Why We Always Have to Set New Goals

Kirk:      Let’s talk about the power of goals. My first question is about the importance of goal setting for you and how it has evolved in your practice up to this point. Then we’re going to segue into what you’ve done this year, what you started out to do in January with the conversation that we had, some of the goals. In the third part we’ll talk about how you crossed through each one of those goals and the importance of them as you transitioned into your new practice. The Dawson Academy has a brand new influence. You guys are primed for an awesome set-up in the next couple of years and I’d like to talk about how it’s important to have goals beyond your goals as you evolve. So John, tell me about the importance of goals in your career and how that has been a constant thread to help you achieve not only what you’ve set out to do for yourself and your patients but to keep you happy in dentistry.

 

John:     I think we’re all wired a certain way but for me, it’s very difficult for me to function in a way that makes me feel good inside and feel complete unless I have a clear understanding of where it is that I’m going. That may come a lot from my stepfather who is a very goal-oriented person but that was something we did even when I was in high school. At the beginning of each school year we would sit down and talk about what the next year was going to be like. We would talk about grades and sport type goals and things like that.

 

Even in areas where I wasn’t particularly strong he instilled in me the idea that it was important to be evolving and improving and reinforced the concept that if you don’t evolve and improve, then you’re probably going backwards or standing still. So about six months out of dental school, which of course was also a huge goal I accomplished, I found myself in St. Petersburg listening to seminar one.

 

And something happened to me at that event. There was a lot of incredible information that came in but there was also a feeling of really wanting to give back to dentistry the way Dr. Dawson had given back. I could see my self at that time doing a lot of the things that I’m doing today with regards to the kinds of dentistry, documenting the dentistry, and sharing what I’m doing. I really had a thought of taking what Dr. Dawson had done and then picking up where he would stop and going to another level. And it sounds crazy but that has really been kind of a common thread throughout my professional career.

 

Kirk:       Tell us about two things that I think are very interesting in that whole process. Number one, tell us about the position that you were in financially when you started learning about this and second, what you did during that first Dawson seminar.

 

John:     The bottom line is I was broke. I was just out of school and had bought a practice for $100,000 and I think the practice that I had purchased did about four units at Crown & Bridge the year before. It was not in a very nice area of town and it just wasn’t the practice that you would think. On top of that, Buddy Shafer (who owns the dental lab that I’ve been using my whole career next to my current facilities) paid my tuition and I went down to St. Pete and slept in my car outside the hotel. So it is important to know that in retrospect, it seems crazy that I could somehow imagine myself teaching with Dr. Dawson within the context of a 27-year-old kid who couldn’t even afford to stay in the hotel.

 

But I think it illustrates the importance of the brashness of a young mind that we don’t really get caught too much on where we are. We’re really only seeing possibilities and I think there is an interesting message with that. I’ve seen it with my own son who has overcome so many medical things in his life. Somehow we’ve got to figure out a way to harness that youthful exuberance our whole life. And it seems like when we hit 30, 35, 40, it’s easy to kind of start giving up on the boldness of what we dream about. So that’s something that I work really hard at.

 

The goal thing for me is huge. At the beginning of every year I sit down and think about what the next level is. One of the worst things you have to really overcome is what happens when you achieve a goal and if you’re not setting your sights higher. I really experienced that two or three years ago myself.

 

Kirk:       I was going to ask you to add one thing too because you said something very powerful to me a couple of months ago. You were talking about the importance of goals and how when you were talking to your wife throughout this process, about where you wanted to go so that when it started to happen to you, she could already see the picture and I think that’s really important for a lot of people to know. Once you set out a bold goal, it affects your marriage and everything in your life. As those goals begin to become reality, everything starts to change. Tell us a little bit about that.

 

John:     We were dating when I came back from St. Pete and shared with her what I could visualize and where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do and you’re exactly right. It actually floors me now when I think back on that – when things did start to happen and I got my first lecture and I started to go around speaking. Not only how unbelievably supportive she was but I think she just knew it was going to happen. I think that’s the clarity in which I could see it but I think that there’s another really important aspect of goal setting and that is that when you set a goal, to share it with people that support you.

