On the Art of Being Fully Present

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

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On the Art of Being Fully Present

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‘Zanshin’ is a Japanese martial arts concept referring to a relaxed mindful state of alertness. It literally means “the mind with no remainder”, and refers to those moments when we are completely focused on the task at hand, while remaining relaxed and fully present.

Zanshin is analogous to what author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi referred to as “flow”, and on a neuroscience level it represents a state of optimal harmony between right and left brain functioning…when we have simultaneously tapped into our objective functioning and our full creative capacities.

The concept of zanshin has high applicability to the practice of fine dentistry, as fine dentistry is largely a creative act based upon training , judgment, and esthetic sense. In fact, dentistry’s finest practitioners are really artists who have mastered how to use all of their resources to create outcomes that their minds have envisioned.

And we all flock to see these masters show and explain how they do it, while simultaneously thinking, “Some day, I want to practice like Frank, Bob, Gary, John, L.D, Pete” , or one of many others who have mastered the art of fine dentistry.

But often when we try to do this, there is a massive barrier in our way – the people to whom the teeth are attached. And many of them seem to have little interest in our abilities to help them and create more beauty in their life.

And so we get stuck, we get frustrated, and we get depressed because it feels like we are not valued.

So how do we get around this? How to we find more people who will value what we do and therefore allow us to practice the art form from which we gain so much joy?

Through zanshin. Through flow. Through being fully present. Through better understanding of how each patient truly sees things, and then slowly, and patiently facilitating their re-framing of dentistry and dental health, and what all of that could mean to them, as well as “allowing them time to summon their will”, as Wilson Southam used to say.

You see, fine dentistry isn’t so much about fine dentistry from the patient’s perspective. It’s about how they feel about themselves now, and about how they think they will feel about themselves later.

And when you begin to sit down with patients and consider things on that level, the magic starts happen. And that requires being fully present and truly caring – zanshin.

Paul A Henny, DDS

Thought Experiments LLC, ©2017

Read more at www.codiscovery.com

How to Be Like Joe

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Joe DiMaggio is well known as the greatest hitter in the history of baseball, with his 1941 hitting streak of fifty-six consecutive games still standing as a benchmark which no one else has ever attained.

The casual observer would tend to assume that Joe’s success was primarily attributed to him being a “natural hitter”, but the truth is that DiMaggio would relentlessly practice his swings over and over again, often in the basement of Yankee Stadium, and then scribe on the walls the number of reps he had completed.

In fact, the “natural hitter” moniker became so prevalent (and DiMaggio so frustrated by the over-simplified perspective associated with the phrase), that he took a reporter to the basement one day and showed him his routine and the marks on the wall. And after doing so, DiMaggio reportedly said, “Don’t you ever tell me that I’m a natural hitter again.”

The same pattern of success being followed by outsider’s assumptions regarding how it all came to pass is present in dentistry. The assumption is that “some people just have it”, or that “she is just lucky”. And that of course, is just an illusion in the same sense that reporters used to think that DiMaggio used to largely just pop out of bed each day and perform almost flawlessly.

In successful relationship-based / health-centered dentistry, there is a confluence of talent, practice, commitment, and clarity of purpose, much like that demonstrated by “Jolt’n Joe”. Success slowly emerges out of the repeated practicing and refinement of the most important things – identified and defined by the Mission.

Excellence is a process. Excellence is a commitment, and as Seneca said, “Excellence is a habit.” So most accurately it is not that “practice makes perfect”, but “focused practice moves us toward excellence, and through our commitment excellence -we succeed.”

Clarified Values ➡️ Clarified Purpose ➡️ Faithful Relentless Practice, Growth & Development = Repeated Positive Patient Outcomes = Success

And you can scribe that equation on the wall as always being true.

Paul A Henny DDS

Thought Experiments LLC, ©2017

Read more at www.codiscovery.com

An Overnight Success Takes Years

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According to Markus Zusak, he had to rewrite his book 150-200 times until he was happy with it. And he began by imagining the end of the story, then the beginning, then the chapter headings – then the writing…over and over again.

In the end, Markus had a NYT Best-seller, with 8 million copies sold, and a movie deal for ‘The Book Thief’.

One might be tempted to view Markus Zusak as an overnight success, but knowing what I have just told you allows you to understand that’s not the truth. The visibility of his success perhaps appeared to be overnight, but the success took him years to create.

