The Practitioner's Journey » practice growth tools

How (and Why) To Set Up Facebook Places for Your Practice

Dan — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 13:59:51 +0000

Hi all – if you want to skip the ‘why’, just scroll down for the how-to part. It’s easy. There’s also a clinic sign we made at the bottom that you can download in PDF… -Dan

Facebook has become one of the largest sources of traffic to our clinic website. And the more traffic we get from it, the more we play with it. And the more we play with it, the greater the potential seems.

We recently set up the clinic as a Facebook “Place”. While a “Page” is like a Facebook profile for your business, Places is a location-based side of Facebook. It lets people use their phone or mobile device to “check-in” – to say to their other FB friends, “Hey – this is where I am, right now.”

How Places Can Help Your Practice

1. Traffic and Awareness

When someone checks in to a Place, an entry goes into their FB feed. It look something like this:

My FB friends (or friends of friends, etc, depending on privacy settings) can then click on the clinic link to take them to our Page, or they can comment on my location, or Like it. I can also tag any FB friends who happen to be with me at the time – all of which serves to basically send the clinic name and link spinning around Facebook in one form or another. That brings people to our page, where they can Like the clinic, or visit our website. All of which trickles down into someone eventually showing up.

2. Deals

Places also offers you the ability to create “deals” – essentially rewards to your clients for checking in when they arrive at your practice. There are four kinds:

We haven’t used any deals yet – I’m not sure they’re a fit for every practice – but we may test it out. Regardless, I’m intrigued – if anyone’s tried it, let us know in the comments.

How To Set Up Facebook Places

This is one of those things that’s really easy, but isn’t necessarily intuitive. You’ll need to be at your practice with your mobile device to get started. Here are the instructions I used. They worked just fine, although the last step of merging our clinic Page and Place seems to be taking awhile. But it only took a few minutes to get it all up and running.

(For those of you really into this stuff, merging Places and Pages seems to be in flux, with various pros and cons, including problems with multiple locations. Might be worth waiting a little while to merge, but there’s no reason to not set up your Place anyway. If this all seems like Greek to you, just go ahead and set up your Place, and forget about the merging part for now. )

A Sign for Your Waiting Room

I’m not convinced that there’s a heap of traffic in our waiting room that will check in via phone, but I’m curious. I thought I’d put up a sign in the clinic letting people know they can do it. Here’s a generic version of the one we made – you can download the PDF here if you want to print it out and do the same, or drop in your own name or logo.

Growing Your Practice With Words: 6 Steps to Great Writing That Gets Done

Dan — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 14:56:09 +0000

It’s amazing to me how many of our practice building efforts involve writing. Blog posts. Website content. Articles for newspapers and magazines. Fliers. Patient forms. Letters. Facebook posts. Email newsletters. The list goes on.

Of course, we like that medium, but I don’t think that’s the whole picture. I see writing as crucial for any practice. From the signs on your walls to the content of your website, your clients are experiencing your practice not just through their interaction with you, but through the written word.

For some, though, the importance doesn’t matter – the empty page is still a source of dread. It’s too big, too hard, too overwhelming. Many a blog, website and newsletter never see the light of day because of that dread.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

I want to share with you our basic process for writing short-to-medium length content like a blog post or article. I’ve broken it into multiple steps for simplicity, but the truth is you can do all of these in a very short time. (Total time for this post: Under 40 minutes)

Before we get to the steps, though, two principles to carry along the way:

Aim for Short

Long is too hard, too scary, and too costly. Most of all though, people don’t read long – if anything, it scares them away. We think long because we spent years in school being taught to write a certain number of words instead of just trying to deliver the message. Time to start losing that programming.

If you’re struggling with getting started (or getting finished), help yourself by deciding that you never need to write more than three paragraphs. That’s it. You might write more, but don’t set yourself up for failure at the start.

Eliminate Yourself…at Least at First

One of the easiest mistakes to make is to talk about yourself and what you do when you really should be talking about other people’s problems and how to solve them. Yes, you do nutritional counseling. But there isn’t a client in the world who has a nutritional counseling problem. Nor do any of them have a gluten or lactose intolerance problem. They have digestive pains so severe they can’t work. Or a skin condition so bad they can’t go out in public.

