What is an Entrepreneurial Clinician & Why You Need to Know

WHAT IS AN ENTREPRENEURIAL CLINICIAN & WHY YOU NEED TO KNOW

Having both an entrepreneurial mindset and a clinical mindset is critical to build a successful, sustainable and profitable practice. But what does it mean to be an ‘entrepreneurial clinician’ and how do you balance both mindsets? In this week’s episode, Jo shares 10 examples of clinical thinking versus entrepreneurial thinking and how you can learn to use them to build your practice.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome to the Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast. I am your host, Jo Muirhead, and I’m going to be bringing to you today a discussion about being entrepreneurial.

Before we get into definition, and data and statistics and things like that that make so many of us get excited, I wanna share a story with you.

See, I grew up in an entrepreneurial household. You might like to think so. My parents owned their own small business. They were travel agents back in the day when we actually needed people to act as travel agents. And my dad had multiple shop fronts in different locations. At one stage, he had five, I think. And he was always self-employed. And there was a period of time when he employed my mum. And I worked there for a little while myself. I got to do exciting things like vacuum the floor, put out all the travel brochures and put stickers on them, telling them to come back to the travel agency.

So you would think that I would have this entrepreneurial thing all sorted, wouldn’t you?

Given that I grew up in that household, I obviously had people in my world who were into this thing called being an entrepreneur. Uh, no, in fact, I’ve made no secret of it, is that my dad was a pretty shocking businessman. He led us to believe or led me to believe in my family of origin that everything we did was on the edge of bankruptcy. And he taught me very, very poor money management skills, particularly in the use of credit. He loved to take a risk and he had this complete belief that any idea that he had was gonna work out positively.

Now, as he sold those agencies and moved into some real estate investing things got a little better for him for a while, and we were kind of like, oh, thank God, some of that, you know, hyper vigilance around money, we were able to take a breath, but not for long because he and my mum had this crazy idea that they wanted to build an agricultural business.

Neither of them ever having had any experience in agriculture, and that was going to be how they funded their retirement. And that ended up being a bit of a mess. I don’t have kind things to say about this time in my life. It was a financial sh*tshow to put it mildly. And, being an agricultural business, there were risks that they were never ever going to be aware of. We had bushfires that almost decimated the place. And then there were incredible winds that almost decimated the place, and it just felt like they were playing catch up and catch up and catch up and catch up and catch up for their whole entire life.

That was unhelpful. That was really unhelpful for me growing up as a young person, because on top of all of this, when my dad was 37 years of age, just 37, he had his first heart attack, and that was terrifying. I watched it happen. It was early in the morning. The ambulances came. It was all very distressing and I can’t imagine what it was like for my mum and my dad, but that was the first time he’d had a heart attack. And I remember hearing the senior ambulance officer who came to see him at that point in time, asking him about what was going on, trying to get a handle on this chest pain. And I remember him saying to my dad, at that point in time, you are so stressed. You’ve gotta look at what you’re doing for work. Probably not what you want to hear an ambulance officer say. Don’t know how much notice my dad took of that at the time. But I heard it and I heard it really clearly.

Now, what all of those experiences taught me and helped me understand was that being self-employed made you sick. Having your own entrepreneurial exercise made you sick. So I very quickly ingrained that and decided I was never going to be self-employed, never going to have my own business because it made me sick to the point where I could have a heart attack or where I could die. So yeah, hypervigilance around money hypervigilance around this thing called entrepreneurship.

So, fast forward now quite some years, I went to university here in Australia. I wanted to do a health sciences degree because it was very important for me to come out of university with something I could do. Didn’t wanna do one of these arts or science degrees. I wanted something that came out, gave me a qualification that I could get a job, start a career and go change the world, because that’s what I was always going to do. I always wanted to change the world.

So I started working for other people. I worked for federal government agencies and state government agencies. I worked in private practice, I worked in small private practice. I worked in large private practice. I was not a good fit for federal government or state government or anything that stopped me from being able to be creative in decision making. I was not a good fit for the really big companies that acted like these big corporations where, you know, every decision was fraught with how many meetings could I have about the frigging decision. What ended up being a really good fit for me was smaller what we call boutique private practices here in Australia where we could be agile, where we could make decisions, where there was a flat management structure, where everybody’s ideas were welcome.

I started to thrive in those places. But guess what? I burnt out again and again and again and again because I had such a terrible relationship with my work. And that is gonna be an episode all on its own.