So too is the case with relationship-based / health-centered dentistry. There are no overnight successes there either. The creation of the practice takes years, starting much like Zusak’s book – beginning with the end in mind.

From there, each aspect is assembled from finding and forming the right Care Team, to developing them, and to finding better and better ways to connect with patients – to truly hearing them…to understanding their struggles…to sensing their desire to feel better about themselves.

And along the way- mistakes, misunderstandings, and outright failures prompting rewrites, re-thinking, and re-doing.

This is the true nature of success – a pathway through failure and upward toward better understanding.

It has been said that the main difference between a vision and a dream is the work involved. The later requires none, the former’s work never ends. A true vision is a principle-centered thought capsule aching to be validated by reality. It has an inherent truth built into it which must be realized. And as with Zusak, if it takes 200 revisions to make it happen, then it takes 200 revisions.

The simple secret to success is in the willingness to be flexible and to accommodate new understandings combined with a sheer force of will and perseverance that only a few are willing to make.

Paul A Henny DDS

Thought Experiments LLC, ©2017

Philosophy Matters

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In 1972, Bob Barkley in his book Successful Preventive Dental Practices stated, “Only a totally new health-centered philosophy of dentistry at all levels of society can avert a collision with mediocrity on a world-wide basis.”

By this statement, Bob was directly referring to the extreme limitations that our profession has on conveying optimal health to others. In fact dentistry can not convey health at all – and Bob was quite keen to this truth. This realization came after years of his own observation of patients. Bob observed that for some patients, no matter what kind of repairs he employed, they still declined in their dental health condition.

This of course is an observation which we have all made after just a few years of practice, and after some of our idealism-inspired vision of saving the world through dentistry has rubbed off.

And like Bob, we realized that is what the patient does -or does not do- at home that has a much greater impact on the longevity of our work than what we do. We have all seen cases where substandard care survives well due to patient efforts. We have also seen some of our scrupulously fine work undermined by decay in a matter of just a few years in spite of what we say or do for the patient.

Bob further stated in his book, “A preventive-corrective approach can only work if the dentist is able to nurture the patient’s latent sense of responsibility so that he may become independently healthy.”

And this “nurturing of the patient’s latent sense” is only possible through the establishment of a truly helping relationship – one where the care giver understands the patient so well on both an emotional and physical level, that they can fine-tune the patient’s experience each time to better lead them toward greater and greater levels of independent health…health that the patient is ultimately rendering onto themselves.

So that is our charge, laid down to us now some 45 years later. Can we develop and implement a “new heath-centered philosophy” in our practice which facilitates in our patients movement toward health, and to see dentistry as a resource in that pursuit instead of only a place they go when they need to be to be rescued?

It’s not easy – giving up the power and control involved in practicing dentistry in a traditional fashion (and with it the illusion that we can give health to others), but it is indeed essential

Paul A Henny, DDS

Thought Experiments LLC, ©2017

Uncomfortable? You’re on the right track!

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Jerry Seinfeld was discussing what it initially felt like to get married, which he described as a feeling of nervousness and helplessness, “like being strapped into a rollercoaster, headed to the top of the hill, where the marriage awaits!”

“It’s like any growth,” Seinfeld said, “you can’t really be ready for it. It’s new….you’re going to have a new life as a result…You’re going to be a new person.”

Jerry Seinfeld is right on this, we are never fully ready for growth in our personal and professional lives. We are never fully ready to start a practice, to hire a new team member, let another one go, start a marketing program, incorporate a new technique, or to experiment with better ways to facilitate learning with our patients.

Personal growth represents one of life’s many paradoxes; we are not ready to grow precisely because we need to grow, so we must start before we feel we are fully prepared for it.

Almost by definition, growth must be something which makes us feel unprepared and uncertain, because if the growth process was comfortable and easy, it wouldn’t be growth, it would be familiar and therefore a repeat of something we already know.

And it would be boring…

Nor would it move the needle.

There will never be a perfect time to do something which challenges and stretches us. And this will always be the case, so we need to get used to it feeling that way.

Starting a marriage? …A new known level of interpersonal commitment.

Having your first child? …Lots of learning on-the-fly.

Choosing a new and more consciously purposeful direction for our practice? …Lots of unknowns on the front end.

This is not to say that growth should be a reckless process, particularly with regard to running a business and managing relationships. We must first explore our desires, intentions, and motivations. We need to think things through…but at some point we must embrace uncertainty because it is the only path forward.