 

Find people that support you and share those goals with them. Also be careful that you don’t just share your goals with everybody because there are some people that are going to laugh at you. If I had shared some of my things that I was thinking about 20 years ago with everybody, they would have laughed at me and maybe it would have discouraged me. It is important to have the right people on that journey with you, people that support you and believe in you. Sometimes it’s those people that are the ones that pick you up and dust you off when things don’t go as well or as fast as you would like.

 

The whole idea is getting clear on where you’re going, being passionate about what you’re dreaming, but then also remember to be very persistent and patient. Patience and persistence are a huge part of this. Just because you dream it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. It usually takes patience and persistence to secure this route to get where you want to go. But I believe that it is our responsibility to figure out why we’re on this planet and our responsibility to do the best we can to fulfill the reason that we’re here, the reason we’ve been given certain talents and when you get all that going on, it’s hugely motivating and I think it drives you through the tough times.

 

Kirk:      Tell us about how that process works in your brain and walk us through this year. When you and I sat down in January you set out some very clear and specific goals that you were going to accomplish this year so tell us about how that process worked for you and what has happened just in the last nine months.

 

John:     Let’s back up a little bit. When I got asked to be Clinical Director at Dawson and I sort of joined Dawson and my seminar business merged with them, it seemed strange but I went through a period where a 20+ year vision happened and then I went through a real kind of lull. I just felt I had come to a plateau and I really didn’t know where to go next. We’ll talk about that in a second. But what I recognized pretty quickly – and some of our conversations discussed this – all the aspects of my life, I did not feel were completely congruent with where I had arrived.

 

And that’s one of the things that I would suggest and this may sound a little esoteric but I think it’s a very important piece of the puzzle and that is to have a theme, a general theme for what your year or your goals for that year are going to be about and for me, the word that came to mind was congruency. It was very important for me to look at all aspects of my life and I think what we talked about was that my theme was going to be congruency through actions. So, when I looked at my day, I wanted to make sure that the activities where I was spending my time were congruent with who I was and, more importantly, who I wanted to be, which is really about the goals.

 

So one of the things that was glaring was the fact that the facility that I had been in for 13 years was just no longer congruent with the dentistry that I was doing. Sometimes patients were flying in to see us or doctors were coming in to get their work done. Even just the people in our community, I just didn’t feel the facility was representative of the things that we’re doing and so we had the opportunity to build my practice on to Bayview Dental Lab. They also have the facility where we do all the hands-on courses for Dawson in Virginia so it’s sort of the Dawson Academy-Virginia facility.

 

So now, after spending a good year with an architect and a builder, last Monday we moved into this brand new facility. My practice attached to the teaching facility attached to the lab that does my work. It’s hard to imagine how different I feel, not just because everything is new but because everything was very well thought out and I’m so efficient in terms of whether I’m doing my dentistry or whether I’m making a podcast for teaching or whether I’m working on an article. Everything is here in one spot at my fingertips. And before, I sort of had an office but not everything in one place. I had a place that I recorded. I had five or six areas where I worked and it just was not laid out. So that has been one thing.

 

The other thing that I shared with you was my physical being. I just had been working way too hard and spending a lot of great time with my family but I had very little time with me in terms of getting fit. I reframed my physical goals by making it a part of my responsibility as a dentist, a father, an educator and a motivator that if I was going to be in front of people and be a leader, I couldn’t do that being 50 pounds too heavy. You just can’t.

 

I’ve done a lot of triathlons in my life and an Iron Man of 2002 and hit a big goal but really kind of got away from regular exercise lately. You helped me find somebody who did some coaching for me earlier in the year and I transitioned to somebody here locally. This Saturday we’re reaching that goal. I shared with you I hit my goal weight last Saturday. I dropped about 35 pounds and I’ll be doing an Olympic distance triathlon on Saturday so it’s really cool that the practice and that goal and the physical goals are kind of hitting at one time.

