Episode : You Need to Protect Your Practice’s Ecosystem | #1,143

Podcast Description

This one is for the billion-dollar assets of each practice: the doctor! Kiera is a pragmatic cheerleader, encouraging doctors to realize the asset they are. She touches on self evaluation, burnout, and building a practice that doesn’t require constant sacrifice.

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Transcript:

The Dental A Team (00:00)

Hello, Dental A Team listeners. This is Kiera. today I just want to give you a perspective shift that I hope you take, that I hope you run with. And I hope that you see the beauty in just thinking about it differently. I’m Kiera Dent. I’m the host of the Dental Dental A Team podcast. I love all things dentistry and I love positively influencing and infusing and impacting your life for the better. ⁓ We fly physically to your practices or we coach your team, you and your team virtually.

We also have in-person doctor masterminds where our entire community gets together. We share, we laugh, we have a good time and it’s for doctor and leadership. I don’t believe that running a successful practice should be hard. So come aboard, join us. You can always head on over to our website, TheDentalATeam.com, click on book a call. We do a free complimentary assessment of your whole practice, leave you with tactical, tangible tips and advice. So reach out, there’s no reason to do this alone. And if you have an expert, that’s your podcast buddy.

Let’s do this together. There’s no reason to make your life hard. I’d love to connect with you even just to say hello. So today I’m going to just give you guys this like really fun thing of dentists. are truly the greatest asset of your practice and you need to start protecting that. Woo. I said it. now be careful. There’s a fine line of egotistical and humble, but I want you just to realize that doctors like you are the greatest asset. If we don’t have you producing, we don’t have your vision. We don’t have a business. Let that sink in for just a second.

Like you’re not a provider. You’re not just a provider. You’re our like entire ecosystem. And so taking care of you, I have on here, I’m not joking. It literally is right here on my computer. says I’m a Foxy Fit billionaire babe. And I also say my body is a billion dollar asset. Treat it like such. I have a thing that says I identify as a Ferrari. ⁓ Things to remind me that I really need to take care of me because I’m the greatest freaking asset. And again, it’s not coming from a place of egotistical. It’s just facts.

And so I want you to just realize that we’ve got to take care of you. And so I wanted to just give you three quick tactical tips today on how we can take care of the most valuable driver of the practice, which is you. So I want you to start thinking of yourself as that billion dollar babe or billion dollar boy, like whatever you want it to be. But like, if I really have a billion dollar asset, be as in boy or babe, I need to start treating myself like that. Like you’re probably producing 500 million.

two million, four million, 20 million annually. Your diagnosis influences millions of people and lives over your career. And yet you run yourself like you’re replaceable and you just run yourself into the ground and you just think that you’re this machine. And I just want you to realize that like that’s not sustainable. Like you need to start realizing I’m a billion dollar asset. And when like this means we don’t skip lunches, we don’t skip workouts, we don’t like overwork ourselves, we don’t.

squeeze emergencies in on every single day. Like you did that when you were growing the practice and I get it. But like, you guys production on the top might not be great for the body on the bottom. We might have decision fatigue. We might have case acceptance failing. Like everything’s spinning around breaking because you yourself is breaking down. We’ve got to start treating ourselves like a high value asset. Going to the gym, eating food regularly, taking care of our relationships, being, showing up for other people, having a quiet mental time. This is a spot of like,

Okay, does my schedule protect my performance or does it drain it? If you can’t even go to the bathroom in the middle of day, you might need to change some things up. And I know a lot of dentists do this. I did this as a dental assistant. We just run crazy because we’re like, we need to serve all these patients, which is great. But the next piece is like burnout is not part of your job. So exhaustion impacts your leadership. Tired doctors avoid hard conversations. Diagnosis gets more conservative the more tired you are and more burnout.

team feels tension grows starts to plateau. And so when we look at this, like not only is it a personal issue, it’s also a business liability. And I have seen plenty of doctors go through to where they actually stopped diagnosing as strongly. And it’s not that they’re doing anything wrong. They just were running themselves ragged. were draining themselves. Like burnout should not be part of the job. You didn’t sign up for this, go into all this debt, go to school for all these different things just to have it be where you’re not, like you’re not able to take care of you. And then

Like we got to look at this and say, like, your business should work for you and not the other way around. So how can I build a practice that does not require constant sacrifice? So my growth should create freedom, not heavier days. If everything depends on you, the practice is not scalable yet. We need to scale it down and get pieces, people and processes in place before we do that. And taking care of ourselves. I’m not kidding. Like going to the doctor regularly.

having date nights with our spouse, working out at least three times a week, ⁓ making sure that we’re standing up and moving our bodies, making sure that we have mental health time for ourselves, going to meeting with a therapist if we need to, having meditation time in the mornings, going for walks, getting outside, having, like I said, date nights where you’re not exhausted, making dinner. That’s life. It should not be, I mean, I do this too, so I’m equally guilty and I’m not here to preach, I’m not here to…

be above, I’m here to be with you and to say that like, okay, I want you to map out your perfect life. I want you to say like, hey, what did I imagine my life looking like by building this practice? And it can change and it can morph. So it doesn’t need to be like at the beginning. For me right now, I want it to be like Mondays are meeting days. I work out three to four times a week. I’m off work every single day at four o’clock. I go for a run or a hike or a walk with my husband every single day outside.