If you struggle with this, try simply refusing to use words like “I”, or “we” or mentioning your tools or modalities in your first draft (more on first drafts below). Focus on the other person’s problem, and only mention what you do in the context of solving it.

Now for the writing. I’ve listed some rough times for this post, just to give you a sense that the process is actually fairly brief.

Step 1. The Outline – Put 1-3 Ideas on The Page (2 Minutes. Plus pondering over breakfast.)

I’m big on outlining. Once the actual writing starts, I’m easily distracted…oooh! shiny!…by other ideas. For this post, I wrote down six phrases to help with the first draft:

Short
Not about you
First draft free-flow
Wait
Rewrite
Help

That’s it: that was the skeleton. It changed a bit, as you can see, but that’s all you need to get started. If you have trouble with a skeleton, try this generic one to start:

A health complaint and its symptoms
What causes it
Solution(s)

Step 2. Write The No-Editing Allowed Draft (20 minutes)

Using your skeleton from above, just write a couple of sentences in each part of your framework. That’s it. If you need more, write it, but don’t be obsessed with quantity. Remember: short is usually better. Just fill in the blanks.

Also, do not edit what you’re writing. Give yourself permission to just free-flow it right from your brain to the page. Fear not: no one is going to see this draft. Get over it.

Step 3.Wait (Optional, 0 minutes)

Ideally, I’ll wait at least overnight after a first draft. I count that as zero time, because there’s no work involved.

What’s going on here is you’re creating a fresh perspective. A new set of eyes. It’s hard to rewrite and edit what you’ve just written. You can’t get a good sense of flow, and you skip over the same errors time and time again without seeing them.

So take a break. You don’t have to, but it’ll make your next step easier, and your final product far better.

Step 4. Rewrite (10 minutes)

With your fresh eyes and a good night’s sleep, take a spin through what you wrote. At this stage, I’m mostly looking for flow – does it make sense? Is there a clear idea? Is it useful?

This is where things start to stitch together. A clunky bunch of sentences starts to tell a story. You can’t write well without rewriting – don’t skip this part.

Step 5. Get Someone Else To Read It (Optional, 0 minutes)

It’s hard to see your own mistakes. Get someone to take a spin through and point out obvious errors and stuff that just doesn’t make sense.

Step 6. Polish (5 minutes)

Do a final tweak based on comments from step 5. Read through, do a spell check.

That’s it! Not counting the optional overnight waiting and your friend’s read through, you should be able to do a short piece in under an hour. If you want to go shorter and faster, you can use steps 1, 2, 4 and 6, and do even briefer post or email newsletter content in just 15 minutes.

The real key parts for moving forward, I think, are the outline and first draft. You need to give yourself permission to just go. Write it down like you’d say it aloud. Don’t worry about spelling, grammar, or about self-editing. That voice in your head that’s saying, “You suck at writing,” is in everyone’s head at some point. Forget about it. It goes away as you work through the steps, and as you write more.

Writing is, like everything else, a skill. It’s a muscle that grows with exercise, and the stronger it gets, the more power it has. Give yourself a chance to build it up.

How to Create Your Practice Marketing Plan

Dan — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 15:25:53 +0000

Note: Apologies if any of you are receiving this twice. Strange things afoot on the site this week. -Dan

With this year closing out and next year looming, we thought we’d share a couple of things. First, a look at our marketing plan for next year, and second, a 4-step process for creating your own.

Part I: Our Marketing Plan for 2011

This isn’t the final state of our plan – more on that in Part II, below, but it’ll give you an idea of what makes our marketing tick.

I’ve chunked these pieces into functional areas because it seemed easier to read that way, but that’s only part of the actual plan – what we do next with this list is the important part.

PRINT MEDIA

Advertising: In 6 magazines / newspapers. We negotiate the rates for a whole year so that the prices are little cheaper. (Monthly)
Yellow pages: Our ad still continues to deliver new patients, even though the directory itself seems to be dying a slow death. We’ll continue it for another year. (Once)
Articles: Health editorials for 3 local publications. We’ll also approach two other publications to see if we can contribute regular health articles. (Monthly)