 

And there are other things, like the pilot thing. I’m getting ready to do my instrument rating so you there have been a lot of things that we looked at but the key is, it was really the clarity in the beginning, looking at both how I wanted to see myself and my business. How I wanted to see myself physically, making sure I had time to be a loving father and a loving spouse so there’s time carved in the day for them and of course, the weeks and months go by and there’s always balls in the air. But what I find is if I can find seven or eight areas of my life that I’m trying to improve and I pick a goal, and then I get somebody like you - our time that we’ve spent together  - to bounce the goals off and help me to see the little steps that I need to do along the way, that’s where it really becomes exciting.

 

Now, as I mentioned, the other thing that’s really important is my family. When I set goals like this, I always sit down and share it with them because the people that love you and support you also keep you accountable. Maybe this is a good thing or a bad thing but, more than once this year, I had one of my children come to me and let me know that I was falling a little short with my goal in terms of how much time I was spending with them. But I gave them that permission to remind me of that and I appreciate it and that’s the stuff that keeps you balanced.

 

Kirk:       That’s fantastic. One of the things that I noticed at the beginning of the year, when you did arrange your goals and you set out to achieve them, you had them in a specific order and I want you to talk to us about this for a minute. One of the first goals that you had was your relationship with God, and then you had practice goals and then you had your personal goals as far as your physical health and then you had recreational goals, for instance, with your instrument rating.

 

I think one of the most fascinating things is number five. You said you wanted to earn the right to be a leader for some of the things that you were doing at the Dawson Academy. I think it’s really cool in that order. Can you speak to the power of making sure that those goals are aligned in the right way in terms of laying the foundation first.

 

John:     I think that, particularly with regards to where the Dawson Academy was and I think some people might be surprised that that was later on the list, the way I looked at it was that the things like my relationship with God and some of the personal stuff with my family and things like that, the things that were higher on the list, I look at those as prerequisites in order to be in the position as a leader at the Dawson Academy because I’m trying to embody the very things that Pete has stood for throughout his life and I think the things that maybe were present that allowed me to get the position.

 

So, it is hugely important in the process to first figure out the most important things that you’re after, in order. I do spend time prioritizing so that I’m envisioning as I get up every morning and have my first cup of coffee. I always pull out that little sheet and look at it. And that’s the thing that sits right in the top of my desk so I just look at it and make sure that I’m going to try to pay homage to every one of those things during the course of the day. It just keeps you on track to review them daily because it’s so easy to write down the goals, stick them in a drawer and forget about them.

 

Kirk:       That’s fantastic. Here we are in September and you’ve achieved a lot of the goals that you set out to accomplish this year. You got back to your ideal weight and you’re going to compete in the triathlon this weekend. You’re now into your new – not only clinical space but the teaching space - has all come together in one fashion and you’ve achieved all of these things. Tell us about what you’re experiencing today and as you’re enjoying your cup of coffee and you’re looking out into your new setting, what you’re doing to prepare yourself for the future because you know that achieving these goals isn’t necessarily a destination by itself.

 

John:      I think if you look at some of the individual goals, there’s going to be some individual goals that we fall short of and I think we had some financial goals also. For instance, in financial goals and productions goals we’ll probably fall a little short. The positive side of that though is that with the economy downturn, we’ve still done pretty well and what we’ve really been able to focus on is some budgetary goals. We were able to decrease our spending and realize a similar net, which in this economy is fine with me.

 

I think sometimes people are afraid to set goals because they’re thinking, “What if I don’t make it? What if I don’t meet my goal and I fail?” And I think the most important thing about goal setting is not success or failure. It’s that you always are going to end up in a better place. You’re always going to be at some other destination that you chose rather than maybe a destination that somebody else put on you.

 

So it’s a very, very good point that it’s not so much the endpoint. It’s the process and sometimes, when you set goals and you start down the process, you start evaluating all facets of your life. You might actually find that certain goals will take you away from a place of happiness. For instance, for me right now, one of the most exciting things I ever did was in 2002 finishing that Iron Man. That was one of the absolute highs of my life. But I also know that during that time, the training of that – the amount of time that training took with where I’m at right now with my responsibility as a teacher and an educator, and a parent and everything else, I just don’t have time to do that. It would suck too much energy out of the other parts of my life.

 

My hope is I can get to a point when my kids get a little older that I can go back to that but I think it’s important to know that just because you set a goal, always go back and evaluate how the goal is affecting the totality of your life from a happiness perspective and if it’s not taking you where you want to go, then back up and set a different goal.

