For several months, Brianna Rhue, OD, FAAO, FSLS, has been moving her frogs around. That’s both literal and metaphorical, and has its roots in what a colleague told her several years ago. The co-founder of Dr. Contact Lens recalls speaking to a colleague who suggested that she create a list of three things to do each day. Dr Rhue, who had just had her second baby, already had a mile-long to-do list. So that piece of advice gnawed at her for three years.
Then she began to think about it differently. If the three things were not just things to get done, but something more impactful to move big goals forward, the concept had more validity. She combined that advice with key concepts from the Brian Tracy book, Eat That Frog. “If someone put a frog on a plate in front of you and said, ‘By 5 p.m., you have to swallow the frog,’ there are different ways to approach it. You could sit there and look at that frog all day long and worry about it. Or you could get it over with first thing,” she says.
So she found three tiny purple frogs to bring this to life. Each represents a task: a hard thing, an easy thing and a thing that brings you joy or someone else joy.
GOALS THAT MOVE THE PROCESS FORWARD
“At the end of the week, you’ll have accomplished five difficult things, five easy things and five things that brought you or someone else joy. At the end of the month, that’s 20 hard things, 20 easy things and 20 things that brought you or someone else joy. Each of these helps move you closer to whatever goal you’ve got because it moves obstacles out of the way or smoothes the ground for the next step,” she says.
She sets her frog goals when she comes into her office every morning. She moves the frogs to one side of her desk, and as she accomplishes each frog, she gets to move the frog to the other side. She’s heard from others who set their goals at night for the next day or determine them on their drive into work, for example.
At the Dr. Contact Lens Booth P1249 at Vision Expo East, visitors can pick up frogs as well as a copy of a new book that Dr. Rhue and Dr. Tabiza created: The Eye Pitch Book. This workbook and guide identifies the steps that doctors can take when they are listening to a pitch for products or services from a vendor to help support a great business decision over an emotional one.
VENDORS AND DOCTORS: DON’T TALK PAST EACH OTHER
Dr Rhue is a little unusual in some circles. She’s a practicing OD, and she’s also a vendor herself. When she’s with other doctors, she hears the frustration of her colleagues who feel like they’re being pitched so many goods and services and they don’t know what makes sense for their businesses. And when she’s with vendors, the conversations sometimes turn to doctors’ lack of business savvy. Both stereotypes –that vendors only want to make the sale and that doctors are poor business people – are not helpful.
“We are very smart people,” says Dr. Rhue. “We invested so much time, money and brain power in our education, and we need to continue to apply those investments into our practices,” she says. She’ll speak up at vendor meetings and remind her colleagues there that doctors are indeed smart and savvy; they just need a little help.
“When you’re in clinical practice, there is no risk-taking. We approach our patients with analysis and evidence and training, and we make our recommendations based on that. But business growth is all about smart risk-taking,” she says. Yet it’s hard to switch mindsets on a dime. If a vendor comes in during a short break between patients to pitch an idea that could help the practice grow, that may not be the time or place where the doctor is or can be open to hearing ideas let alone make a decision.
LEVERAGE THE PITCH
Yet the ideas themselves are abundant. “There are so many great products and services out there that can help a practice grow,” she says. Of course, using Dr. Contact Lens to help reinsert the doctor in the contact lens purchasing process is one of them. So The Eye Pitch Book uses that as an example of points to consider and questions to ask. Then that same model of an approach can be used for every vendor presentation.
Dr. Rhue suggests that doctors take the book with them as they stop by booths at shows. Not every great idea needs to be implemented right away. That would be overwhelming for the doctor and their team. But doctors can select an area to evolve in. And some changes can be implemented fairly quickly.
That’s where the frogs come back into play. By moving toward your bigger goals each day with smaller steps, there’s always a new frog and new area of opportunity. What, are you waiting for your frogs to move themselves?
Read another story about Dr. Brianna Rhue from WO here.
