CAREER ENJOYMENT

Do you enjoy practicing dentistry?  If your answer is "yes", that's great!  Life is much too short to devote to a career that you do not enjoy. 

This section targets the many dentists that do not enjoy their career; frankly those that have lost the enthusiasm for dentistry.  I suffered from career burnout but didn't realize there were solutions to this dilemma.  Below I have provided several ideas that can curb your disdain and make your career so much enjoyable.

CAREER BURNOUT: LEADING THE LIFE OF QUIET DESPARATION

After graduating from dental school, you associated at several practices and once you had increased your speed and your confidence, you purchased your first practice or maybe you started your own.  Regardless of the path you chose, you quickly discovered there was a lot more to running your practice than just providing quality dental care. 

Staffing, job duties, practice management, marketing, accounts receivable and payables, banking, tax preparation, bookkeeping, renovations, equipment repair and maintenance, OSHA, HIPAA, patient charting, computer networks, continuing education, and the learning curve of expanding your skill set and the rapidly advancing technology available to you. It’s hard to have time for clinical dentistry with all of your duties and responsibilities. 

You made some mistakes; we all do.  But over time your delegating skills improved and by the middle of your career, everything was on auto-pilot.  You found the dependable employee that enhanced your life by handling all the tasks that used to burden your time.  Now you could just focus on providing dental care to your patients, and every other aspect of your business was another’s responsibility. 

Now you live the life that is envied by all your friends.  You work 32 hours a week, make a good income, live in an upper income neighborhood, drive foreign cars, and your children go to fine schools.  Isn’t that the life we all desire? 

This was your goal and you have succeeded in building the life you dreamed of.  But there is something that just isn’t right with you.  You feel it immediately when you awaken and it is the last thought in your mind every evening before you sleep.  It has become your constant companion, one that bears an amplified presence when you fall behind in your schedule or that problem patient walks into your practice.  You have seen thousands of patients in your career and completed thousands of restorations and hundreds of extractions and root canals.  Procedures you once found challenging have become mundane.  Accomplishing your day has periods where you must concentrate, but because yours skills are so advanced, concentration voids fill your day. 

When you go on vacation, the stress slowly dissipates, but returns when you begin to think about going back to work.  You tell yourself that you just have to work ten more years and then you’ll have enough to retire. Ten more years--can your body and your mind hold up for another ten years?

You have accumulated more and more financial responsibilities with your practice and your personal life.  Besides your office overhead and staff wages, you have a mortgage, car payments, country club, private school and education accounts you are compelled to grow for your children.  You may have suffered a divorce and that has just compounded your financial strain.  You experience peaks and valleys with your income, but your expenses are constant. 

Many of us are dictated by Parkinson’s Law, which states that our spending rises and eclipses our income.  You couldn’t stop practicing if you wanted to. You actually spend a lot of time trying to figure out how you can increase your income, which is quite a hypocritical thought process when you really need to practice less for your own sanity. 

Well, my friend, I feel your pain. I practiced for 20 years and in the middle of my career, I suffered dental burnout. Mine was manifested as back and neck pain, and migraine headaches that lead to rescheduling our patients on many occasions. I suffered numbness in my fingers and endured the stress every waking hour. I knew that if I did not get out of dentistry, this stress would be the end of me. 

So I quit. I sold my practice and moved to Phoenix. After a respite selling insurance, I re-entered the field of dentistry as a consultant and dental practice broker. I have had the privilege of meeting hundreds of dentists and discovered that many share the pain I suffered when I was in practice. 

Using 20-20 hindsight, my decision was rash, but I felt that I had no where to turn. My problem was not one that I could share with friends or family.  Even my wife struggled with understanding my situation and even more struggle when I retired.  I had no counselor that understood how to help me cope with the disdain I had developed. 

In my meetings with the dentists of the Phoenix market, I have met many with a burning passion for clinical dentistry.  They absolutely love their career!  How can they be so excited about dentistry?  They work six days a week, sometimes 14 hours a day.  Why is it that some love being a dentist while others would rather do just about anything else for a living? 

Carpe diem! The power of positive thinking. You control your destiny.  You have had all of the axioms for a better life engrained into your psyche, but for whatever reason they just don’t stick.  I was compelled to dig deeper into the causes of burnout and how to transform this state into one of joy and satisfaction.  You can change your perception and end your burnout.