We can never be ready for true growth, and that’s why it’s called “growth”. All we can do is step into it with everything we’ve got, and move forward toward the next uncertainty.

Paul A. Henny, DDS

Copyright 2016. All rights reserved. Thought Experiments LLC.

Read more at www.codiscovery.com

This Is Our Practice

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Upon walking into the first day of training camp during the summer of 1961, Vince Lombardi said, “Gentlemen, this is a football”.

You see, the Packer’s previous season had ended with a heartbreaking defeat in the NFL Championship, and that hot summer day was ‘Day 1’ of a process that would lead the Packers under Lombardi’s leadership to never lose in the playoffs again, and to win five NFL Championships in seven years.

And it all started with a Vision.

Truly relationship-based / health-centered practices function in the same way. They are founded on a Vision which is based on a Philosophy, which is grounded in Core Values which are essentially a practice’s functional belief system.

And once that belief system is identified, like Lombardi, the dentist says to his or her team, “This is our practice”, and they start to define every aspect of it, based on this newly clarified perspective.

And what does that look like in the end? Well, there certainly are no NFL banners hanging from the ceiling to mark accomplishments, rather there are behavioral, and personal, and practice growth benchmarks instead.

Wilson Southam labeled this practice model as “volitional” where “In a health setting, of authentic caring and freedom, most people will choose to strive toward higher levels of self-care of their own volition. Volitional practice utterly respects the right of individuals to choose what is best for their own health future, with its ultimate objective to help people better help themselves.”

And I’ll bet if you took the time to work with your Care Team, you would be able to define what you do -and strive to do- in equally eloquent terms. But regardless of your eloquence, it’s the process that is most important. And its the spending of quality time together and the discovering of how everyone feels, as well as what they are willing to fight for which organically drives the practice toward the vision.

This is your practice.

Where will you lead it to this year?

Paul A Henny, DDS

Thought Experiments LLC, ©2017

Read more at www.codiscovery.com

The Implications of Corporatized Healthcare

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You might not be thinking about J. Michael Pearson, but he is likely is thinking about your money. Mr. Pearson is the current CEO of Valeant Pharmaceuticals who recently said that his company’s responsibility is to its shareholders, while making no mention of his customers who rely on his drugs to live.

“If products are sort of mispriced and there’s an opportunity, we will act appropriately in terms of doing what I assume our shareholders would like us to do.”

J. Michael Pearson is part of the new breed of healthcare industry executives, with impressive business educations, and with no personal experience with ground-level patient care. Consequently, they look at people and patients simply as emotionally distant, compartmentalized components of their business enterprise.

Does it matter to Mr. Pearson that Betty, on a fixed income, can no longer afford her life-critical medicine because of Mr. Pearson’s business strategies? Not really, because better healthcare for people is not part of Mr. Pearson’s mission.

The profession of dentistry is in the early stages of being filled with Pearson-like characters as well, people who view dentists, patients, and dental practices as opportunities to be financially exploited. Investment firms from around the world are purchasing and consolidating practices with one purpose only – to make more money for the stockholders and shareholders.

And too often, where does this leave dental patients and dentists? Locked into a co-dependency relationship with a company which at the end of the day, does not have their interests primarily in mind.

Do the right thing? Not so likely.

Hold out for what is in the patient’s long-term best interest? – That interferes too much with the corporate need to hit production goals and therefore make bonus requirements.

It’s an insidiously depersonalizing and de-professionalizing trend. And the truly relationship-based, health-centered practice is the only market alternative. As the contrast grows between these two business philosophies, so too will the opportunities for dentists who have taken the time and made the effort to truly listen and truly help patients on a level much deeper than just another financial transaction.

Paul A Henny, DDS

Thought Experiments LLC, ©2017

Health-centered Marketing

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It has become almost impossible today to pick up a dental journal, log onto Facebook, or attend a conference without “marketing” being a central topic of discussion. And this represents a significant turn of events for those of us who have been around dentistry for thirty or more years.

I have long made the argument that marketing was central to the support and advancement of a relationship-based/ health-centered practice, while others have implied that word-of-mouth was the only way to build a proper practice, and viewed the idea of using marketing to build and sustain a practice as somehow being sub-professional.

The thinking of this later group however has largely faded away along with the phone book, and as websites have taken its place. Suddenly, dentists had to publicly project an image – and suddenly they were overtly marketing their practice whether they liked doing it or not.

