, having to work long hours doing things they dislike and, of course, they resent it like hell… So, time after time, our job is to put the client/business owner back in control of their working life and at the same time we often have to help them repair their personal lives, which can be so easily damaged by spending too many hours at work…

In former government chief economist Richard Layard’s excellent book on happiness he identifies the top seven things that make us happy. Here they are:

  • The quality of our personal and family relationships
  • Our financial situation
  • Work
  • Community and friends
  • Health
  • Personal freedom
  • Having our core values met

The formula for happiness is really uncomplicated and yet many dentists I meet risk damaging their relationships, their finances, resenting their work and neglecting their community and friends and then wonder why they are far from happy or content.

Our clients start this journey of discovery by considering the answers to a lot of questions. Not the everyday enquiries of polite interaction but questions that require thinking at a level beyond the everyday. Here are a selection so that you can consider what your answers might be:

  1. What do you really (really!) want (that you don’t have) in your personal life?
  2. What do you really (really!) want (that you don’t have) in your professional life?
  3. What’s going well in your (personal and professional) life?
  4. What’s stopping/blocking you in your (personal and professional) life?
  5. When will you stop working/earning and how will you live then and what will you do?
  6. Do you have sufficient balance in your life between your work and everything else you want to do? If not, where is it out of line?
  7. If you could change one thing in your personal life and one thing in your professional life, what would it be?

One thing I know for sure (after many years of working with dentists) is that simply working harder, faster and longer hours, as a clinician, is not the answer to:

  1. your happiness
  2. your income
  3. your wealth
  4. living longer
  5. or having a more fulfilling life!

So if you feel something like this —

“I don’t have enough time or energy for the rest of my life”

“I know I can choose but I don’t know what I really want to do with my life”

“I have reached a glass ceiling [of success] that I don’t seem able to get past and I’m bored”

— then contact me for a chat about how we can help you get past this and have a great life.

The next Breathe Retreat runs November 17 to 20, 2016. Contact me for a chat to see if this would suit you and to see what some of our clients say about it in their own words go to HOW WE HELP.

e. simon.hocken@breathebusiness.co.uk

m. 07770 430576

With all good wishes,

Simon

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