How do we stay productive and motivated without feeling burned out and overwhelmed? After running PelvicSanity for 8 years and working with 500+ business owners, we've seen all of the challenges. We wanted to bring you the idea of the Chaos Zone and Comfort Zone - it's really helped our thinking and how we coach!
Based on a great framework from Jon Acuff in his book (All It Takes is a Goal), we've found business owners (and, really, all of us!) often fall into one of these categories.
Either we're stuck in our Comfort Zone. It's easy, we're coasting, we're not making changes or pushing forward in our business. To be honest, most of us business owners don't get stuck here.
Instead, we're far more likely to fall into the Chaos Zone.
We're trying to see all the patients + marketing + administrative tasks + payroll + SEO + faxing referrals + cleaning rooms + doing laundry + also being there for our family + working out + becoming a better clinician + finishing con-ed + also making sure we have time to relax. Whew!
In this 'sode we talk about how to split the difference between these to be in an area Jon calls the 'productivity zone.' He gives a fantastic description: "Steady, joyful progress on a handful of goals you care about."
IC Course - Cohort #2
Today's the final day to join us for the IC Course - you'll get $50 off, a LIVE Q&A and a whole lot more confidence in treating patients with IC!
Accelerator Program
If you'd like help spending more time in that 'steady, joyful progress' we'd love to work with you in the next cohort of the Business Accelerator Program! You can find all the details and get on the wait list here (www.pelvicptrising.com/accelerator).
About Us
Nicole and Jesse Cozean founded Pelvic PT Rising to provide clinical and business resources to physical therapists to change the way we treat pelvic health. PelvicSanity Physical Therapy (www.pelvicsanity.com) together in 2016. It grew quickly into one of the largest cash-based physical therapy practices in the country.
Learn more at www.pelvicptrising.com, follow Nicole @nicolecozeandpt (www.instagram.com/nicolecozeandpt) or reach out via email (nicole@pelvicsanity.com).
How do we stay productive and motivated without feeling burned out and overwhelmed? After running PelvicSanity for 8 years and working with 500+ business owners, we've seen all of the challenges. We wanted to bring you the idea of the Chaos Zone and Comfort Zone - it's really helped our thinking and how we coach!
Based on a great framework from Jon Acuff in his book (All It Takes is a Goal), we've found business owners (and, really, all of us!) often fall into one of these categories.
Either we're stuck in our Comfort Zone. It's easy, we're coasting, we're not making changes or pushing forward in our business. To be honest, most of us business owners don't get stuck here.
Instead, we're far more likely to fall into the Chaos Zone.
We're trying to see all the patients + marketing + administrative tasks + payroll + SEO + faxing referrals + cleaning rooms + doing laundry + also being there for our family + working out + becoming a better clinician + finishing con-ed + also making sure we have time to relax. Whew!
In this 'sode we talk about how to split the difference between these to be in an area Jon calls the 'productivity zone.' He gives a fantastic description: "Steady, joyful progress on a handful of goals you care about."
IC Course - Cohort #2
Today's the final day to join us for the IC Course - you'll get $50 off, a LIVE Q&A and a whole lot more confidence in treating patients with IC!
Accelerator Program
If you'd like help spending more time in that 'steady, joyful progress' we'd love to work with you in the next cohort of the Business Accelerator Program! You can find all the details and get on the wait list here (www.pelvicptrising.com/accelerator).
About Us
Nicole and Jesse Cozean founded Pelvic PT Rising to provide clinical and business resources to physical therapists to change the way we treat pelvic health. PelvicSanity Physical Therapy (www.pelvicsanity.com) together in 2016. It grew quickly into one of the largest cash-based physical therapy practices in the country.
Learn more at www.pelvicptrising.com, follow Nicole @nicolecozeandpt (www.instagram.com/nicolecozeandpt) or reach out via email (nicole@pelvicsanity.com).