So how did you get here in the first place?  In my case, I never really liked practicing dentistry.  The practice of dentistry involves a fine line of inflicting some pain on your patients in order to eliminate their more severe pain.  I was never particularly comfortable with that.  I had low self esteem and self image.  I always felt that I was too compassionate to effectively treat my patients in that I was very stressed if I ever inflicted unnecessary pain on my patients.

Let’s examine the anatomy of burnout and what causes it.  I have identified the following causes:

• Too much free time and lost sense of urgency

• Lack of specific goals or dreams in your life

   

  • Complacency and boredom

   

  • Parkinson’s Law

   

  • Lack of variety in your work

   

  • Introversion

   

  • Habit

   

  • Blaming and complaining

   

  • Hesitant to take leadership role in your practice 

   

  • Not taking responsibility for everything that happens in your life

   

  • Frankly, you just don’t like practicing dentisty, and maybe you never have enjoyed it.  Maybe you got into dentistry because you thought it was an easy path to wealth.  By now you know that is not true.

   

  We will take these one by one and then we’ll present a definitive plan to end your career burnout and get you back on a far more enjoyable path. 

   

You may not realize how much free time you have, but you have many voids throughout the schedule.  As you perform procedures that have become virtually automatic, your minds drifts and typically those voids are filled with the current set of worries.  Schedule pressure, financial worries, problems at home. Next time you do a root canal, keep track of how much “free time” you have to think about other things. Of course you have to focus some of the time, but it is a fraction of the overall appointment length. 

We all have a constant conversation going on with ourselves.  It may go something like this:  The working length of the lingual canal is 20mm.  This one is patent for a change.  I got a #25 to length.  I wonder if I should buy an apex locator.  I hope we get some good checks in the mail today.  I have to pay the lab or they’ll call me again. You would think as much business I send them they wouldn’t be so concerned about getting paid.  I’m hungry but I don’t want to eat a heavy lunch because I have that bridge prep this afternoon and big meals make me tired.  Where is the buccal canal?  This whole conversation with yourself took all of about two seconds.

The self talk of the burned out tends to be pretty negative.  Keep an eye on your self talk-are you compounding the problem by how you talk to yourself?  

Here is a simple challenge for you.  Try to go through an entire day without complaining about anything.  If you do not have something positive to say, don’t say anything.  Sounds pretty easy, right?  Try it tomorrow and see how you do. You can even put a rubber band around your wrist and snap yourself for every verbal complaint you make. You may find that you don’t have much to say!

Lack of specific goals or dreams.  If you are suffering from burnout, I bet you do not have any defined goals or dreams in your life.  Sure, you have thought about some things you would like to accomplish, but nothing very concrete.  Regardless of your current position, you have had goals in your past which you clearly defined and accomplished. You had a goal of getting into dental school, and had to get good grades in college. Once you were in school, your goal was to graduate and you accomplished that. 

Most of your adult life has followed the path of your goals and dreams.  You have accomplished so much and it has been very challenging.  What’s next?  Saving money or getting out of debt are not very exciting goals. You do not have a goal that brings back the spark in your life.  One that gets the juices flowing and gets you excited again.  That is missing from your life. 

It could be that you cannot identify what you would like to accomplish next.  I get that.  You are a doctor; a highly paid professional; an experienced clinician.  Isn’t that good enough?  Apparently not.  There must be more, you just don’t know what it is. 

Maybe you think that because you have accomplished everything you set your sights on that now you can just cruise through the rest of your life.  One little problem with that--your lack of purpose leads to a lack of desire.  Career burnout is the effect of your success. No more worlds to conquer. 

Complacency and Boredom.  You wake up, get dressed, have some coffee and breakfast, drive in your car to work to face another day of restorations, endo and extractions.  At 5 PM you get back in your car, drive home and have a couple beers or drinks, eat dinner, watch “Dancing with the Stars” and go to bed. This is your life, in essence one big series of habits you practice each day. Weekends are reserved for laying on the couch and watching sports and taking a nap. Maybe you go out to dinner with friends. 

In a couple weeks you are going on a vacation to the Caribbean. You are working hard to get ready for the trip. Have you noticed that leading up to your trip that you have felt more upbeat and riding the wave of anticipation?  What could you do to create that feeling of excitement and anticipation into your life every day?

