The Pracititoner Burnout Trap

Burnout in Functional Medicine Practices 0:00

Practitioners who've been trained in functional medicine, functional integrative medicine, they've been trained to understand and see the whole person, but they have not been trained to understand and see the whole business. So they miss all the things that they're going to have to do, and they end up actually falling back into a very similar situation. It's just a huge challenge when you're having to be the marketer, the salesperson, the finance individual, the CEO, the practitioner. the manager, the hirer, all of those different hats, right?

And even when you start hiring individuals, if you're not hiring in the right order or at the right level, you still have some input or some operational piece in every single one of those areas. Hello and welcome to the podcast. This week we bring back one of our regular guests, Seth Conger. Seth is a longtime friend. He's the COO of the Freedom Practice Coaching Group. And he has built, scaled and sold a practice in functional medicine. I think every practitioner when you hear this would typically want Seth to come and run their practice for them because he has so much wisdom and is now mentoring hundreds of practitioners in building strong, sustainable practices.

In this episode, we're going to talk about burnout because it is a big issue across practitioners. If you want to find out more about what Seth does and get in the mix of what we've got going on, which is really awesome and exciting, go to goevomed.com slash FPC. You can book a call. You could do the assessment there. Check it out. In the meantime, take it away, Seth Conger. Hey James, thanks for having me again. It's great to see you. We've had such a great series throughout the years and I think one day we'll look back and we'll see the whole journey of you from running your own practice, helping other practitioners, us working together in a meaningful way.

But you know, I wanted to bring you on because I have hundreds of conversations a month with practitioners in the functional medicine field, and it's really great to sort of keep tabs on what I hear. But the number one thing that I'm hearing right now, and maybe it's just the state of the world, or maybe it's just the way that people are running their practices, and I wanted to get your insight, is burnout. And I just feel like practitioner burnout is sort of an epidemic and not just emotional exhaustion, but like literally like structural burnout from being the clinician, the CEO, the marketer, functional medicine.

There wasn't really a choice about if you felt a moral compulsion to practice this type of medicine, you had to go and start your own practice. I think now we're starting to see that there is a choice because you could go work for someone. But ultimately, I think most people also want to kind of do their own thing. There's that inner rebel, you know, of practitioners that want to go outside the standard of care. So I just wanted to bring you on to talk about it and what's driving it from your perspective because you have a sort of a parallel but much more nuanced and detailed perspective because you're in it with so many successful practitioners and practitioners who are trying to be successful.

So let's jump into it. What's causing it and what's your framing of this issue? And do you see the same thing that I see? Yeah, it is really interesting because as we are talking about what's happening in the world, I'm feeling the same thing as well from all the conversations that I get to have with practitioners. And it strikes me as almost a little bit ironic that it is likely the number one thing. Outside of wanting to practice medicine your own way, burnout is usually the number one or number two reason why practitioners get out of the system anyway.

Right? And typically that is coming from their schedule being completely owned, having seven minutes with a patient, not feeling like they can actually do everything they want to do in that limited time and then having all of this, you know, what feels like useless administrative work behind the scenes with electronic

Why Practitioners Burn Out as Owners 3:40

medical records and charting and their MAs and all these people, right? And you add on long hours to that and you get to a thing called burnout. And I think there's this belief that once you shift over into owning your own business, you're going to get rid of that, right? Because someone's not owning your schedule anymore. And you can see as many patients as you want or as few patients as you want and as much time as you want to spend with them. But if you become the practitioner owner, all of a sudden now you're trading somebody owning your schedule and short timeframes with your patients for wearing seven to 10 different hats.

And I think the practitioners who've been trained in functional medicine, functional integrative medicine, they've been trained to understand and see the whole person, but they have not been trained to understand and see the whole business. So they miss all the things that they're going to have to do, and they end up actually falling back into a very similar situation. Sure, they may be practicing medicine the way they want to do now, right? Very quickly, they end up giving their schedule up to other people.

