by [email protected] | Apr 1, 2020 | Hints for Happiness
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Most of our practices have been thrown into more than a little bit of a curveball as we limit our access to patients, try to protect our teams, and more to prevent the spread of COVID-19. If you’re wondering what’s next and how to stay sane in this lockdown mode, Dr. Cristian Pavel carries some important insight and information that will help you greatly during this difficult time and encourage you to move forward.
Listen in as I share my own breakthrough and Cristian opens up about his journey in dentistry, as well as how he is using yoga to relax, get in touch, encourage acceptance, and increase his mental strength. Many of us burn out or resort to things that damage us or others in challenging times, but we talk about how you can break free from the normal and become more comfortable with where you are and where you’re going.
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Key Quotes:
- “The language we use in our minds dictates everything.”
- “Pressure is the greatest blessing.”
- “Adversity helps us reveal our character, and right now is the greatest opportunity for that.”
- “We’ve always been trained and reinforced in survival mode.”
- “Go into things with curiosity—not just with the intention to ‘slay’ it.”
- “There’s only one failure in my book, and that’s not trying.”
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by [email protected] | Feb 12, 2020 | Hints for Happiness
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If you’re at a point with your practice where you feel like you are bored, burnt out, and broken, it’s probably not your circumstances, community, or team. What it probably means is that you are lacking purpose, or you’ve lost your purpose somehow. In this episode, I’ll be talking about the importance of having and maintaining a strong sense of purpose and fighting to keep pursuing it.
Listen in as I present to you Dentistry’s Chasm of Meaning. This is an illustration that I’ll walk you through in order to understand why and where purpose gets lost in the process of working through our dentistry careers. I will discuss everything from avoiding the games that cannot be won to creating a prosperous practice where you can serve people at a higher level.
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Key Quotes:
- “Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.”
- “I believe we are trying to find external solutions to internal problems, which never leads to a happy ending.”
- “If we try to be everything to everyone, we are nothing to no one.”
- “Our default is more is better and dentistry is success.”
- “Burnout is giving more than you’ve got for too long.”
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by Karah Karah | Jan 29, 2019 | Hints for Happiness
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Today, I want to share an episode I recorded with Dr. Paul Etchison a while back, which touches on some key things we need to figure out as dentists and practice owners. Paul is the author of Dental Practice Hero, the host of the Dental Practice Heroes podcast, and one of the titans featured in Titans of Dentistry, and he’s someone I really respect because he truly walks the talk. Given his successful career and leadership skills, he’s one of the best people I can think of to have a conversation with about high-performance coaching and being a high-performance individual.
In this episode, Paul and I dive into the subjects of happiness, fulfillment, and figuring out your purpose. Listen in to hear the major lessons we’ve both learned throughout our careers, what it takes to be a great leader, and why it’s so important for us as dentists to gain clarity on what we really want out of our practices—and out of our lives.
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Key Quotes:
- “The marketplace doesn’t care what degree you have; it matters how much value you’re adding to the system.”
- “We’re all drawn to certain things, and really defining who we are and what we want—getting that crystal clarity—I think is the first step on the escape plan if you feel like you’re on that hamster wheel.”
- “Making sure that you’re progressively trending upward on some kind of key criteria in life is what drives a practice because if you just try and drive a practice with brute force, you’ll get growth, but sustainable growth is questionable because if you’re burnt out, your team isn’t going to show up.”
- “Make sure that you not only know exactly what you want out of your practice and your life, but why you want it, and if you don’t have a compelling why, then it’s time to go back to the drawing board.”
- “When the team shows up, batteries included, and you show up, batteries included, patients feel that goodwill goes up, case acceptance goes up, and it all trickles down to the bottom line.”
- “You can be confident in leadership, but to think that you’ve learned it all and not be engaged in a lifelong journey I think is a dangerous place.”
- “I hope dentists know that if they’re in a tough spot right now, or if they’ve been through a tough spot, or if one’s coming in the future, that’s just part of the game and to anticipate that. To try navigating around that is just wise business, but to think you’ll avoid it completely is a fallacy.”
- “It all comes down to marketing, and once that mind shift happens, life gets a lot easier because you realize that your clinical skills are just one small part of the equation.”
- “You’re your number one asset and your practice is a close second, and sometimes you have to put all the chips in to make sure that you get the results that you need.”
- “If you’re thinking about investing in your team, if you’re thinking about investing in yourself, it’s not hard to get a $1000 idea if you implement it. It’s not hard to get an ROI. It’s making sure you have the intention to actually put your words into actions.”
- “Be crystal clear on what you want, why you want it, and then pursue that dream without guilt or apologies.”
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by Karah Karah | Jan 16, 2019 | Hints for Happiness
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As we settle into 2019, many of us are thinking about resolutions and what we want to achieve in the new year. But too often, people go about setting goals in the wrong way and end up frustrated and discouraged. So today, I’m going to share an episode I recorded with Joe Blalock and Cole Hackett of the Life and Dentistry podcast that’s all about how to set goals in a way that sets you up for success.
