The last time I published in our business blog, I talked about the importance of vision setting.
As I write this, I find myself in the middle of two lectures on vision setting, one for the University of Geneva online and one for our own Digital Dental Entrepreneurial Program as the introductory lecture at the start of the course.
I also find myself coaching a 3 ½ day vision setting module on the DDEP course next week, followed by a trip to Edinburgh, where I will open a day of lecturing on dental business on vision setting again, together with how to set your values in conjunction with your vision.
I'll take a breather from dental business education to present a masterclass in aesthetic implant dentistry. Then, I'll fly to the Middle East to present another day of business, talking about vision setting again.
It seems that it's becoming a thing, something more and more people are at least prepared to listen to whether they act on it or not, perhaps a different matter.
I talked about the importance of vision setting, but vision setting is ethereal, it is difficult to grab like clouds in the sky, it is an intellectual exercise which is painful and difficult and challenging, very easy to do quickly and badly, tough to do over a more extended period to cement something which will last for the longest possible time.
In these latest lectures, I've rewritten the values section of the lecture to include the concept of the timeline and my adaptation of the timeline.
Professor John Gibson introduced me to the concept of your own personal timeline when he presented on our leadership course at The Campbell Academy.
It's a simple exercise requiring only a blank A4 piece of paper and a pen. Turn the paper landscape and draw a diagonal line from the bottom left to the top right, write the year of your birth in the bottom left corner and the year you are now in the top right corner. Bisect the line with the date in the middle of those two dates and start to add the things that are most significant in your life.
My modification to this project is to use both sides of the paper; on one side, note the times and nature of the best things you can remember, and on the other side, note the worst, the light in the dark.
Seeing what you celebrate is one thing, but seeing what has devastated you is at least as helpful.
I would therefore suggest that you do this project and take as long as it takes to finish it to provide you with something that you trust and believe (it is essential to be honest with yourself about that project).
Once you have completed that, you can start to group together all the experiences which form the most important parts of your life, and once you've done that, you will easily be able to see the pattern of the values of the things which are your moral foundation.
While this seems to some people to be an ethereal exercise, something which is wishy-washy washy, something which goes beyond the tangible nature of work; I always reply by saying, "How can you possibly tell someone else where you're going if you don't know where you're going yourself, how can you possibly set a direction if you do not know where you're going to go or what is important to you?".
Therefore, I think it's one of the most important exercises you can do. I repeat it every year in my sabbatical, updating what has happened in the previous 12 calendar months: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
As I do this exercise, I'm reminded of Stephen Covey's book, The Seven Habits Of Highly Successful People.
In that book, he makes lots of suggestions for such exercises that you can do to ensure you have framed the direction of your life. He suggests going to the beach for an afternoon once a year to do this (it's possible to do it without a beach), but I think you get the point.
If none of us are prepared to invest our time in actually thinking where we would like to go and what we would like to do, how will we ever reach a destination of our choice? How will we ever feel satisfied? How will we ever feel that we are lined up with our values?
This is why the start of any sort of business consideration must in the modern world begin with a vision, which is underpinned by values; once these two are secured, it's absolutely feasible to move on to decide on the tactics.
But for our discussions and the sharing of information here, we'll move on next time to the basic aspects of dental financial management (impossible to set in place if you're unsure about your values).
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