There is a very simple way to eradicate burnout-what W. Clement Stone refers to as “inspired dissatisfaction.”  If you reach the point that you cannot stand another day in your career, you must desperately seek something that will excite you or something that will change your circumstances.  How many ads do you hear about the surgeon working 80 hours a week who got started in some form of network marketing and eventually was able to leave the medical field because he had replaced his income with his home based business. Now he works from home, he has much more time with his family and life is great. 

Those ads present a powerful factor that is universally appealing--the emotion of hope.

 "The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof."   Barbara Kingsolver  

We all can improve how we feel and what we can achieve based on hope.   Hope is simply the feeling that what is wanted can be had or that events will turn out for the best. The stronger the feeling of hope we possess, the more we will focus on fulfilling that hope. Do you really think the surgeon is better off selling health products to people he doesn’t even know compared to the emotional reward of being able to save people’s lives?  Do you think that maybe he could cut his hours back at work so he would have more quality time with his family? 

By the way, how much time and hard work did he have to put into his new home based business? The path of least resistance for you is to rekindle the enjoyment you once experienced in dentistry before you go off on another career path that may or may not be in your best long term interest.

A little enthusiasm will lead to more enthusiasm and create a snowball effect that will extinguish your burnout.

If you use to really enjoy dentistry but now some apathy has set in, we will proceed to blow the doors off that condition.  Please review the section on Internal Marketing.  It is time to make your job fun again and the best way to do that is to follow this simple exercise: 

Find a quiet spot where you will not be disturbed and think back to a time when you truly enjoyed your career. Think about specific patients, like the first great full veneer case you completed, or the challenging root tip you were able to recover using a trick you picked up at an OS seminar.  Find those memorable achievements in your career.  Now think about how you felt dealing with those procedures and your interactions with appreciate patients.

Guess what--how you felt when you accomplished those achievements is how you feel right now!  By recreating those happy times, you recreate the joy and sense of net worth you once felt.  This is an excellent exercise to use anytime you are feeling a little apathetic. 

Remember when you first took ownership of your practice?  Look at all the hard work you put in to get your office just right.  If you are unhappy now, maybe you need to decide what needs to be changed in your office. 

Get rid of the employee that stresses you out--if they stress you out I guarantee they also stress out everyone else. Maybe it is time to redecorate your office-- new paint, new wallpaper, new carpet, or new tile. Make a plan and rejuvenate your practice.

Look back on your life.  An early goal was to get into dental school and look what you went through just to accomplish that.  Then you graduated from dental school, another goal completed.  Then you got your first job and learned to build your speed and confidence.  You purchased or started your practice. 

Each of these milestones started out as goals you set for yourself. What is your goal now?  You have already accomplished a lot, but now you are capable of achieving even greater goals.  With a chief definite aim you will reverse your burnout mode and get back in desire and enthusiasm mode.

What new skill would you like to learn? Doctor comes from the Latin word, docere, which means, “to teach.”  Learning is always the precursor to teaching and your educational process should never cease.  I suggest that you hone your skill set and add implant placement and bone augmentation, ortho, rotary endo, Cerec, IV sedation certification, perio surgery, Biolase, paperless office, digitize, photography integration, or intraoral cameras to your arsenal; whatever interests you. 

Because you have become so competent in your profession, you run the risk that you think you know enough and you do not need to learn anything new.  That is a dangerous outlook, a surefire path to complacency. Fire up the staff with a new bonus system based on introducing some of the internal marketing ideas you have learned. You cannot continue to do the same things you have done in the past and expect different results.

Immerse yourself in self improvement and self development programs.  Read the classics like “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Norman Vincent Peale (have you ever noticed how really cool people use their middle names when referring to themselves?) 

Do not listen to the voice inside your head that is saying, “I don’t need any of the positive thinking stuff.  I am fine just the way I am” My response to your little voice is “boloney.”  Everyone can stand to improve themselves, even a little. You will find this highly invigorating and your apathy will not stand a chance. 

Of course the objective of this program is to increase your net income. Read T. Harv Eker’s book, “The Secrets of the Millionaire Mind.” It will give insight into your current internal belief system. The first and most critical step in increasing your profit is the proper mindset towards your new income level you will achieve. Set some definitive goals, written goals and do not short change your future. 

You are capable of achieving what you can conceive and believe. Napoleon Hill stated this axiom nearly 90 years ago.  It applies in triplicate for you because you already participate in a great profession with nearly unlimited earning power. Let’s put the excitement back in your career simply by stating your goals and giving yourself a renewed hope for the future. If you can fire up your passion for your career, doubling your income will be a breeze. Learn the habits of successful people and integrate them into your persona.   

