by [email protected] | Jan 8, 2020 | Bold Biographies
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Dr. Nate Jeal has done a lot of things, making him a great example of how the journey to dentistry doesn’t have to be a straight path. His fascinating story and how he found his way into the field is both inspiring and eye-opening, and I know you’ll get a ton out of hearing him speak today.
Listen in as Nate shares why he gravitated toward dentistry, as well as how he eventually got into the field after coming from a totally different background. You’ll hear about the trials and challenges he faced while growing a business, how he and his wife got through those hardships, and the importance of perseverance as you navigate the path to success.
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Key Quotes:
- “The sense of scrappiness and doing whatever it takes to make the thing happen – that’s an important part of business ownership.”
- “It’s in those challenges that you really get to learn.”
- “Not all dentists have to be practice owners.”
- “Despite all the challenges people talk about in dentistry, the opportunity that’s presented by a dental degree is really unparalleled.”
- “If you have mental agility, you have the upper hand.”
- “Most of your patients or customers—they can tell when the motivation is anything other than their wellbeing or quality.”
- “In dentistry, the way to find success is by perfecting your craft, so becoming an excellent communicator, helping people really uncover what their wants are and to articulate the result people want to have—and then getting people that result in a really high-quality manner.”
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by Karah Karah | Apr 18, 2018 | Bold Biographies
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Sometimes the biggest challenges we deal with as dentists are moral dilemmas. It can be tempting not to admit to making a mistake—especially when you know a patient wouldn’t know the difference—or to advise someone to undergo an expensive procedure they don’t really need for the sake of making a higher profit. We’ve all been there, including Dr. Bryan Stimmler.
The owner of North Brooklyn Dental Care, Bryan is a big proponent of sharing the challenges we face as dentists, not just the successes. In fact, helping others to learn from his mistakes was his goal in starting The Better Dentistry Podcast. In this episode, Bryan opens up about the difficulties he’s faced along his dental journey, his own major mistakes, and the important lessons he learned as a result.
Key Quotes:
- “I don’t care that you can do veneers, you know, I can do veneers too … I want to see a screw-up. I want to learn from your mess-ups.”
- “There’s not a healthy communication on the challenges that [dentists] go through—whether it’s life or the business side of things or the clinical side of things—and we need to open up some discussion on that.”
- “To be a good dentist, to do better dentistry, you’ve got to get your ego out of the way and you gotta do what’s right. … Better dentistry is getting back in there [after a mistake] and getting it to where it’s supposed to be and then swallowing your pride and apologizing to all of the patients that are waiting for you because you screwed up.”
- “There’s a quote that kind of goes along the lines of, when you think your life is tough, someone’s always had it worse.”
- “When someone’s quiet a lot of times, and then they dish out just a one-liner—those are the ones you need to listen to.”
- “I hear from residents all the time that they don’t feel like they’re learning anything, and when you’re in the thick of things, you don’t even realize what you’re learning. We’re watching you work, and I can see your clinical proficiencies from when you started until when you ended, so you are learning, whether you think you are or not.”
- “In hindsight, [my associateship] was so valuable that I’ve actually told residents, go find a bad associateship. If you have the intentions of opening up your own office, go see what the worst of the worst is. … You’ll find out everything that you shouldn’t be doing, and that’s much more valuable than getting an associate position at a place that is a well-oiled machine and you don’t even know what they’re doing that’s so good.”
- “I always tell people to find a mentor. … Find some mentorship and read a lot.”
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by Karah Karah | Apr 11, 2018 | Bold Biographies
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Do you feel like you don’t have your future quite figured out yet? Don’t sweat it. Being successful doesn’t mean you have to know every detail of where you’re going. The key is being willing to put in the work and keep moving forward. Just ask today’s guest, Dr. Chris Green.
A third-generation dentist and the owner of Green Dental Care, Chris says he’s still figuring out his vision, and he has accepted that the road to get there isn’t always a direct path. In this episode, he shares what he’s learned along his own non-linear dental journey, as well as the importance of knowing that finding your path to success can be a fluid process that you continue to figure out as you go.
Key Quotes:
- “A smiling dental team—that’s the type of thing that can make up for a lot of flaws.”
- “When we think about leadership and owning a practice, we think so much about first impressions. But last impressions are super powerful, as well.”
- “Dentists a lot of times either put not enough focus on their practice or too much focus on their practice.”
- “That’s the beauty of the profession: You can run a practice however you want and create a lifestyle. … It’s an exciting time to be a dentist in my mind.”
- “One of the things that it took me a while to figure out is that if I was the most interesting or the smartest guy in the room, then I wasn’t learning or gaining anything.”
- “Some of these practices just need new energy—they need a young, hungry dentist to get in there and be a little bit better of a leader and be a little bit better of a businessperson, and if you’re a lot of that, then the sky’s the limit.”
