If you have ever had to give a speech or write an article, you know how difficult it is to express yourself or come up with a topic that you hope would help your audience.  I face this every week.  A blank page, a speaking event, or even writing a book.  You open your computer, and face an empty screen, looking like a whiteout blizzard.  There ...

Once again, we have arrived at dental school graduation.  Another 6,900 dental graduates are being turned out in an uncertain dental economy.  It is a time to look towards the future.  Get ready, because what got you here will not be what you need in the next stage of your career.  You are now the proud owner of a dental license.  I might ...

I know what to say, but I can’t say it.  One of our Summit Coaches I know what I need to say, but you can’t handle it.  Michael Abernathy I know what you need to hear, but you won’t listen.  Max Gotcher You can’t handle the truth.  Jack Nicholson  (A Few Good Men – 1992)   Often times, doctors find themselves ...

I tend to be pretty organized, but yesterday I was out in my barn going through some boxes of dental stuff I had saved.  In the process I ran across an article I wrote some thirty years ago.  Three decades is a long time to look back on, but I reread the article and was a little surprised at the applicability of these things even today.  I ...

Have you ever known a person who had problems follow him/her wherever they went?  And have you perhaps observed that the problems often, if not always, seemed to center around the fact that he or she had a hard time getting along with people? There is a relational truth that I learned from a mentor many years ago.  Let’s call our person ...

Suppose we stopped pretending the corpse is breathing.  Suppose we recognized that putting makeup on a dead body doesn’t bring it back to life.  Hey, we are well into another year and once again it is starting to look like ground hog day.  Another opportunity missed. You didn’t lower your overhead, produce more, or finally free up the ...

I can’t help but notice that there is a large percentage of new dental graduates that struggle with their decision to become a dentist.  It is commonplace to list debt, poor training in dental school, and few opportunities when they get out. But about every third post on dental web sites concerns stress, burnout, money, and upset patients.  A ...

In life, we need to understand that really successful people ask the right questions.  They don’t procrastinate or ruminate, place blame, or play the victim.  If you ask the right questions, you begin to fill in the blanks and get better answers.  The question to you is:  Why don’t you _______________? (you fill in the blank).  Excuses ...

There is a commonality to circumstance that many of us overlook.  Open a newspaper, watch the news, or encounter people who, in at least one aspect of their lives, are super successful and we are envious and want to duplicate that success in our own lives.  In the same media, we also hear of the downfall of people with incredible talent, that ...

No one should ever want to be an average practice. Certainly, no patient wants to go to a practice that is just ok, or average. In fact, great practices actually want to dominate other offices in their sphere of influence or about a 5–7-mile radius of your office location. Perhaps “dominate” seems a bit strong to you, but I would have to ...