In the last 10 years, our field has gone from an unknown specialty to a household name. This brings unprecedented opportunities, but we need to rise up to meet them and give our patients the care that they deserve. In order to help others get better, we need to be better. This podcast will help you to become more confident with your patients, more successful in your practice or business and a leader in pelvic health, and we're going to have some fun along the way. Join us as we rise together. We're Jesse and Nicole Cozine, founders of Pelvic Sanity Physical Therapy and the creators of the Pelvic PT Huddle, and this is Pelvic PT Rising.
Speaker 2:
Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of the Pelvic PT Rising podcast with Jesse and Nicole Cozine. Hey Nicole, hello. Well, today, announcement-wise, is the last day that you are able to register for cohort number two of Nicole's IC course. So if you haven't done that yet, make sure you check it out. We're sick of talking about it, just do it. Let's rock and roll. It's at pelvicptrisingcom slash ic, but that thing is awesome. If you have any inclination to be treating IC the way it should be treated, make sure you do that. Anything else to add, nicole?
Speaker 1:
No, it's awesome. I'm super proud of it. As you guys know, ic is my jam. It has been for the better part of 20 years and there are just still so many myths that are perpetuated. There are so many things when I talk to people that have seen other public rehab providers from all around the world and there's just things that are getting missed about treating folks with interstitial cystitis and if you don't want to be that person that misses that stuff, then you need to take this course and it's one of the most comprehensive. It is the most comprehensive course out there and I think it's still, as far as I know, it's like the only course only on IC, on how to treat it, and it's comprehensive and it's medical management, nutrition, how to talk to patients, how to communicate with them, all of the PT and OT interventions and all of the things.
Speaker 2:
The actual techniques, on models, on patients, all of the stuff. So make sure you guys do that. If you're listening to this on the day it drops, today is the last day to join that. Head over to pelvicptrisingcom slash ic.
Speaker 2:
So, nicole, diving in to this idea of the comfort zone versus the chaos zone and this is actually a framework from one of my favorite authors, john Acuff, in his newest book, all it Takes Us a Goal but he said this and it immediately resonated and I wanted to bring it to you guys and I think this is for us goes from like a business owner's lens, but I don't think it has to be. I think you can see this in your own life, no matter what you're doing, and kind of understand where you're at. And so what John talks about is basically being in like three different levels of things. So one is the comfort zone, which we're all kind of familiar with. Right, it's kind of easy.
Speaker 2:
You're coasting, you're not really making changes in your life. You might feel a little bit stagnant If you're in a business. You're not doing things in the business that you know could be helping, you're not really being challenged, you're just kind of there and it's easy to fall into that at different points in your life. I don't know, nicole. Have you been in the comfort zone like ever?
Speaker 1:
I actually think that, like towards the end of each of the employment places that I was at when I was at the hospital-based program and I'd sort of like reach the top of what it was going to be, it was like oh yeah, this is what it's going to be for the next X amount of years. If I stay here, I know exactly what it's going to be. I can make the little ladder changes that they have. I can make up, go from a PT three to a PT four and all that kind of stuff. I can still run the program.
Speaker 1:
I feel like I was in the comfort zone with that kind of in that like okay, like that's sort of it and it's. I think one of the quotes that we'll kind of revisit is that it's a great place to visit, it's not a great place to stay, and so I think, inherently, you start to get a little, even though it's the comfort zone, you start to get a little uncomfortable with being in the comfort zone where it's like what are we even doing here? Like what's happening? You're kind of like started itch for change.
Speaker 2:
Especially if you're the kind of person who's listening to this podcast, right, because that's a lot of times what we're trying to help with is kind of push you guys outside of the comfort zone and push ourselves, and all of that.