They don't prioritize the things that are really important to themselves and to their business growth over the needs of other people. And those other people become very quickly their patients and then their staff members, right? And anybody else who has something that is urgent that comes up is really the thing that takes priority over the things that are important in their business. We'll talk about reactive to proactive. But I think really it's just a huge challenge when you're having to be the marketer, the salesperson, the finance individual, the CEO, the practitioner, the manager, the hirer, all of those different hats, right?

And even when you start hiring individuals, if you're not hiring in the right order or at the right level, you still have some input or some operational piece in every single one of those areas. And I believe it's a combination of that and task switching that starts to cause burnout at any level, because, you know, I've heard from practitioners who are working 40 hours a week who still feel burned out and they feel burnt out because they don't feel like they can put their all into any one thing without three or four distractions happening.

And we can get to it at the end of this. If we want, we can talk about how do you own your schedule to avoid that. But it's really those two things. And then the last piece I want to talk about in this that I think is critical is as practitioners move more towards owners, as they hire more people, as they get a secondary practitioner, they start removing themselves away from the end user, the patient. And they stop actually getting to really understand the reason why they got into this in the first place, which was to get really positive health outcomes and successes for their patients.

And when you remove yourself from that and you don't hear about that on a daily basis, like that's the fuel that keeps you going. through all of these hard things. And if you remove yourself from that and you're just in male chaos all day long, it's like a recipe for disaster between too many hats, being reactive instead of proactive, and then just not being in touch enough with the incredible results that your practice is actually getting. One of the things that I hear from practitioners is they sort of think, because they don't have connection with other practitioners who may be experiencing the same thing, because this is a structural issue that you're referring to, they often take it as sort of like a personal failure, like they're just failing and everyone else has got it together because when they go to the conference, everyone is putting their best foot forward.

Yeah, I would love to run into somebody at a conference who's just like, man, I'm getting my butt kicked and everything's going wrong. Like I've never heard that in 15 years of going to industry conferences. Everybody's having the best year ever and they're doing just great, but I know what the reality is behind the scenes. Yeah. Well, we've talked a little bit about these sort of topics in the past, but I think you're really like honing in on, I guess, the diagnosis, should we say. Yeah. So what's the treatment protocol?

Yeah. So I think there's a few little things, right? And so we have to look at the big picture, the macro, and then we have to look at the micro. The macro is you need to kind of restructure the way you're approaching business if you don't want to lead that to burnout, right? So that involves really understanding what is important to your business, not just urgent. And I think the number one thing that as we talk to practitioners who are moving from startup mode into more growth and scaling mode,

Macro Shifts: From Reactive to Proactive 8:40

we shift from this whole, and I know we've done a whole podcast on this so people can reference, We shift from revenue and new clients is the most important thing, right? Because if you don't have that, you run out of money and nothing else matters. But we shift from that to all of a sudden planning, proactivity, and your team becomes just as important, if not more important, than just bringing in money. And a lot of people never make that switch, right? And they never make that switch and they just keep going down that road of having to do everything at the same scale all the time.

but really it's about having other people supporting you and other people understanding the difference between what's important to the business and what's urgent to the day to day, right? So making that shift is really critical. There's all sorts of information online about this, right? There's the Eisenhower matrix, which is just a quadrant system where you can have urgent, urgent and important, et cetera, et cetera. And you can list out your tasks in that. But really the important things are your team, right?

Are they getting enough training? Are they getting enough management? Are you meeting with them on a regular basis? Did you hire the right people in the first place, right? Are you proactive about your hiring process or are you waiting until you absolutely need somebody in a chair and everybody is at max capacity before you're making a hire and then you're making that hire so quickly that you may not be getting the right person? Are you looking at plans a month ahead, a quarter ahead? Are you thinking about things like Where am I going to grow?

