We've been addressing an issue we're having with handling phone calls in our practice lately. A staff member is having a difficult time thinking on her feet when a patient poses a question that isn't covered in the scripts in our front desk manual. You can try all you want, but you'll never cover every possible scenario that patients can present you with, now matter how many scripts you write. Our staff member wants to do a good job, but she freezes when presented with the need to ad lib. We've been doing role-playing to try to help her see where she gets stuck and to try to teach her how to respond to what the patient is saying. She's pretty stressed over the whole thing, even though we are willing to work with her on it. Today, when I asked her how she felt it was coming along, she told me she'd rather leave than be a negative in the practice.
I told her that we are all negatives in the practice in some way. Each one of us has something about us that would be better if it were different. I tend to be impatient at times, I don't like it and I'm sure that whoever I'm feeling impatient with doesn't like it either, but I try to control myself. Most of the time I do, but every now and then, I'm a negative, and I know it. We all have something. On the other hand, we all have lots of positives. I told her that the important thing is to make sure the positives outweigh the negatives, and that they're more important. You can also try to use your positives to help you work around or make up for your negatives. For instance, that staff member may not do well with ad-libbing, but she can learn techniques to help with that. She can take advantage of our team's generous spirits and allow them to work with her on it. Finally, she can decide that she's going to focus on learning how to overcome her negative and stop being self-involved about it. You see, when you keep thinking about how bad you feel about having a negative, you become kind of self-involved about it. Open up and let yourself be helped so everyone can move on.
Success is largely supported by the desire to succeed. Desire is born within. You can't teach desire, you can't force it either. People desire that which is important to them. Team members with a desire to succeed are a positive. Team members who don't really care about the success of the practice, their co-workers or their own success are a negative. Successfully dealing with negatives takes commitment and sincerity. Positives overcoming negatives, that's what it's all about.
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