Eric Vickery on Goal Setting: Set specific goals, create a plan, set deadlines, and share daily progress.
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About Eric Vickery
Eric holds a degree in business administration and brings a strong business and systems approach to his consulting. His initiation into the field of dentistry was in the area of office management. He managed dental practices for over ten years and has been consulting over 250 offices nationwide since 2001.
Episode Transcript
Transcript performed by A.I. Please excuse the typos.
00:02
This is Dental All-Stars, where we bring you the best in dentistry on marketing, management, and training. Hey friends, welcome to another weekly motivational moment with Eric Vickery, president of coaching at All-Star Dental Academy. And I wanted to talk to you specifically about goal setting. And the analogy I want us to use is a GPS. The thing about goals is, when you’re putting something out there that’s very generic,
00:31
and you don’t really have a specific idea of where you’re going or what you’re wanting to accomplish, you don’t really know if you’re getting there or not. So the GPS is a perfect analogy that pretty much everybody understands these days. So in order to get to a place, you have to put in a very specific address. You can’t just say, hey, I want to go that direction, or I want to go to my friend’s house. You have to know the address. You have to be very specific with your goal.
01:00
Once you put that in, it’s going to give you a map, a couple different ways that you can go to do that. None that are wrong, some just might take more time in getting there. So you want to give it a length of time that you want to achieve this goal by a certain point. You know, going from A to B, you don’t want to do all these different things if you don’t have to. You want to go the straightest line possible. So set a due date for yourself. Give yourself a deadline. If you notice, there’s a strategic plan.
01:30
If you’ve ever plugged your phone in, like to your car and GPS in a layout, turn by turn directions of what you’re going to do, the whole point of a goal is to create an action plan out of that. Get a very specific plan, a very detailed route on what direction you’re going to go. One wrong turn doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the process. Oh, I made one mistake. No, you turn around and you learn from it. You go, OK, this is where I’m going now again. So.
01:58
Don’t be afraid to fail in the process. It is a very strategic, as a momentum builder, as you make the right turn, you make the right turn. It’s strategic when you can say, okay, I’m gonna continue to make the right turn. I’m really focused on it. If you’ve ever had your GPS going and it’s talking to you, but you get distracted by something and then you weren’t really paying attention to it, or you weren’t watching the screen and you went too far, or you made the wrong turn somewhere else, you weren’t focused on it.
02:27
So stay focused on it daily. Your goal has to be something that you’re reviewing daily. And the other thing about the voice calling out is very important. When you can share your goal or your measurement, your KPI, or how close you are to achieving the goal with someone else, that sharing of that goal creates an accountability process. You’re in communication with someone about it. So be specific, create a plan from it.
02:55
Give it a deadline, share it with someone every single day. All right, go out, make it happen, guys.
03:03
We hope you enjoyed this episode of Dental All-Stars. Visit us online at allstardentalacademy.com.
