Love Your Practice

Most of us feel OVERWHELMED at some point! Owning a dental practice creates crazy days that can be a lot to handle! Do you sometimes feel like you don't know what to do next because you're stuck in an overwhelmed state and too busy to move forward with making decisions and properly leading your practice? If so, this episode will help you break FREE from this feeling that you're experiencing and open up a new way of living and leading!

Do you know it's possible for us to love our businesses and our lives by only changing how we're thinking? Our brains are human, created by nature; and they do what they think they need to do to keep us safe. In this episode, I'll explore how the biology of the brain relates to our reality: why we feel overwhelmed, why it's bad for our businesses, and how to get out of that feeling. Sometimes feeling overwhelmed can freeze us in place, and then we can't make good decisions for ourselves and our practices. But we have the power to change what is happening in our brains! Listen to this episode for the steps you can take today to escape from feeling overwhelmed, take care of yourself, be in charge of your life and lead your practice!

Highlights from this episode:

• The job of the brain
• Exploring how overwhelm feels to individuals
• How thoughts begin our emotions
• What happens when we separate facts about situations from our thoughts
• Why we feel overwhelmed much of the time
• A look at an "intentional model"
• How you can show up for yourself and your practice
• The feeling that can change your life

Resources and links mentioned:

Watch Laura's podcasts on YouTube: Love Your Practice!

Laura's email: [email protected]

Laura's website: LoveYourPractice.net

Laura's podcast: Love Your Practice!

Laura's Facebook pages:

Leadership Coach for Busy Dentists

Love Your Practice

Laura's personal page

Thank you so much for tuning in to this podcast! I would love it if you would share it with others and leave a review for others to see!

~ Laura

When we own or manage a dental practice, we get ourselves into a position our brains don't like, as productivity is sometimes challenged and we have to deal with issues as they arise. However, having proper plans in place can help you handle those situations! My guest this week is dental office manager Jodie Pearson. She has 35 years experience in the dental industry and shares many of her insights, from the challenges of learning her own role to coaching employees so they are aware of their responsibilities and ways they can help advance the practice.

This episode explores some of the tools necessary to set yourself up for success and be confident as a manager. When we get so focused on patient care, we forget about the humans who are helping us with that. But our team is essential to our success. From job descriptions to office policies, it is important to have documentation in writing so that everyone has a clear understanding of expectations. And, it's important to know that many employees need to be coached along the way. You have experience you can share with them, and there are some really effective methods for coaching. We'll talk about those in this episode as well as how vital it is to focus on time… development time for your team, time for team meetings and creating team camaraderie, and, very importantly, time to invest in yourself so you can avoid those overwhelmed feelings and be the practice owner or manager you are meant to be. Create the practice you want to work in! If you make the practice the way you want it to be and have a system in place to operate that, you will love being at work! Listen to this episode now!

Highlights from this episode:

• How and why owning or managing a dental practice can be very isolating
• Challenges of management
• "Clear is kind" - what that means and how to implement it
• Setting yourself up for success
• Importance of having clear, clean job descriptions, office policies and more
• Ways to coach employees so they have time to learn
• What to ask employees for so they feel they're making a difference
• The critical nature of team meetings and team morale building
• Making the commitment to investing in yourself

Resources and links mentioned:

Jodie Pearson's email: [email protected]

Jodie Pearson's phone: 562-619-8825

Email Dr. Laura for the guide on how to correct your employees

Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus book

Bent Ericksen & Associates

Keep Your Practice Happy With Communication With Your Team episode

The Happy Dentist Retreat

Watch Laura's podcasts on YouTube: Love Your Practice!

Laura's email: [email protected]

Laura's website: LoveYourPractice.net

Laura's podcast: Love Your Practice!

Laura's Facebook pages:

Leadership Coach for Busy Dentists

Love Your Practice

Laura's personal page

Thank you so much for tuning in to this podcast! I would love it if you would share it with others and leave a review for others to see!

~ Laura

What do you want for your practice? Did you know that your practice is a manifestation of your thoughts? In this interesting episode, Dr. Laura Mach will help you make changes - not from a to-do list but from what is happening in your mind!