ONLINE

Blog posts: We post a short article each week. Sometimes a repost of a print article, which reduces the workload. (Weekly)
Website optimization: Check Google rankings each month. Tweak content as required. (Monthly)
Local search: Update / tweak Google Places listing. (Monthly)
Google Adwords: We run some Google ads, but the results are minimal in our area because there’s not enough search volume. It’s cheap, though, and pretty much on autopilot for now. (Ongoing)
Facebook: We’re dabbling in social media. Right now our blog posts are submitted automatically to our FB fan page. Still uncertain as to whether this will get more attention this year, although I’m seeing it as increasingly important. (Weekly)

PATIENT OUTREACH

Email newsletter: Goes out the second week of each month. Usually has a health tip, recipe, book review and a link to our events calendar. (Monthly)
Print newsletter: Sent out in the spring and fall. This could be the last year for this one. It costs us nearly $1000 each time, while the email newsletter is less than $20. It never fails to bring in far more than it costs, though. (Twice)
New Patient Bailouts: Each week we contact new patients who missed their first appointment for some reason. It’s a “crack” that a lot of patients fell through last year. Our processes were good for existing patients, but there was a “limbo” where a lot of people ended up if they never made it to their first visit. (Weekly)
“Patients We’re Thinking About”: We’ve had some really great success with this. When a patient pops into mind. “Hey. I wonder what happened to so-and-so?” we email them to check in. Works far better than our reactivation letters, which we’re dropping this year. (Ongoing)

PROFESSIONAL REFERRALS

Self Care for Health Care Pros: Monthly. We’ll be offering free yoga classes to anyone in the health care industry, courtesy of the clinic. We don’t offer yoga, but will pay for a local studio to provide the class. Health care pros of any stripe can drop in for a free morning yoga class. (Monthly to start)
Referral letters: Print letters to our existing referrers with updates on new services, and which also include 15-minute complimentary visit cards. (Twice – spring/fall)
Comp card distribution: We drop off 15-minute complimentary visit cards to health care professionals (and related) who currently don’t refer. (Ongoing)
Lunch meetings: “Doing lunch” with a colleague or new face in town. Far less schmoozy than it sounds – mostly about connecting with friends in health care. (Monthly)

EVENTS, PUBLIC OUTREACH

Movie Nights: We show a health-related movie at the clinic. Free organic popcorn and tea. (Quarterly)
After 5: Networking events hosted in different business by our local Chamber of Commerce. Cheese. Crackers. Wine. Schmoozing. (Monthly)
“Weed Walks”: Educational walks about local medicinal herbs. Hosted by another business, with Tara guiding. (Twice in season)
Info sessions: In-clinic evening presentations on a local health issue. (Quarterly)
Speaking Gigs: Presentations to local service clubs, health groups, special interest groups. (Quarterly)
Cooking Classes: Held at a local grocery store that has a community kitchen space. (Quarterly)
Health Fairs/Trade Shows: As many as four this year, depending on which communities offer them in our area. (Quarterly)
Corporate Wellness: We’ll be kicking this off in 2011 with a “lunch and learn” for public school teachers. They fit our demographic well, and have great insurance/benefit coverage. (Ongoing)
“Big Public Event”: One free public event centered around a health issue. It’ll be in a larger public venue, with speakers, etc. This year will be on either environmental medicine or cancer (or both, given the connection). (Once)

PART II: Creating Your Own Plan

Before you begin: You don’t have to do all these parts at the same time, but it’s helpful if you can – the whole process should take you less than three hours. If that’s too much, do steps 1&2 together, then 3&4 later.

You’ll find it easier, funner, and less stressful to work with someone on this. Any colleague, friend, family member who’s bright, optimistic, and has some marketing sense will do. Another practitioner, regardless of their area of focus, is a great bet. Tara and I do this together, but there have been great ideas that have come from sitting down with other practitioners.

Regardless, doing it alone can suck. Be wary.

1. List Your Ideas (30 minutes)

We start with a big brainstorm, firing out ideas, new and old, and just list them. No critiques at this stage. The goal here is to capture everything you’ve done last year, plus any new ideas that might be circulating.

In 0ur case, new stuff was about 20% of the list at the most. I think we could probably have upped that by getting more creative, but much of our stuff is ongoing, and has been for some time.

2. Identify the Keepers (3o minutes)

You’ll know if you’ve done a good job in the first step if you’re staring at a list of marketing ideas that you’ll never accomplish next year. Now the job is to identify what’s actually going to happen. Here are a couple of criteria for picking from your list.

