How can you add more creativity to your practice? Or how do you bring creativity back to your practice and your life?
This a question that we ask ourselves is various forms. Whether it is wondering how to be happier or how to have a better life, marriage, family or practice. It is considering how one can either create more of what you have or where to start to create what you want.
The creative process actually follows what I call a “Cycle of Creativity.” At some point, a doctor probably felt pretty excited about going into practice. There was a point in their lives where there was a spark and a zest. Whether you’re looking at it in terms of being in business for yourself as an entrepreneur, which is a really creative thing to do, or just the fact that you’re out of school, and you’re practicing, and you love what you’re doing and you want to help people. So, there’s a fire back there somewhere. And like any fire that starts to burn down, what do you do? You add fuel to it and you add oxygen. And the oxygen and the fuel, in terms of creativity actually have five different components:
1. Visualization of Your Practice
The first step is what I call a Visualization, which is having in your mind’s eye what it is you intend to create. If you’re looking at being a chef, and you’re cooking dinner, you first get the idea of the meal. You want to create this wonderful evening with your friends and you’re going to create the atmosphere, the wine, the meal, the dessert– everything. You can visualize it. You can visualize what’s it going to look like on the plate. What is it going to look like in terms of the other components, you add some protein to it, and salad and what dessert is going to go with pesto and what wine is going to pair with it. And that’s all visualization. The same thing is true with practice.
2. Know your Tools
You come out of dental school and you think, "Well, I want my own practice. What’s my vision of this practice? What do I want it to be like? Is it just me or am I going to have associates with me? How large do I want it? Where do I want it situated?”
All these things are part of your own vision. And then you’ve got to know the tools of management in order to build it. Any clinical activity has its own set of tools. But we’re not focused on that so much as the tools of building a business. How do you market it? How do you hire people? What’s your business plan? What’s your strategic plan? Those are all tools that we need to be able to implement whatever vision we had.
3. Work Your Plan
Now that you have planned your work, next you have to "Work Your Plan.” You have to go to work and make sure those tools are being used. And that’s something you can’t shortcut. If you’re going to be creative, you have to do something creative. If you want to build a practice, you have to build a practice. I call it working your craft or your plan.
4. Editing and Refining
And then there’s a stage of “Editing”, which means you refine what you’re doing and you learn from experience. Maybe you hire an associate and it wasn’t the kind of experience that you wanted. You felt burnt out on a little bit, so next time you are going to do it differently.
This is where you learn from your mistakes and success. You correct your mistakes and strengthen your success. In other words, you pay attention to both sides of the coin and figure out what successful actions or activity to keep and what to let go of.
This never stops! The way to success and prosperity is orderly progress and always moving forward.
5. Getting Your Work Out to the World
The final stage of any creative process is to “Getting your Work Out to the World.” With a practice, you have to market it whether it’s word of mouth, which is always the best, patient referrals, social media or any other form of marketing. And those five points fit together in a spiral upward.
Hit each one of those five points going back to the vision. And that’s what I do with clients. The first thing I ask them is, what’s your vision? Sometimes there’s a long pause. But as we talk the vision becomes clearer and clearer. This is our starting point.
To learn about the Five Stages of Creativity download the first chapter of my book Create: Tools from Seriously Talented People to Unleash Your Creative Life.
Next week we’ll take a look at Achieving Work-Life Balance.