It is possible to redirect your brain to have better thoughts about how you see yourself and your practice. Think about that for a minute. This could be big news for some of you as you learn to think about how your practice can serve your life and make you proud. It is so vital to examine multiple aspects of what drives you, what you want to accomplish and what gives you joy. Essentially, who ARE you? If you need a little help with this, you are in the right place! Dr. Laura walks you through the process of using awareness tools of what the brain is doing so you can contemplate your current situation and the potential for change in your practice. This will open your eyes to a wonderful new vision for yourself and your practice! So, grab a notebook, and listen to this thought-provoking episode that can help you change your future!

Highlights from this episode:

• Defining your actions within your practice
• What drives our actions
• How your practice is a manifestation of your thoughts
• "The Model" - what it is and how it can be applied to your practice
• What making a "vision" means for your practice
• Questions to examine to make big changes
• Using awareness tools of what your brain is doing

Resources and links mentioned:

Watch Laura's podcasts on YouTube.

Laura's email: [email protected]

Laura's website: LoveYourPractice.net

Laura's podcast: Love Your Practice!

Laura's Facebook pages:

Leadership Coach for Busy Dentists

Love Your Practice

Laura's personal page

Thank you so much for tuning in to this podcast! I would love it if you would share it with others and leave a review for others to see!

~ Laura

Are you trying to be a good leader, but nobody told you how? Do you take the proper time needed to be a good leader in your dental practice? With all of the time dentists spend doing procedures, it is difficult to then devote the attention necessary to focus on leadership. However, this episode presents how essential it is to have a healthy brain to have a healthy body and practice. Explore the "Brain Revolution" with guest Christine Curtis who provides you with new ways to consider what and how you are thinking and see how that relates to leadership in YOUR practice!

Consider the fact that our brains are organs designed by nature, and everything nature designs serves a purpose. Have you thought about the fact that our brains process the information that enters them and filters in survival? Some of the information that enters our brains as practice owners puts our brains on defense, and bad habits can be formed when our brains look to the negative instead of the positive. However, host Dr. Laura Mach and Christine share that there are things you can do to move yourself over to a new track in your thoughts about your practice!

From effective morning huddles to proper paperwork in the office, timely paychecks, and more, this episode will help you focus on issues that are important to being a good leader within your practice and some of the thoughts that pass through your brain, influencing those thoughts. Learn to use the techniques available to train the brain and practice those techniques, making them familiar to you so you can teach your patients the techniques as well. Together, we can make many people healthier… listen now!

Highlights from this episode:

• Examples of flaws in leadership
• The importance of not letting your brain convince you that you have too much to do
• The brain's job is survival
• How brains work
• The fear of things that cannot be controlled
• What the 5 to 1 ratio is with regard to thoughts and the impact it can have
• How often we hypnotise ourselves
• Separating out facts from thoughts

Resources and links mentioned:

Christine's book: Your Dream Dental Practice: Happy Patients, Fewer Hours, Easier Life

Christine's email: [email protected]

Laura's email: [email protected]

Laura's website: LoveYourPractice.net

Laura's podcast: Love Your Practice!

Laura's Facebook pages:

Leadership Coach for Busy Dentists

Love Your Practice

Laura's personal page

For a link to Laura's FREE Webinar mentioned in the podcast, text "loveyourpractice" [all one word] to 22828.

Thank you so much for tuning in to this podcast! I would love it if you would share it with others and leave a review for others to see!

~ Laura

Thanks to human biology, people become judge-y from time to time, and that's okay because human brains just work that way. However, there is another path - a much more positive one - that can be taken along life's journey! In this episode, host Dr. Laura Mach acknowledges that looking for problems can be a survival technique, but living life in a negative mindset does not let you enjoy yourself or your practice. As Laura says, no judgemental sentences you tell yourself "are going to put you in a proactive state where you are feeling motivated to make changes."