Let me finish this story. So in the mid two thousands I had left a job. It was with a large practice. I’d grown the practice, I’d helped grow the practice, but then I found myself acting in ways that contradicted my values. And I’ve talked a lot about this in my blogging before and actually found myself doing things with staff or doing things to staff that, that, that were just what I now find abhorrent. So I had decided then after another period of trying to work out whether I’m a manager or a leader or a clinician, or do I do a combination of both that I needed to step away and start to make sense of the world of work.

So I did, and I stepped away for a period of time, and then I used up all my savings.

So then I went, what am I going to do? I was a single mum at the time. I needed to put food on the table. Quite literally. I started consulting in my clinical work. So here in Australia I could do that. And I positioned myself quite uniquely. I went to these companies that had a good reputation that I liked the look of and said, Hey, who are your return to work clients that you don’t know what to do with that your staff are stuck with? Let me work with them. Let me work with them and let me do good work. I will either help move them on and get you really good outcomes, which is important in that industry. Or I will very quickly tell you that you’re not gonna be able to do anything with this person, and that’s gonna make you look great to your funding body.

So I niche myself by saying, give me all your complicated, difficult, dunno what to do with clients. And that’s essentially how I built my business. Little did I know that that was me exercising my entrepreneurial thinking.

So what does that mean for entrepreneurs who are also clinicians? Because in the 1980s, and yes, I can talk about that, entrepreneurs did not have lovely reputations. Being entrepreneurial was not about the laptop lifestyle. It was not about freedom and choice. It was sleazy, it was embarrassing. It was like the used car thing. It came out of the telecommunications, like every person was selling telecommunications equipment. You’d see lots of forced ads on television with lots of ra ra ra ra stuff going on. And, and all of a sudden I’m kind of experiencing this clinical, you know, transformation and change in my own world, looking at this business that I had grown, looking at what meant, what freedom and flexibility was giving me and went, ooh, what is it about what I’m doing and what I’m watching other successful clinicians who are also entrepreneurial? What is it that they’re doing? What is it that makes this different for us?

Because what you might not realise is that clinical thinking and entrepreneurial thinking are incredibly different. And this is why so many clinicians find it difficult to do both simultaneously. So if that’s you, well that’s great because that should be difficult for us to do. And I’m gonna explain a little bit more about that later.

I’ve actually got 10 examples for you today that I’m gonna quickly cover about how you can adopt a clinical mindset, but then also be open to an entrepreneurial mindset and how both of these mindsets can work together, can coexist, but also how they repel each other and make it very, very difficult. But this is a 20 minute podcast. I’m not gonna be able to cover everything in much detail today.

So I do wanna let you know that you can read more about it in the book that I wrote back in 2018 called The Entrepreneurial Clinician. And there’ll be a link to the book in the show notes.

Now, I’ve just been reminded I need to let you know a little bit about myself. So I’m an Australian, as you can tell, from my gorgeous Australian accent. So in Australia we have some terms and some vocabulary that you might not be familiar with, and I don’t have any people in front of me today, so I can’t actually gauge whether I’ve said a word that you don’t understand. I do have plans to write the ‘Jo Dictionary’, but to give you an idea, I might use a word called ‘fortnight’, F O R T N I G H T in Australia, that is a two week time period, a fortnight. So what are we gonna do next fortnight? Is that gonna take a fortnight? Oh, that was last fortnight in a fortnight’s time. I am not referring to the video game. Dunno how much about the video game. I just know that fortnight is a two week time period.

I might use other phrases like, and then he acted ‘like a pork chop’. Or don’t be a ‘banana fruitcake’. These are colloquial terms that Australians can sometimes use that say, please don’t be an idiot. So when we refer to somebody as being a bit of a pork chop, we go, and that’s a bit silly, that’s a bit unnecessary. Or, you know, don’t be a banana fruitcake. That’s actually indication that you know what you’re, you’re actually being a di*khead. Could you please stop? Okay? So you might hear words, you might hear phrases. If you need some interpretation, I’m sure Google could help you. If not, make sure you leave a comment and we’ll be able to offer you some interpretation.

Where could you leave a comment? Well, there’s a couple of places you could leave a comment. And one would be in the Facebook group, which is free called Future Proofing Health Professionals. This is gonna be the place where I have discussions about these episodes, but it’s also a community of health professionals who wanna know how do we future proof ourselves? Now, some of you are going, what the heck is future-proofing? Well, it’s about how do we stay doing this work without selling our souls or sacrificing ourselves in the process?