Do I know where the money is going to come from next month, right? Even as going as far as planning out a budget or a hiring plan, those are things that are really, really important for your business. Understanding your financials, really knowing, am I making enough profit out of this? Knowing the data from your patients. Is the objective data showing the outcomes that I believe that we are achieving? Those are important things. Urgent things are portal messages, right? And the emails that you're getting and you know, the person knocking on your door when you're trying to be with a patient in tune with them and you have a staff member who doesn't understand that they can actually figure this thing out on their own and they're interrupting you or you even just have those thoughts in your mind about what's going on behind the door.

So I think that's the macro, right? It's shifting to proactive. And we can do that in a number of different ways. Listing all the things that are really important to your business and scheduling time with them and making sure that you don't over schedule that with something that is urgent. You know, even to the point of just actually saying, I'm going to block an hour every day to go through my email and the portal messages and these random tasks. I'm not going to try to do that in between every one of these other appointments because that is taking additional cognitive load, right?

So like those are the things that we can do that I think are critical to shifting to that proactivity over reactivity. And that's kind of like that macro version, I think, of the most important thing that practitioners need to do to avoid that burnout. Yeah. I just want to share that about a month ago, we were together in Mexico and I was sitting in on a session that you were doing with a bunch of these practitioners in the Legacy Mastermind, all talking all about hiring. And what I was really struck with was one is there's a range of people that are being hired by these clinics, right?

So you've got some clinics, they're hiring an operations manager. Sometimes they're hiring a health coach, front desk person. They're hiring an integrator. They're hiring even like someone to help with the bookkeeping. What I really experienced in this three-hour session that was full of gold was that it was amazing to see the practitioners that are further along the line of this, how much wisdom has been accumulated over Mizhaya's you know, correct hires but miss onboardings, you know, and how I wished that every practitioner that I know that I like really want this for them, they read my book, they're fired up about functional medicine, but they're in the burnout experience.

I just wish I could have captured that conversation and taken it out to people because I just know that the pathway to the life that you want is getting the right people in the right seats on the bus. But that is itself a hat. Right? Hiring manager, HR is a hat. And the number of clinics that I see in the industry that have learnt to do that well is very low. And I think that's why we see the situation that we do where most practices are just one practitioner because I can't deal. Just wanted to take a moment to thank our mission partners for helping bring this podcast to you.

As you know, we are in the business of building a network of clinics that can reverse cognitive decline and our partners in that are organizations. You can find out more if you go to goevomed.com and look at the mission partners. But first and foremost, Truenura, if you go to truenura.com, you can get a demo. This is the underlying software that will connect this network of clinics and we have an incredible mastermind session, a lot of cool stuff coming out of that company. You can see here, Fullscript, thanks to Fullscript, with Fullscript, where we're going to help you take advantage of the tools that they have.

to compete with things like ChachiBT and Function Health. It's going to be awesome. Go to goevomed.com slash full script. Big Boost Marketing. If you need patients for your clinic or if you have any marketing needs, goevomed.com slash Big Boost is our premier supporter in that world. And then please also check out Freedom Practice Coaching. Seth Conger is going to be on the podcast very soon, built and scaled a very successful brain health practice and has been instrumental in helping practitioners with the non-clinical aspects of running a practice doing this.

These are our mission partners. These are people that I know well. These are people at the top of their sphere and really excited to bring you the rest of the podcast. Enjoy. Yeah, you know, it's really interesting. A couple things are coming up for me. One, because I'm just coming off of a workshop internally and we have about 30 workshops a week. But this is a special one because we brought our hiring manager into a general workshop with our clients to show what we do, right? What does freedom practice coaching do when we're hiring?

And we hired, we hired 17 people in 2025, right? We're hiring a good amount. And we really have it down to a very proactive science. I mean, we have our hiring plan built for the entire year. We know who we're going to hire and when upon what milestones. Job descriptions are already built for those roles.

