Dental Practice Heroes
Where dentists learn how to cut clinical days while increasing profits - without sacrificing patient care, cutting corners, or cranking volume. We teach you how to grow a scalable practice through communication, leadership, and effective management.
Hosted by Dr. Paul Etchison, author of two books on dental practice management, dental coach, and owner of a $6M collections group practice in the south suburbs of Chicago, we provide actionable advice for practice owners who want to intentionally create more time to enjoy their families, wealth, and deep personal fulfillment.
If you want to build a scalable practice framework that no longer stresses, drains, or relies on you for every little thing, we will teach you how and share stories of other dentists who have done it!
Dental Practice Heroes
How to Mentally Shut Off the Practice
You get it, you need to let go. But how do you actually step back, stop micromanaging and see what your team can really do?
In this episode, we share actionable ways to reduce your workload, delegate the right tasks, and leave work stress at the office. Learn how you might be getting in your own way and why letting your practice fail is the first step to real growth!
Topics discussed in this episode:
- Why letting go is so hard for practice owners
- How to manage the guilt of letting go
- Exercises to redefine your role and delegate effectively
- Why you should let your practice fail
- Building your perfect work week
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The 2025-2026 DPH Mastermind is now taking applications! Make this the year you decided to create the practice you've always dreamed about!
Take Control of Your Practice and Your Life
We help dentists take more time off while making more money through systematization, team empowerment, and creating leadership teams.
Ready to build a practice that works for you? Visit www.DentalPracticeHeroes.com to learn more.
Is your owner brain always turned on? Are you working late nights or weekends, or when you should be relaxing and spending time with your family? A lot of us struggle to shut it off, but it can be done, I promise you. In this episode with the DPH coaches, we're gonna talk about how you can let go and finally achieve that freedom that made you wanna be a practice owner in the first place. You'll get two exercises that you can do today to start delegating the right tasks and stop being the bottleneck in your practice. This is going to change the way you run your business, so stay with us.
Paul Etchison:You are listening to the Dental Practice Heroes podcast, where we teach dentists how to step back from the chair, empower their team and build a practice that gives them their life back. I'm your host, dr Paul Etcheson, dental coach, author of two books on dental practice management and owner of a large four-doctor practice that runs with ease, while I work just one clinical day a week. If you're ready for a practice that supports your life instead of consuming it, you're in the right place. My team of legendary dental coaches and I are here to guide you on your path from overwhelmed owner to dental practice hero. Let's get started. Welcome back to the Dental Practice Heroes podcast. I am your host, dr Paul Edgerton, joined by my DPH coaches, dr Henry Ernst and Dr Steve Markowitz all three of us running associate-driven practices Steve with a group, and Henry and I with large solo practices and just teaching our listeners how to run a practice and where you can get the freedom that you want and deserve and live the life that you want. So here we are.
Paul Etchison:We're talking today about the art of letting go. I was reading a book recently. I can't remember what the name of the book was, but it was talking about this whole idea of loving what you do and how the whole Steve Jobs speech that's I think it was Stanford or something like that at the commencement speech and they said you know you got to love what you do because then you don't work a day in your life. You know what it's like when you love what you do and you don't work a day in your life. He's like you shut out every other part of your life.
Paul Etchison:You take everything that happens at what you do very personally and you're a miserable son of a bitch, and that's what makes me think of as practice owners or a lot of us have a hard time letting go of our practice, and I'm not saying letting go like get rid of it, but staying to shut it off. And how many practice owners do we see that we go home and they say I can't shut it off, I don't know how to go home and not just keep thinking about it. So that's what I'd like to talk about today. So I'll go to you first, henry. Has that been something that you've struggled with in your career? No, doubt.
Henry Ernst:You know I have four kids. Three are older and there were parts where I was just so in the woods and working six days and expanded hours, practice, where you just you just lose focus and it's really really hard. You're just so in the moment that just life goes by and you know it wasn't until I really had some good mentors that you know taught me some things and stepping away from, from the business and establishing leadership and all this stuff that really just changed my life and changed my focus. And it can get really, really hard if you're on that hamster wheel to have somebody tap you on the shoulder and say, dude, you need to get some more balance in your life.
Paul Etchison:Well, it's like it's normal. It's like we can all agree that it's normal to go through those things, but it's not normal to continue. You know like that whole idea of that. You know your parents. It's not your parents' fault that you're messed up, but it's your fault that you're still messed up, or something like that. I don't think I said that right, but hopefully that resonates with somebody.
Steven Markowitz:I think what I heard is that you're messed up.
