Clarifying Your Vision - Business of Dentistry Interview

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In this episode, you’ll get to listen in to Dr. Dave’s recent interview on the Business of Dentistry Podcast. He shares personal stories of his own challenges and the valuable lessons he learned as he built his career. Listen in to hear his inspiring words about finding clarity, what it takes to be a great leader and more.

Key Quotes:

“Life moves fast. I used to think about five-year plans and ten-year plans, and now a quarter goes by, and I’m like, I don’t want the same things I wanted 90 days ago.”
“That’s, I think, a struggle in society, but certainly in dentistry as well, is like you start living out somebody else’s dream and then realize it too late. If you can always be course-correcting, I think that’s probably the best advice, to have a beacon, which would be like your annual plan or even your life plan.”
“It takes some serious time alone to reflect and design [a life plan, but] otherwise your schedule will get full of other people’s agendas.”
“My theory was in 2017 that if I did nothing else but worked on myself, that I could make my practice grow, and I didn’t need to be constantly turning all these knobs like hiring somebody or a new marketing tactic or new phone skills.”
“If you’re the CEO of a dental practice, if you’re the lead producer in a dental practice, you’re the racehorse, and so you have to create ways—whether it be through delegation and leadership or just flat out automating or eliminating things from your life—so that you’re not feeling run down at the end of every week.”
“What are you doing to take care of yourself so that you can serve? It’s kind of a paradox like you need to be selfish to be selfless is really something that we have to come to comfort with.”
“Courage is not the absence of fear. It’s doing the things that you’re scared of because you know that gets you to the destination that you want.”
“Sometimes we use perfectionism as a badge of honor because it sounds really good, but sometimes it’s just fear and excuses packaged in a nice little wrapper with a bow on it.”
“Your teams need psychological safety, so they need to be able to ask their dumb questions or make their mistakes without feeling chastised; they need to know that you have their back.”