I do yoga every single day for at least 10 minutes. try to have like Fridays are my CEO time where I just have like white noise time. But this has been an evolution of Kiera. This is Kiera was running herself so ragged that there was nothing left. I didn’t want to be with my husband. had no time. Like literally I’d walk up from work because you know, I’m downstairs, just walk up the stairs, don’t have a long commute. And I’d be like, I’m just so exhausted. I have nothing in me to make dinner. I have nothing in me to like talk to you.

I wanna just sit on the couch and veg and have TV time. That’s not living. That’s not why I built this business. Like here I am making all these dentists have their fulfilled lives and teams. And yet I’m drowning and feeling like I have no time for vacations. I have no time to be with my family. I have nothing that makes me feel like me. And what I found is you switched that. I meditate every morning. I do yoga 10 minutes before. I used to be like, okay, let me hurry and like work on the business beforehand. Like I felt like I was getting so much done. And now it’s like, no.

I don’t start until 730, eight o’clock. I don’t look at Slack. Slack’s no longer on my phone. Emails are no longer on my phone. ⁓ If clients text me, that’s great. I’m going to respond to you at eight o’clock when I’m in the office. Of course, if it’s an emergency, we will absolutely take care of it. But generally speaking, I need to take care of Kiera. I need to take care of my life. I want to show up for my husband. I want to show up for my family. I want to show up for me. And when I started realizing like, if my body was a Ferrari, I’d put the best fuel in it. So let me fuel myself in the best way.

I would wax and shine. So let me go work out and like, I go sit in the hot tub sometimes in the middle of the day. Why not? You can take mental breaks at the practice too. You don’t always have to be working. Have good food. You can hire people that can help you with this. Personal assistants are great. Like everything does not need to sit on your shoulders. I have a gym trainer. I have a personal assistant. I have an executive assistant. I am about to hire a house manager. I do have a house cleaner. I have a lot of people that support me and help me.

And I realized because I need to take care of me. So for you, I want you to look to see how can you treat yourself more like a billion dollar asset? Everything I listed off to you is 10 years in the making. It did not happen overnight. What’s one thing today that you could do to treat your body and your mental psyche as the billion dollar asset that it is for your practice? How can we implement just a little bit? Because you’re not just working in a multi-million dollar practice. You’re a leading one and you’re producing it.

and I need you to operate accordingly. NBA like players, they’re not on the court every single day. Football players, they’ve got seasons. All of us have seasons. In dentistry, we don’t get seasons. We’ve got patients that come every six months, which is great. So we got to make those seasons throughout the week, throughout the day, throughout the month to make sure we’re taking care of you. So I want you to just think about like, how can I look at my practice? How can I make sure my practice is working for me and not me working for my practice? It’s really crazy. I actually…

This is going to be a little TMI guys. Welcome to Kiera’s life. I hope you’re ready for it. I actually put like chalkboard in my husband and my bathroom and I have markers in there and hand sanitizer. Don’t worry. I want to make sure it’s always clean. ⁓ but it’s first like write little love notes to each other. And on there I said, I said, we work to live. We don’t live to work. ⁓ our, and like, that’s what it should be.

We work is such a vehicle for us. It creates so much identity for us, but also it can create a lot of stress for us. And so I really hope today is one where you can think about it. I am the greatest asset of my practice ⁓ and I need to start protecting it. So what’s one small shift? Can I go to the gym? If I’m already doing a lot of things, how can I up it for myself even more? For me, my latest is like, I shut the door at four o’clock and I’m done and I go for a walk right after work. That’s more self care for myself.

⁓ At night I go to bed listening to a really like calming meditation that makes me think on such a higher level and I love it. I absolutely love it What what can you do as a billion dollar asset for yourself? Because the more you take care of yourself the more you put the oxygen mask on yourself first the more you realize that like I said at the beginning it’s a We start operating like a high-value asset. We stop treating burnout like it’s part of the job

And we build a practice that does not require constant sacrifice. You start to thrive. You start to blossom. You start to grow. You start to realize that you are important. And like you are a member on the team. A great litmus test that I often ask myself is, if I worked for someone like I do today, would I keep working here? And if the answer is no, I ask myself why? And then I commit to within 30 days, I make a change to make that better. So for you, I just want you to

protect you as an asset, stabilize your business and realize you’re playing for the long game, not the short game. Because the best practices are not built on sacrifice, they’re built on sustainability. Truly, I’m so excited for you. If we can help you, think sometimes having a coach give you permission to take care of yourself, to take the vacation, to help you see it’s not gonna break down and we’ve got the infrastructure built around you, can be so freeing. So reach out because you were not meant to be a machine, you were meant to be a human being.

and I hope that that resonates with you. Reach out [email protected], click on our website, TheDentalATeam.com click on the link, book a call. I’d love to help you, I’d love to give you any tips because life is made for you and not to you. It’s all happening for you and not to you. So this is your chance, this is your one life, and I hope that you’re living the absolute best version of it. And if we can help in any way, we’re here for you. You are the greatest billion dollar asset of your practice. Treat yourself as such.

And as always, thanks for listening and I’ll catch you next time on the Dental A Team