The distaste of overtly marketing has now been subsumed by “how” to best market instead of “should I”, and into that world, dentists have plunged, checkbooks and credit cards in-hand, throwing money around at anyone who claimed expertise is this area.

Is this doing anyone – particularly patients – any good?

Marketing can be defined in many ways, and that is likely why there is so much fog around the topic, but any valid definition should be centered around the concept of enhancing perceived value.

How does this happen? By first helping ourselves, and then others, to clarify values. And what does “clarify values” mean? It means making more thoughtful informed choices.

That which we greatly value, is by definition, important to us. And when we understand why we hold these values, we have completed an extremely sophisticated act of prioritization, and goal setting.

And that is your primary job as an ethical, health-centered marketer of your services – to help others make better choices about their healthcare which support what they want for themselves long-term.

At its finest, this type of marketing helps people clarify their values by encouraging them to concretely establish and act upon personal priorities. And in this respect, ethical health-centered marketing is the contrary to “selling”, which places upon one person the need to make choices for another person and to manipulatively gain their acceptance.

Ethical heath-centered marketing involves consultation, and clarification, THEIR active involvement in the decisions, and NO emotional manipulation.

So with this deeper understanding, how is your marketing strategy going? What outcomes do your marketing efforts consistently render out? And are your patients making better choices as a result?

Are most of your patients advancing their heath, or are you just looking for a new marketing guru to solve your production issues this year?

Paul A Henny, DDS

Thought Experiments LLC, ©2017

Read more at www.codiscovery.com

What is in Your Patient’s Brain?

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“Purple Haze all in my brain…”

‘Purple Haze’ is one of Jimi Hendrix’s most popular and well known songs -and for several reasons. First, it is well known among musicians because it starts with a unique chord Jimi invented – now regarded as “The Hendrix Chord”, but among the lay public it is most well known because people think it is about a drug trip – but it is not.

In other words, a large part of Jimi Hendrix’s image today is based on myth not fact – Purple Haze was actually written about a recurring dream Jimi had in which he imagined himself walking underwater and surrounded by a purple haze -from which Jesus would save him.

In dentistry, we face similar challenges with regard to being misunderstood as well as misunderstanding others. Yesterday, I wrote about the AAOSH survey which revealed that 90% of retirement home residents would decline dental care even if it were offered to them for free.

From that survey, I think it is safe to say that the purpose of most dentists is -like Hendrix- quite misunderstood. I would also argue that this is largely because we have failed as a profession to make routine dental care personally relevant to many of our patients on any kind of deep meaningful level.

And I would say that the reason this has occurred, is that we have failed to build a truly helping relationship with a majority of them, one where we not only like each other, but one where we understand each other’s desires and expectations well enough that we can successfully collaborate on a common goal – their heath (and our Mission).

Let’s make the building of truly helping relationships our central goal this year. And by so doing, let’s start to move dentistry away from the image of it being a repair shop only, and toward one in which we are perceived as a helping, health-centered resource.

“…tell me, tell me, purple haze – I can’t go on like this…”

Paul A Henny, DDS

Thought Experiments LLC, ©2017

Read more at www.codiscovery.com

What is Your a Practice Purpose?

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To more than satisfy patients every day should be the mission and purpose of every patient-centered practice. So in that regard, how are you doing?

The question: “How good are we at executing the Purpose of the practice?” can only be answered by looking at the practice from the OUTSIDE…from the point of view of the patients EXITING your front door.

It is important therefore to remember that what your patients are truly interested in is related to THEIR values, THEIR wants, THEIR experiences with you, THEIR reality – not yours.

No dental practice can be everything to everyone, yet many try and fail. And that is why so many patients leave dental practices unhappy. They do not feel heard, or they feel like their true issues are never being addressed… that every time they return, they feel like they are just being “sold” something else.

Patient-centered practices must begin by answering two questions:

“Who are we trying to serve?” and “How can we best serve them?”

And if you can’t deliver on the second question every day, you don’t have much of a business model – do you?

On the other hand, practices which are highly dependent on insurance don’t need to bother too much with either of these questions. Rather, they should ask: “What do the insurance companies need?” and “How do we deliver to the insurance companies what they want every day so that we get maximal payment from them?”

Where on the continuum between “patient-centered” and “insurance-centered” are you today? And toward which direction are you moving as insurance companies increase their demands and lower their reimbursements?

Paul A Henny, DDS

Thought Experiments LLC, ©2016

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