Have you DECIDED to improve your practice?

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Have you DECIDED to improve your practice?

Have you ever had a situation when you knew you needed to make a decision and yet it was too hard, you were too busy, or you were distracted and as a result the situation became worse?

I am sure you see a similar situation almost every day in practice, you will have patients who have teeth that cannot be restored because they ignored the niggly pain on biting and failed to decide to pick up the telephone to make an appointment and consequently the tooth fractures and is unsalvageable and the treatment is more complicated and more expensive.

As a business coach, trainer and mentor I routinely see the similar behaviours being exhibited by dental practice owners. Their version of a niggly tooth is often, not having enough to pay themselves, the overdraft or credit card bill getting larger at the end of the month. It could be a team-members who has a ‘bad’ attitude or a gappy appointment book, odd comments, negative feedback and occasional complaints from patients, all situations that are irritating and not uncomfortable enough to stop and make a decision that will resolve the issue for good. As with your patient with the fractured cusp, the minor irritations you can be ignored for most of the time, yet experience shows, that without active intervention, the minor irritations deteriorate and become major problems. In the life of a dentist at this could be the bank calls in your overdraft, you can’t pay your staff, you can’t extend your credit lines to pay your tax, your great team members leave because of, tolerated and undisciplined, the behaviour of a poor team member, you have days of empty appointments, you receive a major patient complaint or a letter from the GDC, or you get sick and can’t work because of stress. Imagine you are going for a walk and you get a stone in your shoe, if the stone is large enough, you will stop take your shoe off, remove the stone, put your shoe back on and carry on your walk. Now imagine that instead of a stone it was a large piece of grit in your shoe, large enough to be aware of it and small enough to ignore. Most people will carry on walking, because the grit is not large enough to impede your walking. However, the grit will cause irritation and probably a painful blister, such that the consequences of the minor irritation are far more severe and longer lasting than the stone. In your practice and life, you will discover that the major problems you will stop and deal with and the minor irritations you will ignore with potentially disastrous consequences.

In this article I hope to show you how to make effective decisions that save you from making expensive mistakes and keep you in control. Are you ready to be DECIDED and to make a success of your practice?

·      Describe the problem early.             As dentists we ask our patients to attend for regular examinations so that we can catch things early, you probably also regularly have your car MOT’ed and serviced so that you know any potential problems are identified and fixed as soon as possible. When do you last do a health check on your practice to identify any actual or potential problems, so that they can be resolved early and effectively. I encourage my clients to monitor the performance of the practice using several different key performance indicators (KPI’s) including the online Brilliant Practice Evaluation (BPE) which enables you to look at 12 aspects of your practice to gauge how well you are doing and where you could improve. The sooner you identify a small problem and resolve it the less likely it is to become an expensive complex issue. Click here for your Brilliant Practice Evaluation (BPE) or use this link in your browser  https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/Briliant-Practice-Evaluation-BPE

·      Emotional state.                                 I am sure that you have had, or heard about, patients who have attended the dentist with a raging irreversible pulpitis, demanding to have the tooth out, unwilling to listen or consider any alternatives to or the long-term consequences of an extraction. In the heat of the moment all they want is the tooth removed.  When the toothache has gone they often reflect on their decision and may comeback saying they wish they hadn’t had the tooth taken out and what can they do now to replace it? Patients make poor decisions when in pain and most people make poor decisions when they are in an un-resourceful heightened emotional state. State management is an important aspect of good decision making. So that you can make the best decisions you can, learn to recognise your emotional state so that you can respond rather than react.  If you are not in the best place to make important decisions, maybe you need to walk away from situations, and decide not to make a decision now and to make it, at a specified time, when you are able to make one of better quality. You can access more resourceful emotional states in two ways

1.     Changing your physiology this could be a simple as taking deep long slow breaths for 1 minute or more, going for a walk, run, swim or cycle, these repetitive activities are excellent for freeing up mental space. Ensuring you are hydrated, having a glass of water, improving your diet and sleep hygiene, eliminating alcohol, recreational drugs, sugar, caffeine, etc will help you make better decisions over the longer term

2.     Changing the mental internal representation of your situation.  This is a technique that does not change your current situation and allows you to see it and experience it differently, so you do not approach the situation emotionally charged, this is a little bit like eliminating a phobic response. A skilled coach with training in NLP (Neuro linguistic programming) will be able to show you how to do this in many ways.