Hiring, Onboarding, and Delegation 15:30

We're already starting to do some soft searches. And Molly is her name, our hiring manager. She got it to, you know, kind of pull back the curtain and show all of our clients the exact process we use. It's really interesting. Our average hire takes about 60 days and about 40 hours of time to get it right. Our average onboarding process is a 30 hour onboarding process. We really take the time and the care to do that, but we are setting ourselves up for a higher and higher rate of success with the candidates that are coming in because of putting the time and effort into that.

Now, we're very fortunate, right? Before Molly was on a year ago, that was me. And it was another hat that I had to wear of doing that. And she is spectacular. She's far better at it than I am. But also, we grew to a point where that was a capability for us to have there. Molly was with us in Mexico, and she asked a question which I thought was really interesting to this whole group of clients. And it was, how many of you have regretted firing somebody? the past, like post firing now. and not a single hand went up.

And she said, how many of you have regretted not firing that person sooner? And like a hundred percent of the practitioners hands went up. And I was like, oh my God, this is so interesting because we get very in our head about this. What is going to happen? Is everything going to leak? I wish I had better precautions in place. If I only had two more months or a few more weeks, am I going to be able to hire somebody to replace them? And I think the interesting thing is for all the listeners, No one in the history of hiring has ever regretted firing somebody and saying, man, I shouldn't have done that.

Like, what a bad mistake. But they all wish they had actually done it sooner. Doing it sooner is based on being proactive, right? You know if you're being proactive in that whole process when somebody is not working out. Right? It's when you're being highly reactive that it just goes under the rug for so long. And that goes all the way back. So I think it's just a critical thing to remember that, you know, we're trying to create these beautiful environments, not just for our patients, but also for our employees, because we know they're the ones who are actually going to have likely a bigger impact on that patient getting the outcome they want from a holistic manner.

Yeah. No, I think that's, that's really critical. Um, yeah. And I just want to say that, you know, a lot of the, it seems to me, and this is sort of a side, side conversation, but the process of building the structures that you need to do hiring well, I feel like got a lot easier with AI. For sure. Yeah. I mean, we, you know, we have, I was, I was telling the, telling the group today that it took probably two and a half weeks of dedicated time when I finally was like, We need our entire hiring process out of these documents and into a project management system.

We happen to use ClickUp. It needs to be in ClickUp. It needs to be individualized for the person. We need to record all these videos so that they can learn on their own while also being with the manager and shadowing their job and all this stuff. It took two and a half weeks of dedicated time to build all that. Now I can give somebody that template and they can literally recreate it in a matter of probably an afternoon, and it's really just not that cumbersome any longer to build that. The same thing with the hiring process.

Again, it took us years to perfect that, to get it to a point that it's really good. One thing we give out to our clients is actually a hiring agent built upon all of our documentation that helps them build that job description in the way that we would coach and teach for them to do that. and then how to actually interview those people. It gives them feedback on the interviews from what we have. You know, this is for our legacy clients that we have, and it's tremendously helpful. So yeah, AI has been a huge force multiplier in a practitioner's ability to actually create a really great process that keeps them proactive rather than reactive.

As the business owner running this team and hiring the team, what are the critical things that you think the business owner needs to get good at or needs to, in what place in their life or in what place in their energy do they need to be to wear that CEO hat well? Yeah, I think the first part is, it sounds silly, but like a true want. to be the owner and CEO of her own business. I think so many practitioners buy, and this was the case, James, when back the earlier days, when you and I were also first getting our starts in functional and integrative medicine, there wasn't another option.

You couldn't get a job with somebody, right? So opening a business was the only option, whether you wanted to own a business or not. Today, that's different. We have 50 practitioners right now who are trying to hire a very well-trained and educated functional and integrative medicine practitioner to support them in their well-running clinic. And I think so the first thing is, do I really want to own a business? And do I want to be the CEO of a business? And if you can check that box, then leaning into that and leaning into your education as a business owner and operator, as much as you lean into your education of a of a great practitioner is pretty critical, right?

