Live it – Don’t tell it.

Build your relationships first….then your dentistry. ~ Bob Barkley

Live it – Don’t tell it.

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Life is full of paradoxes, seemingly self-contradictory statements or situations which ultimately are found to be true – and the practice of dentistry is no exception.

One of my most favored paradoxes of late is the fact that every relationship-based / health-centered practice must develop a written Philosophy Statement, which can critically function as the practice’s constitution.

Bob Barkley said that creating and writing this Statement represented the single most important thing that a truly patient-centered practice can do.

But therein lies paradox #1:

Even though writing a Philosophy Statement is essential, it is only valuable if it is a “living” document created by individuals who truly believe in what it represents. In other words, a Philosophy Statement is a SYMBOLIC representation of how the team feels, and consequently what they are willing to struggle to attain (including how they chose to live). And because a Philosophy Statement is symbolic, the words themselves are somewhat meaningless – particularly to others except through their EXPERIENCING of what they mean.

And this is where we left brain-leaning dentists can easily get hung up, as most of us have been enculturated in the behavioralist tradition, where we believe that people are reactionary, or should predictably respond to our logic.

This mindset, particularly when activated by an emotional, facilitated Philosophy Statement creation process, causes us to want to tell the world and recite it to our new patients like the Gettysburg Address.

But at that moment, it is wise to pause and recall the truism, “No one is more dangerous than the newly anointed”, as too often in those situations, what we intend with our actions is often perceived very differently by others.

So this brings us to paradox #2:

“I learned that the less I told my patients about my philosophy of dentistry, and what I could do for them, the more interested the patients became in really thinking about themselves and accepting responsibility for their health.” – Robert F. Barkley

So the less we tell patients -the more they learn IF we create an optimal philosophy-influenced environment for that learning to occur. And the less we verbally tell patients about OUR philosophy (but instead focus on allowing them to experience it), the more the they will “acquire a philosophy of their own” which is in greater alignment with their clarifying values.

And it is through THEIR philosophy that the desire for a preferred future emerges, along with the will to see it through.

Paul A Henny, DDS

Thought Experiments LLC, ©2018

Read more at www.codiscovery.com

Why Getting Clear Matters

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Bonnie Ware is a nurse who spent a decade counseling people who were dying. And over that time, she noticed that the most expressed regret was, “I wish I’d had the courage to live life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

In other words, most of them regretted not living life by their own philosophy, and they told Bonnie that they had paid a huge emotional price for doing this – in the form of a looming life regret.

On a professional level, we are confronted with this situation as well, particularly when we partner with insurance companies.

We often assume that our patients value their insurance coverage much more highly than they truly do.

We often assume that patients do not want to spend any personal money on maintaining or improving their health and appearance.

We assume that patients have no capacity to appreciate how we can help them.

But these are largely just stories in our heads, created out of fragments of previous negative experiences, which we then use to create a shorthand way of organizing our time, our day, and our professional life.

Why invest a lot of un-billable time with people when we expect them to fit within our shorthand world view? Why take the time to help others make better choices, when they don’t value what we have to offer very much any way?

If we never take the time to clarify what is important to us, and live like we believe it, then we end up chasing after what we think other people think. And that is a deep, dark rabbit hole full of distortions and rationalizations.

Great practices are built from the “inside-out”. They are built one brick at-a-time on top of a foundation of core values and then a living philosophy -not the other way around.

The murky, grey areas we find in the interpersonal space with our patients typically exist because we have not yet clarified what we believe, and what we are subsequently willing to stand for, against – and ultimately do.

And in the absence of a clarified practice philosophy and thus purpose, we tend to adopt systems and structures from others…the latest guru, consultant, or friend down the street. And those may or may not coincide with who we are inside -because they are based on someone else’s beliefs and philosophy. And when we run someone else’s systems it drains our practice of energy and enthusiasm, with the Law of the Least Common Denominator eventually ruling at the end of the day.

And a least-common-denominator lifestyle is almost always one filled with regret.

Paul A Henny, DDS

Thought Experiments LLC, ©2018

Read more at www.codiscovery.com

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