Speaker 1:
So yeah, and I feel like you know I will say this I think that post COVID, after we had the huge shakeup with having to stop the clinic for 10 weeks and then restarting everything again, and we had a lot of staff stuff go on around that time and everyone sort of switched what they were doing and and then we kind of hit this like I think this lull of like all right, everybody just stay put, even though like it wasn't working like a thousand percent perfectly, it wasn't the most efficient it could be. It was kind of like let's just stay here for a second. That was also when we were going through some like pretty heavy fertility stuff, and so in that way I feel like that served great purpose for us. And that's what your point is right Is that sometimes that's okay if it serves a person, a place in the season of life that you're in, so that's okay to stay there, but that's not a place you want to live.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, you've heard us talk about seasons in the business, and right, sometimes it is a business decision If somebody at the place isn't the right fit long term but they're still doing a fine enough job. Or you know, you've got these systems that you know are a little bit broken, but it's going to be a little bit too much work right now to do it. So we talked about seasons and you can have that again season in the comfort zone, which I love, that, nicole, is just not the place that you want to stay. But I think the interesting thing about what John was talking about was the other end of this is the chaos zone, and I think, as entrepreneurs or as driven folks who are listening to this podcast and wanting to be better in your life, in your career and with your patients, we actually more often fall into this category, and it's something that he, I think, coined this term the chaos zone, and I love it because we see this so often, especially on the business side, but where people are just so over scheduled, they're over delivering, they're doing all of these different things, they are treating all of the patients they could possibly see at all hours of the day.
Speaker 2:
Then they're going out in marketing and doing the administrative stuff and sending out prescriptions and doing payroll, and then trying to somehow add SEO to the website even though that's kind of bullshit and and then trying to be home with their family. But then also they need to be working out, but they also need to be a better clinician and take these con ed courses, and you know, meditation is supposed to have all these great benefits and all of the different things, and so, if that sounds at all like you, you are certainly not alone, and I think business owners and driven folks we find ourselves more often here in this chaos zone and I'll speak for myself, I certainly do Then we do find ourselves in the comfort zone and you know, if you're the kind of person who just made 18 new year's resolutions and all of your goals and all that stuff, you might be finding yourself here and I think it leaves you really, really scattered, right, nicole? Totally.
Speaker 1:
And I feel like sometimes that's glorified a little bit. Right, that's like this business owners grind we're always doing all the things and changing this and doing that. And then I'm also going to take this year long continuing education course because, because I feel like I need to, and so I feel like there's a little bit of that, especially enhanced on social media, that is essentially glorifying that section. But at the end of the day, you're still in the chaos zone over scheduled, over promised, over delivering in all of the areas of your life, not just your business.
Speaker 2:
Yes, and so one of the things that I loved about this kind of framework is that you really want to be in the middle of that, and John calls this like the productive zone, but the phrase he used that I loved was steady, joyful progress on a handful of goals that you care about. Right, breaking that down, first of all, I love any time you can put the word joyful into a thing right. That's one of the things we're trying to do with. All of the stuff we're doing on Rising is like a joyful revolution.
Speaker 2:
I love that phrase of like, yes, like we can want to be better and do better and grow and still like, enjoy the process and it's not all doom and gloom and all of that. So I just love any time that word kind of finds its way into a sentence. But steady, joyful progress on a handful Notice, a handful of goals, not on all of the goals, on all of the different things that you care about, and we get each part of this completely wrong. So the first part if you're in the chaos zone, it's usually like I'm doing this crazy sprint and then I put something down and I don't ever look at it again.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, or I'm in this crazy sprint and then I've now completely run out of gas and I need to go back into the comfort zone to recharge.
Speaker 2:
Yes, right, so you're not making steady progress. You're jumping forward and it's like these spurts and then stopping, and then on just a handful of goals, on being able to narrow that focus. It's one of the cool things that we do in the accelerator program is it forces the people in it to narrow their focus. We actually don't tell people in the program what the next week's module is, because we want them focusing on the here and now, on that handful of things that we actually care about.
Speaker 1:
And we have the accelerator program only go week to week. They cannot see, nor do they know what's coming up. So that's super by design by design, everyone's like. Can I get a syllabus? I'm like no freaking focus on module one and then module two and then module three, because I don't want you sitting on your hands waiting because you think that module 18 is important one for you because it's not.
Speaker 2:
I can guarantee you that all of the stuff going on builds to that Right. So narrowing that I think that's one of the great things that coaching can do is kind of narrow that focus to that handful of things. And so we've seen this now, I think, from everybody Nicole we've ever worked with on the business side have spent a lot of time in this chaos zone, and so we wanted to put together like our five step plan for getting out of the chaos zone. This is kind of how we have now done this with 500 plus people who have been through our coaching programs, and here are the five things that we can think about with that.