But that interest has to be there first today more than ever because your team sees right through it if you don't. If you're not interested in being a business owner, if you're not interested in managing people, if you're not interested in getting out and marketing yourself, then your patients and your team will see right through that and they'll understand that, you know, like, well, This person would actually rather be working for somebody else and that just doesn't give the highest confidence.

So I think that's number one, right? Just that you are interested in doing this. And number two is leaning, leaning into those areas. And I think, you know, I'm not just saying this because of freedom of practice coaching. There's other great business coaching groups out there. You've got to have a mentor. You have to have a mentor and a guide who's been there and done that, who can see your blind spots and guide you in a way of how you can be the best business owner and leader because it's not everything all at once.

There are certain things that you need to really get a grip on and master ahead of others. The first is how do I make money? Then how do I make money and make sure there's profit coming out of that? Then how do I replicate that, make sure that that's sustainable? How do I then have a team that can do that instead of just me, right? But then how do I manage that team, continue to up level and hire those individuals? How do I get great at strategic planning? Those are all different skill sets underneath the business umbrella that are very, very, very different than under the skill sets under the clinical umbrella.

And you've got to lean in on that. And luckily there's an incredible amount of information and coaching groups that can help you along that path right now. But I think if you're going to jump in and say, I am going to be a business owner, then you have to have a guide or a mentor or a coach that is going to help you do that. Because there's, you know, there's nobody who's going to say, I'm going to be a functional medicine practitioner and then not get any education and guidance. Yeah. Absolutely.

Well, look, I mean, in order to have a team, one of the things that you have to do is you have to be able to delegate tasks. And I'd love to get your thoughts on what practitioners resist delegating and why and what the implications are for running a smooth, freedom-filled practice. So I think delegation can be quite scary, right? You've just gotten to the point where you've mastered how to do this yourself. And that took a while. And you know how you want it done. And it feels like in many cases, either someone else is not going to get it done the right way.

And you're just going to spend a lot of time working with that individual, or you'd rather just do it yourself. And that only works up to a certain point until you're overwhelmed. And then it just breaks down, right? So the easiest thing with delegation is A, be very, very, very clear about what you want done. When you want it done, right? So the what. When and then why, why you want it done a certain way, right? So there's got to be those things, but it's not about how, right? We don't necessarily dedicate, delegate how we want this done.

You want the person you're delegating to, to do it in the way that they know how to do it. that gets it back to you with those other criteria, right? So it's the what, it's the when, and it's the why, but it's not necessarily the how. Now with some individuals, if it's just like a, if it's literally a standard operating procedure, an SOP that you've been doing for a year that works really well, give them that, give them the how, and say, you just follow this. And if they can't follow that, then we're all lost, right?

Reconnecting to Patient Outcomes 25:00

Like that's pretty low bar. But really thinking about tasks that are a little bit more thought-provoking, that involve some thinking, some creativity, maybe finding a new way around something. You want to trust the individual that you've hired to be able to come up with, how am I going to do this? You want to see how they critically think. You want to see how they approach problems, what they come up with for solutions within a defined mechanism of, what do I want to get back? When do I want to get it back?

And why is this important? Right. And so that's the framework that I usually use. And then I work with that individual upon how they come back. We talk about it. How did you get there? What solutions did you use? Did you think about this? Did you think about that? And that's a learning opportunity for them to then go back the next time and iterate and improve on that. Right. And that's how you coach and mentor somebody. so that you get more and more confident that you can delegate more things to them with less training and that they'll actually bring you back a product that in many cases is actually better than what you could have come up with in the first place.

If you're not getting that back from them, then you'll know that you either have somebody that you have to define the process for or you have the wrong person in the first place. The opposite side of that of what most people do is They delegate a task with very little information, with no specifics, where the individual has no concept of what level of importance this has or why they're doing it in the first place. And then when they bring something back, they also don't get the feedback that they should have.