What Works: What worked for you over the past year? What didn’t? Our reactivation letters, for example, worked okay, but not well enough to keep going. What do you think will work?

What You Like: Marketing you like to do is marketing that tends to actually happen. If you like connecting with people, then make sure that your list has lots of it. If you like online work, then make it part of your plan.If you’re excited about it and it won’t break the bank, then keep it – anything you’re jazzed about is worth a shot.

For each “keeper”, identify how often it will happen. Daily, weekly, monthly, etc.

If you’re having trouble prioritizing the list, use our Low Hanging Fruit process to help you identify what’s going to get you the most return for the least effort.

3. Step Back and Take a Look (30 minutes)

Once you’ve got a list together, stand back and have a look. Is it doable? Sustainable? Enjoyable? Before you lock in (step 4), take a look at the list with an eye for the following:

New things: You can only tackle so much change in a year. If you’re planning on launching a new blog, an email newsletter, a Facebook fan page and a bunch of speaking gigs for the very first time, make sure you’re not biting off more than you can chew. Unless your practice is brand new, you should see a reasonable amount of “old” on the list.

Gaps: It’s important to do marketing you like, but are there any big holes? Are you completely ignoring online marketing, for example, because you don’t like it? If that’s the case, you may want to consider filling that gap by having someone else help with the load. Are you hiding from the world? You might need to start getting out there and connecting with people face-to-face.

Overall balance: A small, sustained effort is better than some big noise for two weeks and then nothing. You can probably do more than you think, but can you really do everything on the list? You might need help, or you might need to cull your list further.

In the past, when Tara was in solo practice, the things that generally got slashed were the public events – speaking gigs, health fairs and networking, etc. Our plan then was to not have more than 1-2 evening events in a month in order to keep family time balanced. Now that we have more help, a lot of that stuff is coming back online.

4. Calendar Everything (60 minutes)

One of the hardest parts of growing a practice is to actually get stuff done. It’s easy to fall into the trap of lofty goal-setting and strategic planning without a plan for doing the actual work.

Everything on your list should end up on a calendar. You can use paper or digital, just make sure it’s a medium you’re comfortable with. If you’re going to write a health article once a month, for example, then pick a consistent day that you can make that happen, and stick it in your calendar 12 times.

Even things that are “ongoing” should get a specific deliverable day.

There may be things that you don’t have dates for yet. We don’t know, for example, when all the local health fairs are yet. Instead, the calendar gets an entry to call our local municipal office and find out.

The End Result

The outcome of all this should be a calendar that you can easily see your marketing efforts month by month. I have a digital version of ours on my computer, but it also will go on a large office calendar where everyone at the clinic can see what’s happening.

Happy growing!

-Dan

How to Pick The Low Hanging Fruit in Your Practice

Dan — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 11:19:52 +0000

One of the ideas in The Practitioner’s Journey is that complexity is what gets us bogged down. We often know what to do in practice. We just don’t know what to do next.

You’ve probably been there. You take a look at the pile on your desk, or the to-do list, or you scroll through your mental file of marketing tasks you should be tackling, and suddenly all the initiative just drains right out of you. For any one single task, you probably know what to do. The problem seems to be deciding where to begin. Things are just too complex in their present form.

Sometimes, the best place to begin is with the low-hanging fruit – things that don’t take a lot of time or money, but deliver great results. This is particularly true when you need to get results quickly.

Perhaps you’re in a dip in practice, for example – maybe client visits have slowed and you want to take action, but you aren’t sure what’s going to get faces in the door the fastest, and you can’t afford to waste time and money on things that won’t deliver for a few months. You’ve got a lot of marketing ideas floating around in your mind. You may even have a bunch written down somewhere. But every time you look at the list, your brain kind of fogs up, and you just end up pushing paper around or checking your email.

Here’s the system we use to find the low-hanging fruit. Don’t be deceived by how easy it is – this is a great way to build momentum and confidence, and get results.

What You’ll Need

I’ve made the simple template we use available here (PDF). Just download it, and print it out.

The steps are pretty simple. You can probably get through a trial run of a full single page in about 10 minutes.

Step 1. The Brain Dump

Our first job is to get as much of your “to-do’s” on paper as quickly as possible. In this case, you want to simply write down, as quickly as possible, all the marketing & practice growth ideas already you have in your mind or on paper, and any more you can generate in 2-3 minutes of brainstorming. Write them all down, one per row in the first column.