Speaker 2:
First of all, going back to what's important to you If you're in a business, why did you start a business? Your planner should match your priorities, right, your planner should match your priorities. If I looked at your weekly calendar, could I tell what are the most important things to you? And a lot of times in business that's not the case, right, you're running all around town doing every workshop you can possibly do, and yet when we sit down and say why did you start your back practice? And so you had the time flexibility to pick up your kids at school? And I was like cool, when did you last do that? And they were like 2021. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1:
I was like oh.
Speaker 2:
Seriously, no joke, right. So we've got an issue there and so you know that's one thing that we've really tried to do, nicole, and I think I've finally done a great job of in this year of being deliberate about that. If you looked at our calendar, it would look pretty dang close to what our priorities are of actual dedicated weekly mentorship time at Pelvic Sanity, of actually preparing time for these podcasts and putting a ton of thought and effort and time into those. Of actually having time to create the content for our rising groups, not having that not be a afterthought. Being able to spend deliberate time with Clay, knowing when we're going to be able to do that, like that's what was important to us obviously changed when we became parents and then we had to change our calendar to accommodate that.
Speaker 1:
Absolutely. That was a mindset shift for us. That was something that was. It's not easy to do if you're not deliberate about it right. So the just thinking that that will always be your priority does not actually happen, especially when you're on the business and you are pulled in multiple different directions. And for us, we own multiple businesses and we're in a partnership with a third, so it's like that needs to change, where our planner needs to match our priorities, and we feel like that's been a deliberate decision and a growth in our essentially like CEO minded practice, now that that's what we have to do.
Speaker 2:
Right. So the second thing we'll always ask you is how much patient care you're doing, and I'll break it down and I'll just give you the answer right now it's too much.
Speaker 1:
And I'll even say and this is a big evolution for me to say, but I will also say it's probably too much and I know as a clinician myself, I understand how difficult that is to realize and how difficult that is to pay attention to and how difficult that is to change. But you're probably doing too much patient care.
Speaker 2:
And remember, for every patient that you see, you're probably doing two to three hours worth of marketing, of admin, of scheduling, of all of that stuff around it, depending on how efficient your systems are. Which is why, when people decide oh, I could just start a business If all I did was see 40 patients a week and I kept every dollar of that and I had no expenses, then I could make way more than I'm making now.
Speaker 1:
It's like yeah, and also the math doesn't quite work like that, you idiot.
Speaker 2:
Right, it's not even close. In fact, if you're working in a place where you're being well compensated as a solopreneur, you're probably making at best the same, and usually a little bit less, than you could be making working full time for someone else. That's the truth of the matter. But you don't see that when you're running it. So you start cranking in as much patient care as you can be, or you hire somebody and don't realize that in order to do that, you're gonna have to reduce your own hours in order to mentor them and train them and take care of all the admin stuff. That has now doubled because you have two different clinicians working for you.
Speaker 2:
So how much patient care are you doing? And I will just say we have never once correct me if I'm wrong, Nicole. So just in this whole vein of like understanding your bias right and your guys who are listening to this, your bias is seeing more patients. Have we ever mentored somebody, Nicole, when they came to us and were like you know, what you really need to do Is open up more hours in your schedule and start cranking on patient care. No, I have not yet seen that.
Speaker 1:
Literally never said that, and we've seen how many hours of one-on-one coaching have we done.
Speaker 2:
Like 2,500.
Speaker 1:
I mean so many hours of talking to folks and working through their issues and we've never that's never once been a solution to any problem, including revenue issues.
Speaker 2:
Yep.
Speaker 1:
And so yeah.