During this introspective episode, Dr. Mach moves listeners from acknowledging judgemental behavior to a state of looking at life through a lens of curiosity so that improvements can be made. By asking helpful questions instead of saying how things "should" be, you will learn how you can see options for improving any situation that you are questioning. Changing how you look at things heightens your creativity, allowing you to better develop new solutions to what you would like to see happening differently.

Ready to get your confidence back? Your feelings come from what you are thinking - not from the actions of others! So it's imperative that you think thoughts that boost your confidence. For example, being in a state of judgement of others makes you suffer: you feel angry because of what you're thinking. However, if you look at a situation simply from the point of view of what makes you content, you can eliminate your anger! YOU are in control of your feelings! Get your control and your confidence back… listen to this episode now!

Highlights from this episode:

• Understanding self-judgement
• How everyone loses in the comparison game
• Nothing good comes from the state of being judgemental
• Problems with jumping to conclusions and viewing life through a negative lens
• Letting your mind acknowledge negative things but move to a helpful place
• Rephrasing your view of situations from negative statements to curious thoughts, sparking creativity
• Understanding the concept of emotional adulthood
• Boosting your confidence through how you think about elements of your life

Resources and links mentioned:

Laura's email: [email protected]

Laura's website: LoveYourPractice.net

Laura's podcast: Love Your Practice!

Laura's Facebook pages:

Leadership Coach for Busy Dentists

Love Your Practice

Laura's personal page

Thank you so much for tuning in to this podcast! I would love it if you would share it with others and leave a review for others to see!

~ Laura

Mindset and Creating Freedom from Third-Party Payers One Step at a Time With Kleer CEO Dave Monahan

Do you think it's dangerous to break out of the mold of dealing with third-party payers? Are you nervous about eliminating insurance companies? My guest on this episode is Dave Monahan, the founder and CEO of Kleer, a company that helps dentists create membership plan programs, allowing dentists to offer care plans directly to their patients. He explains why you don't have to feel anxious about growing your independence from third-party payers while you tap into your expertise as a caregiver who can create the care plans your patients need!

Let's talk about how we want to look at our businesses with regards to third-party payers. How do we want to look at these things in order to be ready to break free? This episode will help guide you on the steps necessary to develop care plans - which are one piece in creating that freedom from discount plans - for your patients, present them to your team, and market them to your patients. Give your patients the affordable care they want and improve their oral health, while also eliminating the administrative costs of dealing with middlemen by working directly with patients instead. Focus on your business, and listen to this episode to understand why this move can be a smart goal for you and your practice! Listen now to hear how you can liberate your office!

Highlights from this episode:

• Problems with insurance "plans" that limit patients' thoughts about dental care
• Some stats on patient behavior for those with and without insurance
• How membership plans provide better care for patients and more profitability for dentists
• Issues membership plans address
• Components to creating membership plans
• The thoughts and feelings that dentists experience prior to making the leap forward to eliminating insurance companies
• The ways membership plans can provide you with additional time to give your patients better care
• How Kleer can help you transition to membership plans without any upfront costs to you

Resources and links mentioned:

Kleer

The Less Insurance Dependence Podcast with Gary Takacs

Laura's email: [email protected]

Laura's website: LoveYourPractice.net

Laura's podcast: Love Your Practice!

Laura's Facebook pages:

Leadership Coach for Busy Dentists

Love Your Practice

Laura's personal page

Thank you so much for tuning in to this podcast! I would love it if you would share it with others and leave a review for others to see!

~ Laura

Why are you a dentist? What do you WANT to do in your practice? Consider the fact that YOUR practice belongs to YOU! How you run your practice is up to YOU. You do not have to be a pawn in the game that belongs to the big insurance companies anymore. Today's guest is Dr. Nicole Vane, and she shares her story of how she has forged ahead in her practice to create a new way of managing her practice so she is the person in charge. Her experience will help open your eyes so you can look at yourself and your practice in a new way.

We can get dentistry back to where we want it to be… but we have to work TOGETHER! Have you been churning out the work in a fast-paced, high-producing practice that is heavy in PPO billing? If so, there are other business models you can incorporate to boost your profits without running yourself into the ground. You can break the cycle of a business model that does not serve you anymore.

