Reignite Your Passion for Dentistry

I wanted to address the concept of taking care of yourself first, as I find many, including myself, donʼt. If we donʼt do this, how can we keep our enthusiasm and passion for our business and jobs? As we always discuss, the value of our Prosperity Plan is that it helps to keep you focused on what is important and helps to keep you healthy physically, emotionally and spiritually.

What happens if we donʼt take care of ourselves? Well that depends. If we donʼt take care of ourselves our stress might eat us up and cause us to, at a minimum, be less effective with our teams and patients, and worst case, kill us. How much good can we be to our team members, patients and families if we arenʼt healthy? If we are stressed or if we are dead? I am not trying to be dramatic, but people do have heart attacks because of not taking care of themselves.

I thought a metaphor Michelle Gabrielson shared with me demonstrated the importance of this really well. It is a metaphor about your hands and, as a clinician, how effective could you be without your hands? Could you treat anyone? How much could you impact anyoneʼs life?

The Power of Simplicity

It is a key test for leaders: Can you take complex tasks – like working through countless variables for, say, your organization’s values or strategic goals – and distill them into a short list that everyone can remember?

And just how short should the list be?

Getting Your Dental Patients to Say "YES" 

The past few weeks we have been discussing, on both our TV Show and our blog, How to Increase Patient Acceptance - a very hot topic within dentistry. Two weeks ago we discussed why people make changes, in general, with our blog entitled "How to Improve Dental Case Acceptance." For example, what motivates someone to lose weight, quit smoking or accept dentistry? Then this past week we discussed how consumer buying behavior impacts this same topic with our blog "Can Understanding Consumer Behavior Increase Dental Patient Acceptance?" This discussion built upon the previous week's discussion and related it specifically to dentistry.

Can Understanding Consumer Behavior Increase Dental Patient Acceptance?

If you look at dental case acceptance through the paradigm of consumer buying behavior, you might find the topic enlightening. When wanting to spend money people, in general, look at things like the "blind lady of justice", meaning, on one hand you have your money, and on the other hand you have the product or service that you want to buy. If the importance of the product or service is high enough, it outweighs the desire to hang on to your money, and you will spend it. If on the other hand it doesn't, a consumer will hang on to their money. For example, if you have a job and it isn't across the street, buying a car becomes important enough to you that you would contemplate a car purchase to get to work. If your job is close enough, and it is a nice summer day, perhaps you think you will just ride your bike. When winter roles around, suddenly a car purchase seems even more important because riding a bike in the snow isn't easy, so you buy a car. Now that you have solved that problem, you might not have a bunch of interest in a second car because one car solves the problem fine.

How to Improve Dental Case Acceptance

I hear frustration all the time from doctors about patients not accepting treatment. While I understand their frustration, I also look at things differently perhaps than most do. When I look at patients from a psychology standpoint, I think you can divide the population into two groups: those that appreciate and want cosmetic dentistry and those that don't. I am going to approach both groups differently.