The individual who was the tasker just says, man, I could have done this. I could have done this better myself. And so next time I'm not even going to give them, I'm going to say this person can't do it. I'm not going to delegate to them and I'm just going to keep that myself. And those are the two camps that people usually live in. I prefer the ability to really help grow and train people through effective delegation. Yeah, beautiful. Well, I see that and I see that that is a muscle that needs to be built and certainly like a process that you can get better at over time.

You know, one of the sad things about our world is that a lot of times, you know, you train as a doctor or a clinician, you have your conventional training, then maybe a bit later on you come to functional medicine. It takes a while to get good at that. Then you start your own business. You know, there's not a lot of time, you know, there's not time to build up those systems, but there's so much that is necessary if you've learned to do that, to build something that's going to really sustain because ultimately, you know, we need to create a legacy of this medicine.

And, you know, I think there's a lot that we can do in that. You know, one of the things you said to me that I wanted to just check in on is talking about deliberate reconnection as a leadership practice. And I'd love for you to test on that because that was something that came up in that conversation about the power of reconnection as a topic that I'm very interested in always, but particularly right now. What do you mean when you say deliberate reconnection? Yeah. So deliberate reconnection is really when you have become disconnected to the reason for which you started this thing in the first place.

Right. And that is usually, I want to get patients better results on my own terms and I want to hear about those results. Right. Like that's typically why people start their own business in the functional medicine space. It's very, very rare. If I ever hear someone says, I want to make a fortune, that's why I started a functional medicine clinic. So, you know, I think what happens is when practices become successful for whatever reason, whether they did this by process and had a really well done marketing and sales process and then great operational systems and they hired wonderful people and they got themselves all the way up to the CEO or even the medical director in the business, or it was by happenstance.

You know, they had a phenomenal background and really good reputation. So they got a lot of referrals and those referrals referred other people and it grew that way. And they kind of stumbled with the systems and the marketing and this and that, but still the practice grew to a certain point. In either case, people start pulling back from the day to day because the day to day becomes monotonous. Even though that's why you started the practice, now all of a sudden seeing 40 hours worth of patients every single week becomes a little challenging, right?

So you pull back from that, you get into these different seats, and next thing you know, you're not connecting with the patients at the level that you used to. My story with that is after, you know, selling Carolina HealthSpan Institute, Back in 2019, um, and joining forces with freedom practice coaching, I thought that, wait a second, we have 200 practices here. I'm going to get 200 times the amount of great feelings of all the people we are helping, right? Cause I'm just literally getting this exponential effect from all of these practices that we're working with.

And after about a year and a half, I was like, wait, what, why am I not feeling this like. passion, this like mission driven thing that we're doing. And it's because I was not in touch with the end user. I had no idea what was actually happening. I was seeing some numbers on a screen. I was seeing literally thousands of people with, you know, seeing their MSQ scores improve, but I had never had a conversation with one of them. And I had an opportunity, we have a podcast, FreedomRx podcast, and I had an opportunity to interview one of our practitioners, Bryce Applebaum, and a patient that I sent to him.

And it was this like, almost knocked me out of my seat moment. of getting to hear the end result of a patient's total transformation from a practitioner that we got to help on the business side. And it really brought me back to how important it is to be in touch with those outcomes. And I think it's literally the best thing that you can do to keep yourself going. To defend against burnout is to consistently hear about clinical wins, consistently hear about what is going on with the patients, not just This patient is mad because they couldn't get an appointment this fast or this patient's mad because we didn't return their portal message within 48 hours, right?

That's what we hear as business owners. We hear all of the complaints. We hear all of the hardships. We hear all of the operational breakdowns, all of the leakage. And we have to readjust and get back into the wins that we're actually creating. And that's the easiest thing to forget about. So celebrate those wins systematically, even give it as a task. Delegate this task to your team to come up with wins every single week and put them in Slack or bring them to the team all hands meeting on Monday morning, right?

