What Do Dating and Building Your Practice Have in Common?

While cleaning up my files this week I ran across a report on “Conscious Dating.” As I flipped through it, it struck me that most of the ten principles for successful dating also apply to building your practice.

1. Know who you are and what you want. Understand your strengths and weaknesses and your values. Target the clients you enjoy working with. Choose a specialty that is aligned with your values and where you feel that you can make a contribution by building your practice

2. Learn how to get what you want Develop creative strategies and action plans. “When you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” Be among the most successful 3% of businesses with a written plan.

3. Be the “chooser” Take initiative and responsibility for your outcomes. Don’t react to what, or who, chooses you. Seek to create what you want in your life. Use your initial interview to be sure the client fits with your practice.

4. Balance your heart with your head Make your choices consciously, with your vision, values, goals, and requirements in mind. Do not feel like you must accept every client that walks through your door.

5. Be ready and avialable for commitment If you are trying to answer calls, read email or handle other matters while interviewing a prospective client, you telescope the message that you are too busy to give that person your full attention. They may not remember what you did but they will remember the way they made you feel.

6. Use the “law of attraction” Attract the clients that you want by developing yourself and living the life that you want. “Build it and they will come.” Talk to your ideal client from your website, your special report, your blog – all the materials you produce for clients.

7. Gain relationship knowledge and skills Prepare for ideal clients by learning about business practices and systems and improving your business skills. Take more risks. Read about business practices. Get business coaching. Take business classes and workshops.

8. Create a support community Isolated professionals become lonely in their businesses. Don’t travel this journey alone. Find business friends and connections, as well as developing a network that will support you in finding clients.

9. Practice assertiveness To get what you really want, you need to say “No” to what you don’t want. Take care of yourself in your business by learning to identify and enforce your boundaries so you avoid burnout and frustration.

10. Be a “successful single” The best way to a successful business is to be a happy, successful professional living the life that you really want. Pursue your goal of a building your practice while living life fully in the present and letting go of your attachment to future outcomes.

Ok, so maybe number ten is a stretch, but don’t you agree that the other principles apply to building your practice?