And what’s really interesting for me, reflecting now since it’s been, what, four years, five years since I wrote my book, that entrepreneurial, entrepreneurialism, entrepreneurialism being entrepreneurial, haha, there we go, I got there. What it sets us up to do is to future proof ourselves. Now, there are some other things we need to do, but entrepreneurial thinking is key in how we future proof ourselves, both as private practice owners, but also as clinicians who wanna do good quality work.

So let me take you through 10 examples of clinical thinking and entrepreneurial thinking. You ready for this?

So clinical thinking says to us, what am I treating? So you’ll often go into a first session with a client or a patient and you are constantly looking for what are you treating? And we’ve got really well ingrained neural pathways now that help us make those decisions quickly. What are you looking for? How is this person turning out? What are they saying? What are they not saying? How are they moving? How are they not moving that help us quickly form some diagnostic criteria?

Well, entrepreneurs don’t start with what am I treating? They start with, where can I add value? Completely different concept and frame of reference. So entrepreneurs are always going, how can I help? How can I help? Where can I add value? Who needs to know what I know? How do I get my message out? How do I help more people? Entrepreneurs, true entrepreneurs are always looking for that ability to add value.

Clinical thinking still tells us ‘do what I say’ as the clinician, because I know best. Now I know a lot of us allied health professionals have been working very, very hard over the last 20 or 30 years to move away from this God complex that health professionals have. But it’s still there and it’s still, and we can see it in memes around ‘Don’t mistake my six years at university for your Google research’ memes that we can see online sometimes, but clinical thinking still leads us as clinicians to go, Hey, you asked me for my clinical opinion, I’m giving it to you. I am the clinician here. Why aren’t you following my advice? Whereas entrepreneurial thinking again is how can I help? Because I think we’ve all been in rooms with clients many, many times where we’ve gone in with a ‘what am I treating? Do what I say’ but we’ve completely missed where the client is at. So entrepreneurial thinking allows us to be in that space of going, what’s really going on here? And what do you need right now in this moment?

Clinical thinking still tells us to be clinical, to be professional and to be ethical. And when I talk about being ethical, I’m talking about your code of ethics that your board or, or those people that give you your license tell you to behave. I’m not talking about the use of the word ethics and Facebook communities where we use the word as a weapon. . So we are expected to turn up clinically, professionally. There’s still the concept of the white coat, even though most of us don’t wear white coats. But there is still this awe, this ‘be clinical, be professional’. We’re not supposed to show any emotion. We’re not supposed to do, God forbid, any countertransference. But entrepreneurial thinking asks us to be real and be authentic. It doesn’t mean put all of your dirty laundry out there. Certainly doesn’t ask you to be unethical by making sure you participate in counter transference. But it is asking you to turn up and be real. Be who you are. Don’t try to be someone you are not. Don’t try and put the ‘show no emotion face’ on when you’re impacted by something, as long as it’s serving the client. And we can’t participate in a social world that is full of recommendations. Even if it’s just two clients talking to each other or talking to their family members. How we make a person feel in the room with us and while they’re engaging in our marketing is going to say so much more to them than what we told them to do. They’re not gonna remember what we told them to do anywhere near as much as how we made them feel. This is why authenticity, this is why being yourself is so incredibly important.

Clinical thinking tells us to behave ourselves. We are all rule followers. We’ve gotta follow the rules. And that’s important because all of us as health professionals, we know that if we make a bad decision or if we make the wrong decision, we can harm people. So of course we wanna behave ourselves and stay within the lines. But entrepreneurs, they’re all about taking risks. We don’t take risks with our clients unless we’ve got a risk management plan in place. But with our businesses, we’re going to have to be taking risks. So you’ve gotta get used to understanding your own tolerance of risk. But most of us, by definition as clinicians, now, we have become risk averse. Clinical thinking is about following the rules, like I described above, but entrepreneurial thinking allows us to practice creativity. And there are some great ways that we can do that within sessions with clients that get fabulous results with clients.

But there’s also great ways that we can do that inside of our businesses or inside of our business unit that you might be managing on behalf of a larger employer. This one comes up in clinical thinking all the time. We still have this underlying belief that money is evil. And I am not going to get into the pros and cons of living and working in a capitalist society. That’s where I find myself. I find myself in a capitalist economy. I am trying to make good in the soup that I swim in thanks to Brene Brown there. But clinicians are often taught that money is evil. We don’t talk about it. And in some cases we don’t ask for it. And some of us have been taught that if a client can’t pay or gives you the impression that they can’t pay, we don’t ask them to pay. And we all have had experiences of that. It’s rare that I ever get to speak to a health professional who has not had some difficulty in asking for payment, expecting payment, conversations about payment.