Regarding internal marketing, talk about touching people with emails, newsletters and phone call, movie tickets, giveaways, contests, birthday cards, Thanksgiving cards, toy chest for adults, take patients out to lunch or have a patient base picnic at the park. Keep in touch and keep active. 

How much do you deserve to be paid for the services you deliver to your patients?  If you have owned your practice for more than a year, the answer is whatever you are currently receiving. 

Here is a difficult truth to swallow: the blueprint for our financial success has already been determined. It is independent of our skill set, business acumen, and acquirement of good fortune. This blueprint is embedded in your subconscious mind and will not change unless we decide to change it. I see dentists that enjoy a $300K income year after year--with their skills improving, why do they not increase their income consistently? They are programmed to receive the amount already determined in the subconscious.

Another way of stating this is that we all will generate what we feel we deserve, and nothing more.  We need a program to retool our subconscious mind if we truly desire a higher income. Your internal belief system dictates this amount, and unless you can convince yourself that you deserve more, you will be stuck at your current level.  Sad but true. 

How do we rewrite your belief system?  You take for granted how easy it is to do a filling, but is it really?  Isn’t that a highly specialized skill that you took years to acquire?  Many doctors do small filling and only charge a nominal fee because they rationalize that it did not take long and that it was simple to accomplish. How long would it take a non-dentist to do that filling and would they consider it easy? Absolutely not. 

Collect what you services are worth and remember how hard you studied and practiced to attain your skills.  Eliminating this underestimation of your skills is a strong first step in rewriting your belief system.  Let the income you really deserve considering your very high investment of your time and efforts come to you without resistance. Be nourished by the abundance of the universe.

Parkinson’s Law 

So you have a problem. You have built a fine practice, but you have also created a much larger scale of overhead expenses. Your living standard has increased, with a very nice home, foreign cars, private schools for your children, exotic vacations. You can earn your way through this high cost of living, but if you do not work hard, your world may come crashing down around you. You feel trapped. You realize that if you do not work at your extended pace, you will put yourself in jeopardy of not affording your lifestyle. 

If this predicament sounds familiar, I have some good news. Only when we are pressed do we open up to the changes that must occur in order to solve our problems. You must find a solution and as such have definitely your Ultimate Goal in mind. The question is how do you get a grip on your expenses and lift the financial burden that you have created?  Do not wish it away. Hope not for your problems to be lessened, but hope for the wisdom and strength to deal with them. 

The first shift in your thinking is to take responsibility for everything that happens in your life. This is very difficult to accept, but you must in order to change your life. Blame and complain are two elements that must be vacated from your persona. I have never met a rich person who blames and complains.  Who would listen anyway?  Only when you begin to take full responsibility for all that happens in your life can your path be cleared to attain a new level of achievement. Practice Hawk will help you increase your income, but your realization that you can solve your own problems and literally achieve anything you wish is a much more valuable accomplishment. 

As a dentist, you really are not accountable to anyone.  This lack of accountability creates a vacuum in your career. Maybe no one really knows how much you are suffering and on the other hand you really have no outlet to share your achievements as well. Your program will give you accountability and keep you on track to succeed at a high level. You will find that you can overcome virtually any circumstance with the newfound strength that you have possessed your whole life. You just did not know how to retrieve it. 

I used to worry a lot about the grave financial situations I created for myself. A better way to spend your time is to focus on solutions to your problems.  With my understanding of my gifts, I eventually realized that I can manifest as much money as I desire, and so can you.  Money struggles are really just the tip of the iceberg--if you are suffering from money issues you have much larger issues looming in the wings.  Solve these larger issues and money will flow to you to the point that your security will be a given. 

Do you really think that if you grasp and possess the habits of the Exceptional Dentist that you will continue to struggle with financial issues?  Absolutely not! Those habits are the composite traits of the most successful dentists and businessmen and women I have ever met. Study success and mimic the masters.  Read “Laws of Success” by Napoleon Hill over and over until you can recite it from memory. It took Hill 20 years and interviews with thousands to write that masterpiece and even though it was written 80 years ago, it is as applicable today as it was then. 

As part of your subscription you received the e-book, “Blueprint of the Exceptional Dentist” written by Michael Warm, DDS.  I wish I had this set of habits while I practiced.  They would have served me well, and I am certain that adopting these habits will enhance your career and your life.