Hey, how do you like that. Right after Halloween we get a Friday the 13th to celebrate in the horror and freight of all those superstitious nights.
Superstitions are disguised as beliefs in every industry on earth. They make up what is correct, true, possible, expected, normal and customary.
They are also down-right, flat-out wrong in most instances.
Have you ever heard the story about the mother whose child once asked her why she cut the ends off of the ham before placing it into the oven for every Christmas Dinner and the mom replied “Well, I do that because that’s what Grandma always does…”
And then the mom one day curiously asked her mom, the grandma, why she cuts the ends off the ham every Christmas and the grandma replied very abruptly, “Well, I cut the ends off of the ham because the ham was always bigger than the pot I had to bake it in, so to make it fit I cut it down to size…”
This is a story about our lives, the entire dental industry, your practice, and human nature in general. We do things out of habit, hand me down, because someone else does it that way, in other words superstition of belief about something that is not necessarily true rather just something we believe to be true.
Call it paranoia, though there is healthy paranoia, a topic for a different day.
Call it being a hypochondriac…I don’t really care what you want to make it out to be; fact is, you are costing yourself tens of thousands of dollars of treatment every month (if not a hundred thousand or more) and a whole lot of extra work all because you believe certain things that you have been told that are not really true.
Here’s two big ones:
Patients will be scared away by receiving the full treatment plan (the truth about their mouth…integrity in diagnosis) on their first visit.
Well. Sorry, wrong. And stupid. Because the highest income earning dentists in North America are doing it and that’s why they are getting so many patients to say yes to full treatment – because they are presenting it.
Of course you aren’t suppose to take someone that has spent less than 2 minutes on the phone with a team member, walked in, the only relationship a clipboard and paperwork and then thrown the patient down in the chair and burst her bubble of thinking her mouth is just fine, her teeth all still in tact and then tell her they need a full mouth reconstruction or smile makeover when she never asked for one.
No. There is a right way, the wrong way, and the best way: my way of cultivating trust, relationships, need, want, deserve with each and every patient that will lead to them excited and desiring to know how to optimize their health.
The bottom line is patients don’t want to be lied to for better or worse and they darn sure won’t say yes to something they are never offered. If you start small or step-by-step your treatment you will always end up with less than you should.
Your decision and belief that you have to “ease in to the treatment plan” is just your lack of effectiveness, not your patient’s lack of ability or willingness to accept.
Question: are you short changing yourself and in turn your patients by not treating comprehensively, by not communicating the continuum of dentistry that they need to complete their journey to health, function, and beauty?
Another superstition:
That other dentists are your competition.
C’mon, seriously. You are delirious.
If your patients are price shopping you, they are either the wrong patients or you are just really terrible at differentiating yourself. There are more than enough patients to go around.
Your competition is your own beliefs, your team members’ lack of focus and showing up ready to play to win. Your competition is the mindset of the patients you already have, the terrible conditioning you have allowed them to experience by your passive approach to health and dentistry, up ‘til now. Your competition is the insurance companies robbing you of the money you deserve and the healthcare your patients need.
Everything is about education and knowledge. You want informed patients who have relationship with you who would not even consider going anywhere else. You want to breed quality patients and be in a category of one who has no alternatives because once you capture (care) for your patients they become loyal and devoted ambassadors of your practice.
As I have said my many times, our biggest competition is being commoditized by our own industry and our own mindset that we do not make dentistry important enough in the minds of our patients to remove all thoughts of competition or believing that they can get the same care anywhere they choose to go.
Question: what are you doing to differentiate yourself and to educate your patients on how to make great decisions?
Of course I could keep going on superstitions and industry norms that rob you of opportunity, prosperity, patients, and overall peace of mind.
Here’s what I want to leave you with this week.
Question everything.
Believe nothing.
Take control of your own results and outcomes.
I learned long ago that your increase in income is in direct proportion to your increase in responsibility. When you leave things up to ‘the industry’ ‘the patients’ ‘the market’ and any other ‘the’ you want to rely on, you will immediately and automatically diminish the most powerful and controllable force you have over dictating your outcomes and results – YOURSELF.
A Dentist said to me yesterday on the phone…
“I would really like to only work 3 days a week…but I don’t know if it’s possible…”
And I said immediately – “Of course it’s possible, anything is possible.” And it is because we make it so.
Do I have to repeat for you the saying that has become so famous in the world of personal development, once said by Napoleon Hill – “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.”
Repeat that to yourself again and again, out loud. Say it to your team.
Embrace it. Own it. Be consumed by it.
You can choose what you believe in. The same thing that everyone else does based on made up superstitions, or in possibilities, in the way you want things to be.
YOUR practice is YOUR practice.