And if they can't find them, it's probably just from a lack of tracking, which is a hole that needs to be filled to ensure that you guys are following up with patients to make sure that they're getting what they wanted to get out of the agreement you had, whatever agreement you had with them financially to get to the results they wanted to achieve. Awesome. Yeah, I think that's so critical. And I totally resonate with that. And, you know, getting reconnected to mission and purpose through other people's transformational stories is mission critical for sure.

All right. So I want to just ground us to finish here, Seth. You know, we started off talking about the scheduling and love to just end there because I'd love to just get your take on schedule design because ultimately most practitioners, it seems like this might be something that they could implement after listening to this podcast and be on a pathway towards everything

Schedule Design and Time Ownership 33:00

else you've spoken about, which may seem a little bit intimidating, but tell us your best practices for organizing your schedule. And I'm interested in too, because I feel myself Switch tasking and I'm in a, I'm in a very like exciting, creative moment in my life where a lot is a lot of cool stuff is happening. I think it's a very exciting time for the functional medicine movement generally. But I'm finding myself switching between things and wishing that I could be more productive with my days.

Yeah, so, you know, when we talk about the macro, that's shifting from reactive to proactive. In the micro case, this is what are you doing on a daily and weekly basis? And how is that affecting your energy levels? How is that affecting your productivity? And how is that, you know, kind of emanating out to the rest of what's going on in your world? We lose control of our schedules quite quickly for a lot of reasons. Some of that is personality. Some of that is a belief that other people's time is more valuable than ours.

Some of that is not being efficient with the time that we actually use. And we see that all the time. There's a lot of different reasons for this, right? But I think that there's some critical things with the schedule that will help everybody. So first of all, none of us are getting away from this low value, but semi-critical block of time that we need every single day to literally just answer notifications, right? Notifications can be coming from your internal Slack, it can be coming from your portal messages, it can be coming from email, it could be your text messages.

When people don't have a system for that, it pervades everything and they are answering those things in between appointments, which is not good for the answering and it's not good for the appointments and it's not good for anything. And we end up actually like adding up probably two or three more two or three x more time than it would take to answer all of those notifications if we did them in like two blocks so i really like having a buffer time blocked into the schedule right so whatever your whatever your day looks like if you can have a buffer time midday and you can have a buffer time at the end of the day.

The end of the day one cannot be sandwiched in with anything else right it's the last thing that you do there's not an appointment after it if there's an appointment after it you're just going to prepare for that appointment it's got to be the last thing and that's kind of like a clearing session right you're just kind of like clearing the day wrapping things up, looking at the next day and saying, what do I have? Finishing up any emails and things so you're not bringing that home or not thinking about it until after dinner.

It's just a really nice buffer block. If you can afford to do that midday as well, it will completely change your day and how you're functioning because you're You're just not thinking about all of these different things. You know, this is the time when I respond to other people that are not actually on my schedule. That's number one. Number two is protect deep work times, right? And deep work is the important things that you have and whether important is I'm writing a book right now or important is I'm trying to build a new marketing funnel or important is I'm doing research on my patience and I'm trying to figure that out or important happens to be I'm in a coaching, I'm in a coaching group right now and they've told me I've got to work on my ability to communicate and I need some dedicated time to that.

So whatever that deep work time is, protect that above and beyond anything else that you have, right? Because everything will try to encroach on that. It'll look like this really shiny big block of time in your schedule and you'll want to do reactive things in it. But it's not the reactive things that move you forward. It's reactive things that keeps you treading water. It's that proactive, protected, deep work time that actually allows you to move forward. That's the important non-urgent, right?

Exactly. Exactly. And the bigger team you have. the more opportunity you think you have to do that, but then the more people that you have to answer to, right? So it's critical to protect that at every single stage in your business, no matter what, because that is a critical time. So for instance, I don't take meetings on Thursdays. Until the very end of the day, the last block from three to four PM, I'm on Mountain Time, we have a leadership meeting and that's it. no other meetings during the day.