Say "Yes" to yourself and to your practice by saying "No" to being controlled by the insurance companies that set the rules for how you bill and the fraction of payment that you receive for your quality work. This is the time to make a change. Believe in yourself and your ability to break the mold of how you've been managing your practice. You can get back to focusing on the care of your patients: treating your patients with attention and providing the best services for them, not spending all of your time and energy dealing and negotiating with insurance companies.

Covering topics such as stepping outside your comfort zone, changing how you think about your practice, framing how you look at your work, aligning the culture in your practice, leading your employees appropriately, and building value and trust with your clients, this episode will open your eyes so you can look at your practice more objectively and focus on your patients… while increasing the ROI of your procedures. Listen to this episode to learn how you can continue to do your best work but also change your mindset to recognize that YOUR work is valued!

Highlights from this episode:

• Shifting dentistry to fee-for-service
• How thoughts become beliefs and influence how you run your practice
• Skewing diagnoses based on what the insurance companies dictate
• Escaping the trapped feeling of catering to the insurance companies
• Comparing courage versus comfort
• Breaking through the money scarcity mindset
• Realigning the culture in your practice to change the mindset to work within a new management framework
• Becoming the leader you need to be
• Learning to question your objectives and goals
• Recognizing the trust your patients place in you and value building with clients
• Looking at production and collection totals and lower costs within the new business model

Resources and links mentioned:

Dr. Nicole Vane's email: [email protected]

Dr. Nicole Vane's trifold: email Laura for a photo of her trifold. [email protected]

Laura's email: [email protected]

Laura's website: LoveYourPractice.net

Laura's podcast: Love Your Practice!

Laura's Facebook pages:

Leadership Coach for Busy Dentists

Love Your Practice

Laura's personal page

Thank you so much for tuning in to this podcast! I would love it if you would share it with others and leave a review for others to see!

~ Laura

Today's interview can enrich your life and make you a more successful leader. In fact, it's a conversation about conversations! With about twenty years of experience in the dental industry, Robyn Ramirez is a dental consultant and is a Conversational Intelligence Certified Coach… so she understands the neuroscience behind conversations. Based on her experience as a business development coach focusing on helping dentists grow their dental practices, she recognizes that increasing financial numbers in a practice does not necessarily make people feel better. She realizes how important experiencing true happiness from work is, and there is a path to get to that point. One critical component is the art of conducting successful conversations.

Conversations cause people to release hormones. An actual physical change happens. This process changes your perception of reality, and that can carry over into future conversations and affect your whole day. And often conversations are not understood properly. In fact, Robyn points out that a study found, "Nine out of ten conversations missed the mark, meaning that the intent doesn't equal the impact." So the information is not being expressed well. In fact, if you want to grow your business, successful conversations are critical. This episode will emphasize the importance of good conversations and how impactful they can be to your practice's bottom line. If you think most messages you try to get across are "common sense," then this episode will be effective in helping you see your side of the conversation through a different lens! Learn how to start and conduct conversations more effectively, avoid the pitfalls of your interactions with others, and establish trust within your conversations with Robyn's eye-opening insight… listen now!

Highlights from this episode:

• Conversations are often not understood between the participants
• Tips for more effective conversations
• Facing and overcoming the feeling of being overwhelmed
• The #1 conversational blindspot that so many people don't recognize
• Examining the physical changes that are caused by conversations
• Avoiding the pitfalls of conversations
• What the conversational dashboard is and elements you can implement
• The importance of positivity

Resources and links mentioned:

Let's Talk Results

Robyn's email: [email protected]

Laura's email: [email protected]

Laura's website: LoveYourPractice.net

Laura's podcast: Love Your Practice!

Laura's Facebook pages:

Leadership Coach for Busy Dentists

Love Your Practice

Laura's personal page

Thank you so much for tuning in to this podcast! I would love it if you would share it with others and leave a review for others to see!