Speaker 2:
Including people going off on maternity leave, including people, all of the different things, right? So you're probably seeing too much in the way of patient care, which again prevents your planner from matching your priorities. So number three when we go through this is what can you do to eliminate, delegate or automate what you're doing? Look at what's going on in your day. Where is their time-sucking nonsense or TSN? We do a whole module about that in the accelerator program, right? Where are you having poor, inefficient systems that you're papering over with your sheer effort? And where can we find ways to take some of that stuff off of your plate? And it doesn't mean that you have to hire, especially if that's not what you want to be doing or not where you envision your company going. But you can certainly eliminate just a lot of stuff. Sometimes we see a ton of time-sucking nonsense, things that we just like. What would happen if you just stop doing that thing?
Speaker 1:
It's kind of like papers and piles on a desk. You know, I'm like notorious for this. It's like if you leave them there long enough, you could just throw a lot of shit away. It's actually kind of like that with some of the things that you think are super important and you can actually, if you just you know you can eliminate, just like quite a bit of things that you're doing that you think are super important and they're actually not that important when you really come down to it.
Speaker 2:
Right. So ask yourself a question what would happen if I just stopped doing that thing? You know another one if you are delegating to somebody, it doesn't have to be an employee. I mean, that could be something as simple as delegating your linens or your cleaning, or you know something easy around the clinic. It doesn't mean that you necessarily have to hire, or you could have some high school kid come in and send out a bunch of prescription faxes, which we've done.
Speaker 2:
Right, it's like it doesn't have to be like a full time W2 employee situation.
Speaker 1:
Totally. And then the other thing is is that because business and personal is so intertwined sometimes it's talking to your family about delegating tasks and sharing some of the responsibilities at home so that you can have more time to do stuff in a time blocked manner? So, especially if you're we've had folks where we've been like, uh, can you like let's just talk to your kids, like, aren't they like 13 and 15? I mean not that we're parenting experts at all, but also like they could be doing some of their own shit too. They're going to have to be doing that shit in three years, right, but that creates a little bit of family friction and effort to change that stuff, and so, but point being is that you can delegate things outside of the business that don't necessarily cost money, or things that you can hire out on the personal side that also allow you to have more time so that your planner can match your priorities 100% and that gives a great example to Nicole of before.
Speaker 2:
We had kind of consistent childcare. You and I would plan the week and it would be saying cool, like I'm going to take clay all day Tuesday, so you have some dedicated time to do some heads down work or get your nails did or whatever. Whatever it was that you did during those days, because I don't think it was what you said you were doing. But I came back and like all of a sudden you're like got a dewy complexion and your nails are done and they're like how's the work going?
Speaker 1:
And you're like great yeah, postpartum self care is work.
Speaker 2:
Right, but that was a delegation thing and Nicole is doing the same thing for me. It's like cool, I'm going to need some heads down work time this week. When can that be? Sometimes that is thinking about that, optimizing that on the family side, or automate it with better systems with you know how can I make this easier if you're still sending out you know your own appointment reminders, like what are we doing here, right?
Speaker 1:
Or making your own stupid bills or doing some other dumb shit like that that goes into that category of time sucking, nonsense, things that you think you can just do better.
Speaker 2:
Or it's not worth doing. All the efforts is going to take to automate it. Right, that's the it's. The upfront cost is not worth it to you and I can promise you it almost always is number four we have on that list. So once you've eliminated, delegated or automated, then fix the limiting factor first. This is actually one of the biggest things about one on one business coaching, and especially as we have a new crop of people going into the rising mentorship. It's fun to see because everybody has a different limiting factor. But, by definition, if you don't address and fix the limiting factor, all your work that you're doing in these other areas doesn't help. So, for example, everybody thinks that they have a marketing problem. And if you can't convert people on the phone, if you're only converting 25% of the people who call you, I don't care how much marketing you do, your business is going to struggle. And so everybody's always going out and trying to market and do all these workshops and set up a Google ad and do all this bullshit, when in reality the limiting factor is your conversion rate. You have to address that for everything else to go well. And so if we don't do that, we put in a ton of work and we don't see the outcome in the business. It's one of the reasons like in the accelerator program, a lot of times we see a lot of really rapid growth in the first month or two Because there's so many. When you're kind of younger in business or you need the help or you need the systems, there's a lot of different like limiting factors that are easy to correct, and as you go further and further on in business the low hanging fruit is gone and it becomes harder to enact a change in your business. But if you're not fixing the limiting factor, then you're just wasting a bunch of time and so figuring that out. And if you can't figure that out, that's one of the great things about business coaching is that it's super easy to spot that from a exterior viewpoint. That's why we get our own. It's sometimes it's just easier for other people to be able to see that in our business. And so once you've decided on what that limiting factor is, that comes to number five.