Here are some we wrote down the last time we did this:

Contact new clients who never showed up for their first appointment
Send out an email newsletter
Create a video for our website showcasing the clinic and our services
Arrange a lunch date with another practitioner
Start a Twitter feed
Contact existing clients who’ve fallen off the radar
Send a letter to other practitioners who refer to us

Try to come up with at least 20. They can be big ideas, or small tasks. Your sheet will start to look like this:

Step 2. Prioritize

If you look across the worksheet, you’ll see two columns near the right: Impact and Ease. For each item you’ve listed, you’re going to allocate a score between 1 and 5 in the Impact column, and the Ease column.

Impact: This is your guess as to how effective this item will be. Something that will generate a lot of business in your practice, for example, would score a 5. Something that might do very little would be closer to 1. In our case, contacting the new clients who for whatever reason had to cancel their appointment, was likely a 4 (or even a 5). They’re already interested – we just have to get in touch and rebook.

Ease: This is your guess as to how much this is going to cost you, in time and money, to do. In our case, making a video was going to take a lot of time and money, so it got a 1. Reaching out to those new clients who had to cancel was just a few phone calls – it was an easy 5.

The trick here is to estimate. Sometimes you don’t really know – don’t worry about it. Use your judgment and guess. You may have something that will have big long-term impact, but nothing for a while. Because we’re looking for quick results, that’s going to get a lower impact score.

Now the important part: for each item, multiply the ease x the impact. You should get a number between 1 and 25 for each item, and a sheet that looks something like this:

Step 3: Final Details

Next circle the top five scores in the Total column. You’ve now got five things that are easy to do, and deliver results!

You’ll notice, however, that there are three other columns. You only need to use these for your five circled items. Here’s how to use them:

Next Action: Sometimes the items on your list are just a single to-do, like, write an article for the local paper. In that case, the next action is really just that. Sometimes, though, it’s got a few more steps. To create an email newsletter, for example, you might need to pick a system to use, sign up, add your email addresses, etc. before you can start writing. It’s not hard, but there are a few steps – to avoid being overwhelmed, you’ll want to decide, what’s the very next action for this item?

Person: If you’ve got help, then it’s not always you that needs to actually do the thing on the list. If you have some admin support, or a web guru, or a willing partner, this is where you offload to them.

Date: When will this item be done by?

Step 4: Accountability

This step is optional, but it truly makes a difference. Find someone who can hold you accountable to those top five. Their job is to check in with you on those five easy, high impact choices, and make sure you’re on track. Just forward this to a colleague and ask them to partner with you – it’s that easy.

The Beauty of the System

You’re now staring at five things that are easy to do, and deliver results. It’s like having someone say to you, “Just do these five things in order. It’ll be great for your practice.” All you have to do now is just follow orders.

The beauty of this system is that it quickly finds the low-hanging fruit – things that are easy to do, that will almost certainly work. Because of that combination, you get great results quickly, and build some success and momentum. It makes it easier to keep going. It’s inspiring, effective, and takes that tough dilemma of what to do next off the table.

The Rest of the List

And as for the rest of your items? Don’t throw them away. Those things still have value, they’re just not fruit that’s as juicy and easy to pick.

There are likely things on that list that are critical in the long term. You’ll still want to tackle them. But when you’re feeling overwhelmed and need quick results, this system really works well.

8 Strategies for Practice Success in Tough Times

Dan — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 20:14:47 +0000

We went through a multi-day strategic planning session last fall. In our case, that essentially meant Tara and I sequestered away in a cheap hideaway where we could focus on the big-picture of the business, and do some great hiking when we needed a break. It was three days very well spent.

One of the real advantages to this process was that we came out of it with a concrete, concise template for how to move forward when things get dicey. I’ve gone through the plan and pulled out the strategies that I feel are making the biggest difference during challenging times:

1. Look for Prospects, Not Patients

It’s easy to think that you need more patients, but the truth is that before someone becomes a patient, they often make a pitstop along the way. In sales, they call it being a “prospect” – that’s someone who might become a patient.

In a slower economy people are more careful in their spending. They’re cautious when it comes to resources, and as a result they don’t necessarily want to leap from stranger to client in one step. They want to kick a few tires first.