- “For me, it just hasn’t been a linear road to get to the vision—I still don’t know if I have my vision totally figured out. It’s a fluid process. The more I know, the more I realize I don’t know, and as I learn more, I realize that there are many ways I would have done things differently, but you’ve just gotta keep plowing ahead.”
- “The simple epiphany I had was that I could always make more money, but I could never make more time.”
- “Sitting down once a year, or once a quarter, or however often to evaluate your vision, write it down and reverse-engineer how you’re going to get there—that will get you in the right mindset as to not expect shortcuts.”
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by Karah Karah | Mar 21, 2018 | Bold Biographies
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It’s no secret that building a successful dental career is hard work. But when that hard work gives you the opportunity to create the career and lifestyle you want, there’s no question that it’s worth it. Just ask Dr. Josh Cochran.
The owner of Dr. C Family Dentistry, Josh saw his share of hardships as he worked to build his practice from scratch. In this episode, he shares the most important lessons he learned along the way, as well as what he’d do differently if he had it to do over again. Listen in to hear how he overcame the major struggles he faced on his journey to success, his advice for dentists still building their careers, and what makes it all worth it in the end.
Key Quotes:
- “As I’m building a business, I’ve learned how important core values are. … I don’t care how attractive an applicant looks, or a vendor to work with; if their values don’t meet mine, I’m just not interested.”
- “Dentistry is like a clay you can mold to fit what you want, your life how you want to live it.”
- “I went in with private practice doctors who were fantastic doctors—great with their patients, great with staff members, just the nicest people—but they didn’t have a model for growth and success, so I was kind of like that appendage attached to the practice, and not actually part of the practice.”
- “If you can find a corporate gig where your morals aren’t feeling compromised, I think that’s the quickest path to success right out of school, and you’re going to do better financially.”
- “As long as the practice you’re working for is patient-centered and not profit-centered, I think you can be very successful right out of school.”
- “If you want the results, you have to be comfortable with the labor it takes to get there. … People ask me, ‘how do you work a three-day work week.’ Well, I started with 28 days a month.”
- “Really figure out what you want—how you want your life to be, what your focus is—and then you can find the path to get there.”
- “Customers, they want it all: the low price and the good service. And if you can differentiate yourself from the dental market by providing both of those—and convenience, as well … you’re going to be successful.”
- “You’ve gotta trust your gut when you’re interviewing people and when you’re working with people, but you also need to be real clear about what your values are. That way, when someone starts to not follow your vision and your values, you can identify it and talk to them.”
- “You don’t know what you don’t know. And so if you connect with other dentists in like an open forum where you can just chat … you’re going to see what else is going on out there, and you can get a really good feel for what’s available to you and where you want to go.”
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by Karah Karah | Feb 28, 2018 | Bold Biographies
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There are many roadblocks presented when developing a dental career. From financial struggles to battling introversion and depression, Dr. Russell Kirk shares his journey through all of it. He talks about his valuable experience in the military, how he learned humility, anger management, leadership, and how to prioritize the important things in life.
In this episode, Russell speaks in-depth about his military career and how valuable it was to his dentistry career and education. He also shares some struggles and issues along the way and how he overcame them and learned valuable lessons from each. Russell emphasizes the importance of a strong work ethic, self-responsibility, being open to criticism, and accepting help. Through developing these traits and practices he has become happier and more successful in his life and career.
Key Quotes:
- “There’s a lot of, a lot of learning to do as soon as you get into practice.”
- “The older I get, the smarter my parents and grandparents were.”
- “Anything worth doing isn’t going to be easy. If you can outwork the other person, you can sometimes outwork talent.”
- “The educational opportunities in the military are really robust.”
- “Early in the game I liked to blame everyone else that things weren’t going right, and it was pretty frustrating, and now I realize that at the end of the day it’s all on your shoulders.”
- “A lot of us have similar stories and there’s variations but the underlying theme is, it’s a tough profession and life is tough but there are other people out there and we’re trudging along and doing okay.”
- “You get out here on an island by yourself and it’s easy to get discouraged and it’s easy to get frustrated then you go to a meeting or have a conversation like this and you come away with a little bit quicker step.”
- “You have to stop being the victim and start being accountable for everything in your life.”
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by Karah Karah | Feb 21, 2018 | Bold Biographies
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As academics, it can be easy and even quite enjoyable to continually be feeding ourselves new knowledge but if we never put that knowledge into practice, it means nothing. Dr. Justin Bhullar joins us on the show to share his journey of pushing through some tough obstacles to arrive where he is today. His optimism and work ethic are inspiring and he has lots of great insight on learning, improving and leading that you can learn from and implement into your own practice.
Justin explains how he turned his pain points and weaknesses into strengths and motivators. He also emphasizes the importance of the people you work with and how to take your leadership to the next level. Justin leaves us with the powerful idea that we should plan to fail and explains how that mindset will lead to resilience and strongly affect our ability to learn and grow.
Key Quotes:
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