Motivation is the driving force behind your business. The more motivated you are, the more productive you will be. The more productive you are, the more successful your business will become. It is quite simple. Once you lose that motivation though, your business will become stagnant or even begin to regress.

Motivation is what is necessary to keep the momentum going in your practice!

It saddens me time and time again when I see the fear, limiting beliefs, and small failures eat away the motivation from my nurse practitioner sisters and brothers. Often times, the motivation decreases to the point where their business never takes off because it lost too much momentum. It crashes and burns before it even had a chance to reach cruising altitude.

Think of motivation as the jet fuel required to get a jet off the ground and in the air. It takes a significant amount of fuel over a short period of time for a passenger jet to get off the ground and up to cruising altitude, but once there, the jet will use that same amount of fuel for 1 hour of cruising. It is the same as your motivation when starting and maintaining your practice.  

It takes a large amount of motivation to get started when you open your first medical practice. You are doing something you have never done before, you become fearful, and there is a large question mark about the future of this new endeavor in the back of your mind. Many people do not make it past this stage. Their fuel tank of motivation was too low to start with. They never even got off the ground.

If there is enough motivation in the tank though, then they will lift off the ground and their business will officially get started. The problem here is that it takes another large reserve of motivation to get that business to cruising altitude. The process of take-off to 30,000 feet of elevation in your business requires you to stay motivated. You will hit turbulence on your way to cruising altitude, so you better have the motivation to get through it. If you do not, the turbulence will take you down. This stage of your business is CRITICAL to its success. You must get that business to cruising altitude and on autopilot, it is the first real milestone of your business after all…

Once your business is at cruising altitude, then it does not require as much motivation to stay there unless you want to continue growing. Be aware though, that you must have enough fuel in the tank to maintain your altitude, if you do not, you will begin either a slow or fast decline depending on how much motivation you have left. Everyone has seen the successful business fail. One of the main reasons is because the owner and management lost the motivation to keep it going. Do not become one of the failed business statistics on account of you losing motivation.

This all begs the question: How do you maintain your motivation?

Well, everyone’s motivations for starting and maintaing a business are different, so that is ultimately up for you to decide, but here is my list:

1. Financial independence: I love what I do, but there are times that I would just like to take a couple months off and not worry about my finances. This is my main motivating factor. I want to be financially free to do whatever I want, whenever I want.
2. Making an impactful difference on the lives of others: Seeing the difference I make in the lives of my men’s health patients is very rewarding. I save marriages and lives through my men’s health practice. I also LOVE seeing how many nurse practitioners I have helped start their own business and build a more fruitful and free life. It brings me great joy to see the impact I have made on my fellow nurse practitioner sisters and brothers.
3. Improving the life of my family and community: My hard work not only improves myself mentally, physically, and financially, but is also improves the lives of my family and community.
4. Creating a legacy: I came from nothing and I want to make sure that my children inherit wealth from me when I pass, not a burden. I want the world to be a better place after I leave.
5. Telling the “man” to shove it: I hate what business has become in this country, especially healthcare. It is a for-profit model that is operated by SHARKS that do not care about the patients and especially do not care about the nurse practitioner. I want to build a large group of elite nurse practitioners that can tell the sharks NO MORE. Let them drown; we should not be feeding them cheap labor any longer!

These are my 5 personal motivating factors. While not inclusive of my motivating factors, they are amongst my top motivations and I would reckon they are many of yours as well. The point is that you know what is keeping you motivated, but maybe you just need to write them down and be thinking about them often.

When you start your practice, you need to identify what your motivators are so you can ensure they are strong enough to keep the fuel tank full. If you are already operating a business and are at cruising altitude, then identify the motivators that will keep you going. If you are stuck, then figure out what else could motivate you to continue to grow.

Motivation is your momentum friends. Never let is run out. If you do, you could fail. Always stay motivated, it will propel you higher and higher and propel your business to success!