Growth Only Happens When You "Let Go"

 

Then your practice started to grow and things got complex. You probably started taking some continuing education courses to grow your knowledge and skills. You actually started becoming dangerous to yourself as you learned more. You realized that the gap between what you did know and what you still didn’t know was endless and tempting. As you embraced this journey to grow, you learned to TAKE ON MORE. So you mounted all of your cases, you slowed down the new patient process, you took more time for diagnosis, you learned to use a facebow, you started taking photographs (you didn’t let anyone else use the camera, because you were confident they couldn’t do it as well as you could), and you started writing treatment plans that had a lot more meaning, substance and significance. In essence, your task list grew at an exponential rate along with the production of your practice.

 

As you look back on the last few years in your practice, you see substantial GROWTH. You see it professionally in your skills and the production of your practice. You also see it, personally, in your communication and behavioral skills. You see all of this culminate most profoundly in the quality of the dentistry and the quality of relationships with the people around you. 

 

This GROWTH made you feel good. You actually got used to it. You relied on it. You might even have gotten addicted to it.  It almost became a drug.  This growth made you feel purposeful, energetic and happy. Without it – you were a wreck.

 

Now it’s gone for some reason. You blame the economy because that is the easy thing to do. The growth you have grown to love and rely on has been stagnant or flat. You feel sick and you miss it like a long lost friend. You look for ways to get it back by using the old method of taking on more (with greater resolve). You work harder, longer and faster. Your energy is diminishing, but you continue to TAKE ON MORE, reflecting to yourself under your breath, “I didn’t think dentistry would be this physically and emotionally taxing – especially as I matured in practice. I really thought it would get easier. I can’t possibly do anymore.”

 

Your question becomes, “How do I get this growth back?”

 

 

Getting the growth back at this point requires completely new thinking. It requires a level of thinking that is paradoxical to the thinking that got you in this position in the first place:

 

 

By LETTING GO you embrace the idea that some of the other tasks can be done by your team members. You empower the people around you to feel a sense of self worth and responsibility in your practice. When dentists train, trust and let go to grow the team members around them, they can actually spend their time in what Dr. Peter Dawson calls the Circle of Productivity (the place where the most productive dentists spend 90% of their work hours). When this happens, GROWTH returns.

 

The best esthetic and restorative dentists learn this at some point in their careers. It becomes one of the most freeing times of their lives, because they now start to understand that they are truly not the only person that can do many of these things, but in fact others in their practice can do them too, and most often times they can do it better than you can.

 

For example, Dr. Mike Fling (Oklahoma City, OK) doesn’t do any of his own lab work. He has forever had a vision in which he wanted to focus his energy in the areas that he was best utilized in his practice and the procedures that most gave him energy. He knew that if he was going to do excellent work and have an excellent life (he works 7-3), he couldn’t spend all the hours of his free time in his lab, so he set out to systematize his entire office and train the people around him to do it in the same way he would do it. He LET GO and trained his assistants to be “Lab Assistants.” Now when it comes to his lab work, he just walks into his lab and looks over the mounted casts and says to the amazing women in his office, “Great job!” His assistants are so good they train other dentists and assistants how to do this. 

 

Click here to learn more about a course they will be teaching on November 12 & 13 in Oklahoma City.  I highly suggest you take this course if you want to learn more from one of the best.

 

Dr. John Cranham (Chesapeake, VA) does the same thing when it comes to patient photography. He says that the best way to get good at photography as an office is to “Fire the Doctor” from taking photos. I love this! He LET GO and now all of the patient photos are taken by his amazing team. What you start to realize is that they can in fact do it, and they can often take photos better than you. What’s better than them taking photos is that they start to take an ownership in the relationships with patients and they feel a sense of pride, creativity and personal value that they just can’t get in any other dental practice. His team has a spark, energy, a sense of pride that a lot of teams struggle to find. John even went so far as to create an amazing system in which all 21 photos of the Dawson Academy's Photographic Series are standardized in an easy to use format on laminated sheets in every one of his operatories. Now every team member can be an expert photographer in his office.

 

If you examine all of the endeavors you have had in your life, there was a time where you had to work hard with a lot of focused energy to get things going. Then as the endeavor matured -- you hit a plateau. The exponential growth slowed or stopped.   To experience more growth you had to let go. You had to trust. When you did…growth ultimately reappeared.

 

This is true in building the future of your dental practice, it is true in patient relationships, it is true in growing some team members and letting some go, it is true in transcending the relationship with your children, and it is especially true in any spiritual relationship. Growth will only come from LETTING GO.

 

So, here’s to letting go. Give it a try. Train and then trust the people around you to lead. When you realize that you don’t have to do everything and you start to TRUST, everything changes. LETTING GO brings back the growth to your business, the time to your life, the profit into your pocket and the calmness to your soul.

 

My very best to your and your family,