Listen in to hear us break down the key ingredients for succeeding when it comes to resolutions, goal setting, and lifestyle design. You’ll learn how to use human nature to ensure your goals work for you and not against you, the common mistakes people make that set them up for failure before they’ve even begun, and what you can do to create habits that will lead you to the life you want.
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Key Quotes:
- “Success is on your own terms, and if you define it, if you’re clear about it, if you don’t let your vision get hijacked, those opportunities are available to each and every one of us at higher and higher levels as our career goes on.”
- “If I do something for ten minutes a day for 365 days, that’s 60 hours of output. There’s not much you can’t become almost a subject matter expert on in 60 hours.”
- “For me, if I set a realistic goal, it’s all in my brain, and I feel like, if I’m going to hit big targets, it’s gotta scare me a little bit, and it’s gotta connect the head and heart to some degree.”
- “The only way to grow predictably as a human is to look at the drivers of our subconscious. That is our beliefs, the story we tell ourselves, and our identity.”
- “Most people don’t even know what they want. You’re lost from the very beginning expecting someone to hit a target they can’t see.”
- “True success is a matter of alignment, and if you can get your thinking and behaviors all in alignment, then hitting these targets just becomes like target practice, because you know how to do it predictably.”
- “If you’re going to follow through on something, one of the main ingredients typically is having to report to somebody you respect.”
- “The common themes that you’ll find in everyone’s purpose—if it’s really good and they’ve worked through it—is to serve and to grow and expand. That’s what makes us fulfilled.”
- “If we create a path that we’re always looking to increase our health, increase our wealth, increase our connection with God, and increase our spirituality—that’s the fuel, and then all these other things, these lifestyle things, become the byproduct. Now we’ve got a pattern that’s repeatable, and it doesn’t leave us running ragged.”
- “If you’re just 1% better each day for 365 days, you’re 38 times better at the end of the year.”
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by Karah Karah | Nov 21, 2018 | Hints for Happiness
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How often do you take the time to focus on being grateful? Big or small, we all have things to be thankful for, and as Thanksgiving approaches, it’s the perfect time of year to reflect on what they are and really appreciate them. It’s also the perfect time to start making it a habit to focus on gratitude.
As Willie Nelson put it, “When I started counting my blessings, my whole life turned around.” This is something I’ve found to be true in my life, and I’ve made it a point to count my blessings as often as I can. In this episode, I share the practice I use to help me keep gratitude at the forefront of my mind and why it’s so important for all of us to remember all the reasons we have to be thankful.
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Key Quotes:
- “All that risk, all that sacrifice, all that courage {from our veterans} preserves our comforts and convenience that sometimes we take for granted, and I don’t want to be that way. I don’t want to take things for granted.”
- “What you appreciate appreciates. If you’re thinking lack all the time because you’re not appreciating, or it’s not quite right, or it’s not enough, or it’s a financial issue, or it’s an economic issue, you really expect to have more? It’s just unrealistic to think that if you’re taking things for granted that you’ll be blessed with more abundance.”
- “The focus on what’s not right will rarely get you more of what’s good.”
- “It may be a nice challenge for you to think about taking time over the holidays—maybe it’s Thanksgiving, maybe it’s when you have a week off between Christmas and New Year’s, maybe it’s just another Saturday or Sunday, or you’re taking time to think about all the things, all the seeds that have been planted to give you the life and the opportunities that you have today.”
- “Everything changes when you take your focus off the news and the critics and the naysayers and look at what is really provided for you.”
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by Karah Karah | Nov 14, 2018 | Hints for Happiness
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What comes to mind when you hear the term “work-life balance”? How about when you think about retirement? I get a fair amount of questions about these two topics—likely because this podcast is all about engineering a practice that provides for your epic life—but I’m here to tell you that I think both work-life balance and retirement are complete b.s.
In this episode, I go on a bit of a rant about why these two ideas really bother me. Listen in to hear why I don’t agree with the thought that we should have a clear distinction between work and the other aspects of our lives, the reason I think retirement is a bad idea, and how we should all go about designing lives that give us purpose and fulfillment.
Key Quotes:
- “Is ‘work-life balance’ implying that one is bad and that we should balance it with the other one? I don’t know—I have a hard time with that. Most people get their purpose and a lot of their identity from their work.”
- “Why can’t we have a vision that blurs the lines between work and play?”
- “I think that’s a common theme in 100% of people, that you should be growing and evolving and serving. And most people do that through their work.”
- “My life is fueling my work, and my work is fueling my life. So can we just all call it life and integrate it?”
- “I, quite frankly, want to work the day before I die. I want to work until the end, delivering value.”
- “You’re serving the patient by being influential. You’re serving your team by giving them a culture, a place that they enjoy and collaborate and have a shared vision. All those components fuel your life.”
- “Five years we’ve been talking about designing an epic practice to fuel your epic life. It’s a vehicle to get what you want—to live the life that you want—but it all has to be engineered with intention.”
- “Can we stop talking about retirement, and can we stop talking about work-life balance? I think they’re both complete bullshit, and I think they take people down paths that they shouldn’t even consider.”
- “Design a work schedule that gives you purpose, that gives you meaning, that gives you challenge and allows you to grow, and let that fuel your life.”
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