And I'm pretty ruthless with that because that's when I get my best work done. And if I'm not doing that work, who else is, right? And if I'm, if I'm asking my team members to do that, then like, and I'm not doing it, then they're not going to do it either. So I think those are those really, really critical pieces. The other thing is if you have, and I think this is one of the most valuable exercises I've ever done. a real time audit, like not just looking at how was my schedule, but how valuable are each of these time blocks across like a two week period?

And then do I like doing them or do I not like doing them? Are these single dollar value signs or are they four dollar value signs? Is it the high end sushi restaurant or is it the takeout place down the street? And then do I actually like doing it? Because sometimes there's $4 sign things that I don't like doing. And sometimes there's $2 sign things that I do like doing. And looking at this and understanding where am I spending my time in an average two week period of time. And then looking out a quarter from now and saying, how can I adjust my schedule proactively?

Because my schedule may be filled up for the next three, four, five, six, eight weeks, right? But if I look out 12 weeks from now, I can make changes in my schedule to ensure that more of the high value things that I like to do are on my schedule. Doing that proactively will allow the rest of the schedule to fall in around that to ensure that you're doing the things that are of the highest value that you actually like doing for your business. And I think those are the most critical things. I mean, we actually teach a lot on time optimization and time ownership really.

And I think it's. It's one of the most critical things that you can do as a business owner. We teach all sorts of stuff on that and run workshops on it and entire curriculum sessions. But those three things I think could help anybody literally in a tax improvement in how they're utilizing their time. All right, well, take that advice, use it and build upon it. There's a lot of wisdom inside Seth's brain. It comes from a lot of experience, but also there's a hive mind of thinking and experience and connection that is being created.

I'm proud to be part of it with what's happening at Freedom Practice Coaching. I think that there's some really, really exciting things on the horizon because getting groups of practices to really own this type of thinking and having true success. I mean, that's the way to create legacy, you know, to whatever comes next. So if you are interested in finding out more about working with Seth, being in the community, go to goevomed.com slash FPC. There are two options on that page. You can schedule a call with someone if you want to go further into some of these conversations, have a strategy session.

Closing Thoughts and Upcoming Summit 40:30

There's also something that Seth created called the scalability assessment there. And, you know, that really hones in on all of the different areas. We talked a lot about hiring today and protecting your schedule, but that's just one area of what it takes to run a successful practice. And what you created with that scalability assessment, I think, really gives practitioners, even just by going through it, a good idea of where some missing pieces might be, where some blind spots are. So I highly recommend that everyone go through that process.

It's free. You can have a session off the back of it to sort of see where you are with things. We've got a very, very exciting future ahead of us. And it really looks like building this network and bringing capacity to the network so that we can reverse these chronic conditions at scale. And that's what I'm involved in. That's why I'm here. That's why I'm doing the work that I'm doing. And I know that you listening to this at home can be a powerful node in that network. So thanks so much for tuning in, Seth.

Thanks so much for coming back regularly. We love having you as a guest here on The Evolution of Medicine. I think you're hitting into some crucial pieces. And if you have questions, feel free to get in touch. You can book a concierge call with me. We can have a discussion as well. Go evomed.com slash concierge. Great to have you here on the show. Excited to share, you know, as some things come together later this year and look forward to the next conversation. James, always good to be here. This is the Evolution of Medicine podcast.

I'm your host, James Maskell. We've been here with Seth Conger. He is the Chief Operating Officer of Freedom Practice Coaching. And thanks so much for tuning in, and we'll see you next time. So that was the podcast. What an epic session. And just a reminder that coming up in April, we will have version two of our Reversing Alzheimer's Summit. And we're going to have updates on some of the new studies from Dr. Bredesen and be charting a path forward for the reversal of Alzheimer's and cognitive decline.

Thank you so much for tuning in to the Evolution of Medicine podcast. We'll be back again next week and thanks so much for tuning in and we'll see you next time.