~ Laura

My listeners, you deserve to hear this story from my guest, Dr. Sonya Stolze. She shares why she decided to enter dental school, how she began her career working alongside her father, and how she learned about the business side of managing the practice. Everything was rolling along until there was a major crisis in her life and the operation of the practice. This episode is one that every dentist needs to listen to… being prepared for impactful life changes is essential, and this story presents a real-life example of how leadership must continue and evolve during times of crisis.

When a practice goes through a crisis, it can be very difficult for the entire staff as well as the patients. But it is vital to be able to assess the changes that need to happen, pivot to meet those needs, and learn new systems to implement to manage the practice through the critical period. With delegation and staff training, efficiency comes; and this episode delves into Dr. Stolze's experiences as she recognized her vulnerability and then navigated her way through staff member training and changing the flow of work within the practice. As you listen to this episode, you will hear how this practice transformed and how staff members developed new skill sets and were able to personalize the work they were doing to provide the services and care needed by the patients. This episode will help you discover the importance of deciding what you can delegate to your team, allowing them to develop into their best selves and your entire practice to be more productful!

Highlights from this episode:

• The need to prepare for unexpected changes in a practice
• How to navigate through changes in the practice when there is much uncertainty
• Changing how you practice to become more efficient
• Implementing new systems to adjust the flow of the office during a crisis
• Acknowledging the need to change the capacity and ability to lead
• The importance of delegation of duties
• What "Clear is kind" means and how you can incorporate this mindset into your life and work
• How important it is to know and communicate the markers of success

Resources and links mentioned:

Laura's email: [email protected]

Laura's website: LoveYourPractice.net

Laura's podcast: Love Your Practice!

Laura's Facebook pages:

Leadership Coach for Busy Dentists

Love Your Practice

Laura's personal page

Thank you so much for tuning in to this podcast! I would love it if you would share it with others and leave a review for others to see!

~ Laura

If you would like to sign up for my FREE Webinar on February 26, 20201, go to my website and scroll down the homepage or directly to this LINK.

Do you question your abilities and struggle with feeling that you are not qualified to be at the level where you currently are? Maybe you are having a negative inner dialogue that needs to be changed. If so, please know you are not alone! This episode will enlighten you to what you are really experiencing, the fact that you are part of a large community of people going through the same thing, and that there are ways to deal with these thoughts! Dr. Laura Mach welcomes Empowerment Coach Dr. Jessica Metcalfe who shares her story and explains how the "Imposter Phenomenon" can be dismantled.

Most people have some elements of Imposter Phenomenon happening. However there are ways to escape it and become comfortable again. When experiencing times of self-doubt, it is important to not push these feelings under the rug; rather, give yourself permission to think about what you're thinking and acknowledge that your brain is wired to be negative because it's trying to find potential problems and keep you safe. So give your brain some grace, and choose to look at all of the positives in your life. Sometimes this is not a natural process, but there are easy exercises you can do to overcome this! Listen to this episode for details that will not only shed some light on your thoughts but help you change how you think, which will change how you feel… leading to many positive changes for you and those around you as you lift yourself up and let your light shine! Listen now!

Highlights from this episode:

• What the imposter phenomenon is
• The connection between the cues you pick up from society's messages to the feeling of anxiety when you're trying to be heard
• The fears associated with asking for help
• The thought processes people experience during transitional periods
• How self-worth is linked to achievements
• The method to becoming aware of your thoughts and making a conscious effort at changing them
• Changing how you choose to talk to yourself
• Finding internal validation and learning to congratulate yourself

Resources and links mentioned:

Dr. Jessica Metcalfe website: drjessicametcalfe.com

Dr. Jessica Metcalfe's email: [email protected]l

Laura's email: [email protected]

Laura's website: LoveYourPractice.net

Laura's podcast: Love Your Practice!

Laura's Facebook pages:

Leadership Coach for Busy Dentists

Love Your Practice

Laura's personal page

Thank you so much for tuning in to this podcast! I would love it if you would share it with others and leave a review for others to see!

~ Laura

*** Sign up for the FREE WEBINAR on my website before February 23, 2021. ***