Speaker 2:
The last thing on our points here let go of the shit that doesn't matter, right, let go of the shit that doesn't matter, of all of these shoulds. I should be doing this. Well, why should you be doing that. I should be doing this marketing thing. I should be doing community education. My people should be getting these crazy individualized HEP videos that I should put up in this library. That should be accessible to anybody. That should be HIPAA compliant. That should be behind the pay. It's just like you're shoulding all over yourself. So what can you let go of? That doesn't really matter If you're in a point in the business where you have a three-month wait list. We see this all the time. People are still going out and doing a bunch of marketing stuff and feeling burned out and not being home with their family when they want to be. Why that's not moving the needle in your business. You're just doing that because you feel like you should.
Speaker 1:
And if you're sitting there right now being like wait, jesse, but that does actually matter.
Speaker 2:
What would? You say To what the marketing side.
Speaker 1:
No, just that whole thing. I think every single person sitting here would in that situation would be arguing with you about that. That actually does matter. I do need to do workshops, I do need to do the things, so it does matter.
Speaker 2:
Right. That's why you need business coaching. Honestly right, it is Right. How many transformational things have we had because a coach looked at us and actually made us articulate something Like wait, why are you doing it that way? And then we would look at each other and be it was. Even when we hired an office manager, this was fantastic. One of the best things for us was hiring an office manager because, a she's freaking fantastic and awesome if you're listening to this, christina but b it also forced us to articulate things that we were doing at the clinic to somebody who was smart and intelligent and asking really good questions.
Speaker 2:
Half the time, halfway through my explanation, I would be like, wow, this is sounding stupid coming out of my mouth. Wait, this is the process for sending out these prescriptions. Like there's got to be a better way to do that. Like literally halfway through, I get this like sheepish grin. It's like, okay, well, you're not going to like this, but here's how we're doing it. So sometimes that external perspective is just really helpful.
Speaker 2:
And then going back to that idea of what's important to you, because work will expand to give the amount of time that you get it right.
Speaker 2:
It's Pareto's principle and it's why Nicole does well with her procrastination, which drives me crazy, right, but if you only give yourself like one night to do something, it only takes one night. So if you say, hey, the most important thing to me is to be home with my family, starting at three o'clock, it's kind of amazing how that squeeze either makes you really efficient with eliminating or automating or delegating, or starts to make it really clear that you have to let go of something. You can't do it all. You can't do it all, and I think that's the point of this episode, as we talk about escaping the chaos zone, is letting go of that idea that you can somehow do it all, that you can grind hard enough that you can do all of the things for your health and your family and your clinical skills and your business and all of that stuff. Something's got to give there and it's helping acknowledge that and then recognizing that it's okay to let something go.
Speaker 1:
And choose the right things to let go right. So that's all that she wrote on that.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so I hope this has been helpful for you guys. If you are remember, this is the last day that the IC cohort two is available, so head to publicptrisingcom, slash IC to get that. And if you are interested in business coaching, then we have an accelerator program that is for you. That is our entry into our business world. That's our six month intensive coaching. You can get on the waitlist for our July cohort of that. We've taken more than 200 folks through that already.
Speaker 2:
It's super exciting to see the changes in their business, and we want you guys to be able to escape both the comfort zone where you're just sitting there with your feet up and not making moves and progress in your business, but, more importantly, this chaos zone where so many of us, as business owners, get trapped in and actually get back to that. I love that phrase. One more time that's steady, joyful progress on a handful of goals that you really care about. That's what I want for each and every one of you. So if you have questions about that, let us know. As always, we want to hear from you. We want to keep this conversation going.