But entrepreneurs know that money is a tool. If we don’t get paid, we can’t help the next person. If I don’t get paid, I actually can’t eat. And if I can’t eat, I can’t see you next week. So we understand that money is a tool. It resources us, it helps us go and serve the next person or the next people. Clinical thinking starts to tell us that work is a necessity. I have to work, I have to work, I have to work, I have to work.

But entrepreneurs know that work is an opportunity and we have enough medical evidence, research-based evidence, a lot of it came out of the United Kingdom. It’s 20 years old now and it’s been going on for 20 years, telling us that work, good work is good for our health. And being able to engage in entrepreneurial thinking allows us to create work that is good for us, which actually adds to our longevity. People who do not work actually experience higher rates of mortality, not just morbidity, mortality, that’s a bit freaky.

Clinical thinking is always telling us that we don’t know enough. There’s always another research article, there’s always another discipline I could learn. I could always go back and get my PhD in something, God forbid. I’m not an academic in case you haven’t figured that out. But we’re constantly being told, I don’t know enough which way, as health professionals internalize as I’m not good enough. That’s a whole episode in itself. But we’re constantly looking for, I don’t know enough, I don’t know enough, I don’t know enough. And we start to devalue what it is that we do know.

But entrepreneurs know how to learn and we are very good problem solvers and we are very good at taking how we’ve learned in the past and applying it to a problem we need to solve. Now, clinical thinking tells us that we need to learn then do. And that’s important because if you don’t learn how to splint somebody, you know before you put a splint on somebody, then you’re probably gonna mess up their hand or their leg or whatever it is that needed splinting. So, but we’ve been taught that we’ve gotta learn then do and learn, then do. And a lot of us are not those types of learners. I’m not. I’m an experiential learner. I need to get in there and learn while I’m doing. Entrepreneurial thinking allows us to learn while we do, which means we’ve gotta make mistakes, which means we’ve gotta take risk, which means we’ve gotta back ourselves.

Can you start to see how all of this fits together with the positive psychology that we’ve been trying to indoctrinate ourselves with for so long?

And the final thing out of my 10 examples of clinical thinking versus entrepreneurial thinking is that clinical thinking tells us that failure is devastating. And rightly so. If we make a mistake with a client in clinical intervention, that could cause them harm and some of that harm could be devastating. But as an entrepreneur, failure is information. It tells us when something is not working and that gives us clues to something that needs to change.

So there are some 10 examples of clinical thinking and entrepreneurial thinking. And I think as you go through this list, you can really see that it’s very difficult to quickly swap from being a clinician and thinking clinically to being an entrepreneur and thinking entrepreneurially. Especially when we have spent a gazillion years and hours learning how to be the clinician in the first place.

So my goal in today’s episode was to help you understand why some of us might find it difficult to do this thing called entrepreneurship. But I also wanted to share with you that it’s not all about making money and a laptop lifestyle. It’s not all about a side hustle because my dad would probably fit into the category of being an entrepreneur, but I grew up thinking that I was an economic burden on my family.

But just like you learn to think clinically, you can learn to think entrepreneurially. It takes practice and you’ve gotta get good at it. And you need people in your world who can help refine you and help you understand where you are engaging in analysis paralysis because you’re so scared of making a mistake.

So this is where I wanna end this episode today. So if I’ve gone really, really fast and spoken really, really fast today, yay, that is something that I’m also exceptionally good at doing. When I get passionate, when I get excited, I can talk fast. I’m not sure if the app that you’re listening to me on has an ability for you to slow me down. Often we are told, Hey, watch it at 1.7 speed or listen to it at 1.5 speed. I don’t think you’re gonna need to do that with me.

So my promise to you is to make sure that these are short, these are sharp, and good information that you can take away and do something with quickly.

Now, given that this is also a brand new podcast that I am committing to do an episode a week for the whole of 2023, then I need your help. And the way that you can help me is that you can rate, you can review and you can share because when you rate, it tells the app that you’re listening on that other people might be interested in this. When you review it tells the app that you’re listening on that people could be interested in this. And when you share it, other people get to know it exists.

So if you have enjoyed what you’ve heard today, if you found this interesting, if you found this compelling, please rate, review and share this episode.

And I look forward to coming to you next week and helping you understand more about being an entrepreneurial clinician.