·      Clarity about the outcome                 Before you make a good decision, you need to know what is it that you want as an outcome and your motivation. My clients are very skilled at telling me what they don’t want in their practices, their finances their team or their life, unfortunately they are less able to tell me what they do want. Before you make a decision, you must get really clear about what it is that you are intending to achieve and what are your underlying motivations. Think about what you want, when you want it, with whom you want it, are there times when you don’t want the outcome, how does the outcome align with your beliefs, values and sense of identity?

·      Information and options                    The most common reasons people avoid making decisions is because they either have too little information on which to base their judgements, or they have too much and are drowning in information overload and become paralysed. It is important that you have the correct information and enough of it you have elicited all your potential options. Most people make decisions on a binary either-or basis and yet there are generally more options available to you if you look for them. Working with a coach and mentor is really useful at this stage of a decision- making process, they will make sure you are looking at multiple perspectives, will be able to pull you back when you are getting lost and help you keep on track with the momentum you need.

·      Deliberate and Document                                         When making a decision, writing down your thoughts, pros and cons as a swot analysis, mind map, post-it notes or using Jane’s 5-magic questions are invaluable tools. When you try to decide in your head you will probably think one action is a good idea and then before you know it you have created scenarios when it does not work and are looping round and round, not actually making a decision. Many people report, that before you know it the thinking about it has become a ‘worry worm’ and hijacked their brain so it is all they can think about and yet they don’t decide. Writing your problems, thoughts, ideas, options, potential consequences and potential benefits will change your perception. Again, many clients report that working with a coach and mentor at this stage makes the deliberation process much easier, your coach and mentor will help you focus on what is important and why and prevent you from getting caught in the irrelevant. A client I was talking to last night asked me to help him make a decision at the end of the session his comment was, “Thank you, that is a great weight of my mind” CR dentist Eire.

·      Execute immediately                         One you have made a decision, act immediately showing commitment to what you have done. Initially this will be to write down your decision, the action plan required in small enough steps to make it manageable and large enough to precipitate momentum and define your accountability plan. Accountability is essential, who do you need to tell what you have decided so that they continue to remind you and support you in your progress. Obviously, your coach and mentor is ideally placed to do this and your accountability buddy can also be a friend, colleague, spouse, anyone who is prepared to support you. Make sure that you commit to your decision and give it enough time and evaluation it needs, decisions can be refined and changed to continue to build on your success.

·      Diarise your decision making            When you are doing a crown prep is not the time to decide how to manage a difficult team member, when you are cooking the family supper is not the best time to make important financial decisions, multitasking is a fallacy. Multitasking results in doing a number of things badly, focus on one task at a time and do that thing to the best of your ability. If you are a practice owner you will have lots of decisions to make on a regular basis, make sure you have at least one day a week set aside for reflection, information gathering, conversations with your coach/mentor, space to think and decide.

If you have a problem or situation that has been going round and round in your head and you know you need to make a decision and would like some support, you can call me on 07989 757884, or e mail Jane@IODB.co.uk to schedule a coaching/mentoring appointment.

Remember, for your practice to be the success you deserve, you need to be DECIDED and now is the time.

·      Describe the problem early

·      Emotional state

·      Clarity of outcome

·      Information and options

·      Deliberate and document

·      Execute immediately

·      Diarise decision making

Jane Lelean Dental Business Coach, mentor and trainer.

Master Practitioner in NLP

Professional certified Coach with the International Coach Federation