 

 

The other thing that goes along with that is the thing that you and I have talked a lot about, Kirk, and that is the whole concept of transitional goals. This means as you start to approach the endpoint of achieving a goal, it is really important to remember to start thinking about and start planning for what the next plateau is going to be, what the next goal is going to be. I’m in that point right now. Like I say it happened to me after the Iron Man. You’ve talked about it, post-marathon syndrome. It’s very common for athletes to feel depressed and anxious and I felt it fairly soon after getting asked to do this Clinical Director position. It has really come home to me that things are moving rapidly. As you approach your goals, really start thinking about transitional goals and what this means in terms of the next level.

 

For me, what I’m really excited about right now is taking this facility that we’ve established and a lot of my emphasis right now is just the beginning process to creating this whole podcast environment for our students. For their own training, for staff training, for their own goal setting, to really create this web-based environment where they can either learn completely there or in conjunction with things we’re doing and the classes.

 

With regards to my physical self I am really transitioning now that I’ve established a level of fitness and am working to improve on it. I think I can get fitter but most importantly want to start to establish a training regimen that is more maintenance-based and make some of these short course triathlons that I can do without alienating my family. And to make additional exercise part of my lifestyle so that six times a week I’m earning the shower, as you say, whether it’s getting in the pool or doing the bike or running - but just six times a week carving 30 to 45 minutes a day to do something physical for me.

 

I also think with the fitness goals, particularly for parents and employers, if we have a hard time doing it, we can make it about being more efficient in our office and about being a good role model for our kids, not just simply about the gym but about our responsibility to be a leader and to be a motivator and to create good habits for our kids. Those are all the things that sometimes I have to draw on to get me out of bed in the morning, to do that 30 to 40 minutes.

 

Kirk:      John, there are dentists out there who are trying to commit themselves to excellence and they have been through the goal setting process and maybe they’re not feeling what you described earlier in the interview, that congruency when they set out to do something and maybe those things aren’t necessarily happening in their practice or their life. What advice would you give them or what specific steps would you tell them to feel a little bit more congruency in their life?

 

John:    I think the first thing you have to establish and I think sometimes one of the biggest frustrations we have is we haven’t even really thought about how there’s a feeling of unhappiness or an unsettled feeling that we have that we’ve never really thought through clearly. Ask yourself what it is specifically that you want. One of the things that you have to do is first figure out what that endpoint looks like. The other thing is to set some realistic plateaus of where you’re going to be along the process. This is the hard part because it took me 10 years after hearing Dr. Dawson to get to a point where I was even feeling a little bit good about my practice because I had such a clear vision of what I wanted to be doing and the practice I bought wasn’t that.

 

It took a long time and some very specific work with my team and gradual change and I think that’s the thing that we all have to recognize is that you can’t turn the Titanic around over night. It’s going to take a little bit of time. But if you can set some mini goals along the way and celebrate the mini goals, that I think is one of the most important things we can do, is to celebrate the subtle plateaus along the way.

 

The second thing that I think we can do is to find a mentor or coach because if you can find somebody who is achieving the results that you want, you’re going to get there a whole lot faster than trying to reinvent the wheel all by yourself. So if you can mirror the behavior of somebody that is doing what you want, it cuts the learning curve down tremendously.

 

Kirk:      John, I really appreciate your time today and sharing with us all that you’ve talked about as far as goals go because this is really a very important subject in dentistry and I know a lot of the high striving dentists that are out there and committing to being excellent can learn a lot from this. This is a foundational piece in their learning and their leadership in the organization and their practice.

Dr. John Cranham maintains a restorative practice is Chesapeake, Virginia. He is the director of Cranham Dental Seminars and is a member of the primary faculty of The Dawson Center. He lectures internationally on Contemporary Cosmetic/
Esthetic Procedures, Occlusion, Laboratory Communication, Building, Managing and Marketing The Cosmetic Restorative Practice, and Happiness and Fulfiment in Dentistry. For more information, call him at 757-465-8900 or visit his website at www.cranhamseminars.com.