by [email protected] | May 26, 2021 | Prescriptions for your Practice
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Where in your relationships, your health, your financial situation, your clinical dentistry, can the realism of progress take precedence over the fantasy of perfection?
At one point in our life, we have been in a situation wherein we strive to be perfect, only to realize that it is only an illusion that we put upon ourselves out of fear of criticism and rejection.
The key to perfection is acknowledging that it doesn’t exist.
Perfection is fiction, and it can be destructive. I’m not saying that you should lower your standards. Set high standards and strive for excellence, not perfection. You can only achieve success through progressive action.
Listen in as I discuss pointers on how you can identify areas of your life or business where the standard of “perfection” should be replaced with progress.
Tune in and find solutions to common practice issues at Prescriptions for Your Practice
Key Quotes:
- “When it came time for me to cross the finish line, I looked up at my time and the critic turned on, and I was starting to think of ways that should have improved my time and why the time wasn’t good enough. The standard of finishing immediately changed, and I was looking for opportunities where I could have perfected that run.”
- “That is a metaphor for a lot of or our lives. Where is that perfectionism that we’re trained to notice these meticulous details in the mouth, the dentistry that we’re doing, the margins, the bone levels? We’re down to millimeters and microns and that works really well in dentistry, but it can create all sorts of problems with their teams, with their families, in our life.”
- “We create these environments where there’s learned helplessness because our team thinks ‘Well, I can never live up to the doctor’s standards so why even try? I’m not even gonna put up the effort because I’m getting criticized.’ So, it starts to hamper our relationships.”
- “What is perfect? The reality is it doesn’t exist.”
- “The solution isn’t to really lower your standards. But we have to appreciate that the path to mastery is messy. Whenever you start on anything, you suck at it. So you have to give yourself permission to suck and get better, and better, and better.”
- “The solution is making peace with imperfection and falling in love with process and progress.”
- “Human desire isn’t perfection, it is connection.”
- “Understand that we have to change habits to change identity. Once we start to build that confidence, then the success and the progress are inevitable.”
- “Perfection leads to procrastination.”
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by [email protected] | May 19, 2021 | Prescriptions for your Practice
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Have you been scouring the internet trying to look for the best reward system for your employees? Let me tell you a secret; there’s none! I’ve tried different approaches, many times myself, and they didn’t work.
The bonus system aims to give out incentives (monetary or otherwise) to motivate employees to bring out their best and be productive. However, this kind of approach is counterproductive and not to mention expensive.
If you’re looking for a perfect incentive system for your employees, you should not miss out on these three elements: alignment, belonging, and healthy conflict. A reward system should not curb creativity and risk-taking. Once it’s manipulative and punitive, it will predictively fail 100%.
Tune in and find solutions to common practice issues at Prescriptions for Your Practice
Key Quotes:
- “What’s the best bonus system out there? And the short answer, the bottom line up front, is that there is no such thing.”
- “If you work from that mental frame, work for wages, then you immediately assume that if I give more wages, if I give an incentive or bonus program, then I have a better team and I’ll get more and better work… it just doesn’t work.”
- “Modern research says that bonus systems suck, and it can actually demotivate employees, or worse, motivate them to be egocentric, to work on their own self-interests.”
- “Most people are looking for alignment, belonging, and healthy conflict.”
- “You, as the practice owner, are completely limiting the effectiveness of your team if it’s a top-down approach.”
- “If we don’t first fulfill those common human needs, a bonus system will likely be expensive at best, counterproductive at worst.”
- “I really didn’t have the practice or team that I dreamed of until I really dug into the science of human potential, the science of organizational behavior.”
- “No bonus system can match the internal motivations of your team.”
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by [email protected] | May 5, 2021 | Prescriptions for your Practice
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How do we secure a productive environment in our practices? One that doesn’t get disrupted by the increasing tension in society and result in a toxic culture that could compromise your livelihood?
Let’s engineer a work environment that brings out the best in you and your team!
In this episode, I talk about the imminent changes in the dental profession that are big long-term wins if we start enhancing our company cultures. I’ll also discuss how to keep your team innovating and encourage your employees to grow their confidence, improve engagement, and experience joy at work.
Tune in and find solutions to common practice issues at Prescriptions for Your Practice
Key Quotes:
- “Our dental practices are a microcosm for society. Unless we create systems for safety and alignment for our teams, that polarization will create a very toxic culture and undermine your livelihood.”
- “In all (economic) climates, it’s important that you, as a practice owner, are building your confidence and that of your team.”
- “Personal issues manifest as work issues all of the time.”
- “If there aren’t systems for frequent and open dialogue, there’s a very good chance there’s some toxic behaviors hidden from you, the doctor. Those are the ones that explode and hurt you, patient care, and others on the team.”
- “Make sure you have some sort of no gossip policy.”
- “Make sure that you have systems for recognition.”
- “If you, the doctor, don’t engineer an environment that brings out the best in you, patient care and your pay will eventually take a hit.”
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by [email protected] | Apr 7, 2021 | Bold Biographies
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It feels great to reconnect with a good friend, Dr. Peter Bowman, whom I guested in my podcast 5 years back talking about The Art of Believing and Achieving. Fast forward to the present, Peter now owns a world-ranked 9-hole golf course and his dental practice is currently focused on implant cases in varying degrees of complexity, sedation dentistry, and Invisalign.
Listen in as Peter gives us a glimpse of what his work week looks like, his undertaking outside the practice, how he adapted his practice model to his other ventures, biohacking, and a trip down memory lane on how luck played a role in why he got into dentistry.
Tune in and find more Bold Biographies
Key Quotes:
- “Doing more efficient scheduling and delegating to the assistant, scheduling docker time and assistant time, we still have to kind of stay on top of that sometimes. But you know, just like anything else, nothing goes perfectly. All we can do is to make it better with each day.”
- “You’re putting out fires the whole time. You don’t have enough time to figure out where you want to grow and do new things, and doing that buffer time is really hard to even get scheduled. But you know, once you’ve got it and formed that habit, it’s been the best thing I made in the long time.“
- “A lot of my time is spent marketing and finding opportunities for growth, figuring out what service we don’t offer, the other offices in the area don’t offer, and finding a way to introduce that into the practice, picking a little niche to take care of.”
- “I think you can do a fee-for-service model pretty much anywhere, but you really have to make yourself stand out and differentiate yourself.”
- “We still do most of our approach based on finding out what the issues are, finding out what the patient wants, telling them how we can give them what they want, here’s what more we can do. And it just seemed to work for us. We built up a lot of trust and people keep coming back. So that’s how we do it.”
- “You become what you think about.”
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