In practical terms for us, that meant pushing our 15-minute “meet the doctor” visit. It’s a complimentary appointment for people to find out if naturopathy is a fit for them, and how we can help. It gives prospects a risk-free way to explore the idea of becoming patients without leaping right in. It’s a stepping stone to becoming a full-fledged client, and in a slow economy, you need those stepping stones. (And is it worth it? I think so. Over 90% of our 15-minute prospects become patients.)

What risk-free “stepping stones” are you offering for people to discover you?

2. Build MD Relationships

Health care is publicly funded here. That means that a recession doesn’t really change whether or not you can see an MD, or visit a hospital. It may affect how long you wait, but you can do it regardless of your income. The same applies for people with insurance coverage.

The impact of this is that in slow times, MD’s still see a lot of sick people. While CAM usage tends to be out-of-pocket and hit harder by economic changes, MD’s in many countries stay busy. We’re working to create more relationships, and nurture the ones we have with MD’s. The downside? These often take time to build. But like planting trees, if you want to have big ones, you need to start with small ones as soon as possible.

3. Cut Costs

This one isn’t rocket science, but it’s a critical piece of the plan. Here’s what we did:

Created a quick spreadsheet containing most of the expenses in the clinic
Used the spreadsheet to calculate the savings on each item, and overall, if we could cut 15% across the board
Assigned areas, where possible, to the staff. The admin and other support staff tackled things like medical and office supplies, we did things like payroll and others. (Even in a one-person office, it’s actually pretty easy when you just itemize it all and get going.)

This whole process did feel a bit squishy at first – like scarcity thinking, or a step backwards – but one we got started, I realized there were some things we should have done long ago that had nothing to do with the economy. They were just smart business decisions.

4. Stay in Touch with Your Clients

These days, it’s easy and cheap to stay in touch, particularly by email, and when things slow down, there’s no excuse for not connecting with patients. We do a few email newsletters and a couple of print mailings a year, and we’ve stepped that up a bit with targeted mailing to certain groups within our patient base.

If you’re looking for an easy way to start your own email newsletter, we’ve always recommended iContact. Lots of templates, and those great little signup forms for your website, too. No geekiness required, and you get a beautiful email newsletter delivered to your client base for pennies apiece. Two thumbs up!

5. Increase Advertising (but Measure Return)

It’s tempting to cut your advertising when money’s tight, but the truth is that as long as your marketing is working (bringing in patients), then there’s no reason not to spend more.

If your advertising generates more profit than it costs, it makes sense to do more of it.

The trick, of course, is to actually know when it works. We track the source of every new patient so that we know whether a splashy ad, or our website, or a trade show, or an open house are attracting patients. It’s not hard – we just ask patients on our intake form, and clarify as needed – but it’s unbelievably valuable. If you also know the annual value of a patient, then you can pretty quickly see what’s paying off and what isn’t. If we run an $800 ad, and 7 new patients come in as a result, we know exactly whether or not that ad was worth it.

6. Consolidate Debt

If you’ve got business loans, student loans, operating lines of credit, credit card debt, etc., it’s worth trying to consolidate them into one loan in one spot. Easier to manage, and you can often get away with a smaller payment, or a shorter term. It’ll depend on your situation, but it’s worth half an hour with your banker to find out.

7. Expand Operating Credit

If cash flow is tight going into a recession, you’ll need some extra breathing room to be able to advertise more, get through a lean month, etc. If you don’t have a business line of credit to help you through the swings in business, it’s worth checking into. if you do have one, consider expanding it just in case. You don’t have to use it, but you’ll sleep better if you have it.

8. Monitor Your Media Consumption

Unless you’re prepared to take action on bad economic news, there’s no need to be micro-informed about every bit of bad media out there. I’ve ditched news radio in favor of music, changed the news I see on my browser’s home page, and I stay away from television news wherever possible.

This isn’t head-in-the sand behavior – I know these are challenging times and we’re taking action. I just don’t need to hear it 24×7 – I can tune in briefly once in a while to get the big picture. This one wasn’t in our strategic planning, but it really is important. Too much bad news keeps you frozen in place and makes it really difficult to execute these strategies. I’m not usually troubled by any of this stuff, but I can honestly say that avoiding the bad-news mania has made a real difference.

If you’ve got a question about how to implement these strategies or you’d like to share a few of your own, leave us a comment!