Henry Ernst:I heard messed up a couple of times. I need help. But it's really hard because you think about it. It's a lot worse with the newer dentists coming out. We have such a nut that's behind us, the loans that we took out, or we practice loans, or we got to make this amount of money to take care of our family and stuff like that. So it's really scary.
Henry Ernst:I know in my instance where somebody said, okay, you need to work two days less every week and you're going to be better off, and somebody's just like got a magic wand to tell you that and if you establish a practice like we always talk about, that can run on its own, it gives you that fuel to do that and to step away intentionally. Right, that's the thing I noticed is Dennis will say coaching clients like, oh, I'm going to step away a couple of days. Well, what happens? They go into the office and they're still sitting there, right? No, you're not allowed to be in the office either. You got to be totally away from the office and dude, shut off your phone for a couple hours too, and take that me time. That's non negotiable.
Steven Markowitz:Steve, have you ever struggled letting go? Always, I'm still struggling with it. You know when, when you talk to entrepreneurs not just dentists and they, they say like why are you doing this and and why is it so important for you to keep growing? And whatever, whatever those questions are, and they're like I'm doing it for my family and I just want to take them by the neck and I'm like that's such bullshit Totally.
Steven Markowitz:Like if you, if it was really for your family, you would have stopped when you were 10 years ago, when you had that balance. So it's not about people are mistaken, their why. A lot of it is just our own egos or our own insecurities of what we think defines us. And then this thing that we built, that we can control, helps us create this identity of like we're successful, we're a boss, we're a leader. Whatever we tell the story we tell ourself and that is what makes it so hard to let go is that everything that we have done to this point has created this. What we think is this perfect dental practice that's created this great life for us, and that we're able to control every little piece of it. So when we have to let go because it's either the practice has grown beyond our leadership capabilities or we are at a new season in our life where we need to spend more time at home or our kids or our families expecting more of us, now we're like all right, how do I let go? I just, oh, I just don't show up. Is that how I let go? But that also hurts because now I feel guilty when I'm not there and I just am never present anywhere.
Steven Markowitz:I felt guilty when I was at the practice. I felt guilty when I wasn't at the practice and when I truly felt like I was able to let go. What happened was I was like, oh shit, I must not care anymore. I must not care about my practice because I'm not worrying about it. And then this was where, for me, therapy helped me a ton. It was like you can actually care a ton about something and not worry about it. Those are mutually exclusive things. Hair and worry are very different and I think that was the thing I needed to get over. To truly let go was all right. How do I know I care about something but also not worry about it because I've let go and I can be present when I'm not there? That concept of care versus worry was the thing that propelled me to be able to start to have that be a reality for myself.
Paul Etchison:I love that you said that, because I feel that guilt, and I would say I currently feel that guilt right now that I must not care about my practice because I'm just not there as much. And I do still care about it. And I thought after I sold it I would stop caring. I still care and, henry, I know you can share the same thing. You sold your practice, henry and I both sold two groups and we still both very much care about our practices.
Paul Etchison:I think it's one of those things. It's like you mentioned we do all these things and it gets us to a certain level of success and then we think we can't achieve that same level of success unless we continue to stay in it. And I can tell you now I'm barely in my practice, but when I remember when I was there all the time and it's all I did. I don't even know if my team even remembers that, but you know who does remember, that is my wife and my oldest. My wife and my oldest remember it and not for the reasons I want them to, when you really think about what it matters. I know it's easy to say, but life goes by fast. The title of our episode is how to Let Go. So we've all struggled with this, but I'm just going to go back to you, steve, so you said you were working through it right now.
Steven Markowitz:I started to do these exercises of understanding what is it that only I can do in my practice and what does that look like and how can I do that in that fits the buckets of my financial goals, my time goals, all of the things that I need. So for me, I know it's doctors. I can find doctors, I can find practices and I can train up doctors. That's where I need to be. The other stuff, whether I worry about it or care about it or do it all day, it doesn't move the needle and I had to learn that through experience and watching it me not delegate it and not have it cause the practice or the business to go backwards to really understand. But I really needed to spend time and understand what only I could do and then make sure that the people that were taking on those things had enough support to do it. It's just the art of delegation. But the first step for me was what is that one thing or three things that I need to be doing in the practice?
Paul Etchison:How much time do you spend doing that each week?
Steven Markowitz:With my doctors, mm-hmm, the majority of my work days. Yeah, if I'm not talking to you, paul and henry, then I'm talking to doctors, yeah, or therapists mostly therapists.
Henry Ernst:Henry, what do you say, man, like what has been your secret to get letting go well, I think, just making sure I'm not a perfectionist right, we always want things done, great, but the old line I always heard is, if somebody can, you can train somebody to do something to take your place, and they can do it 80 percent of your abilities to start with. Be happy with it, because you're not doing it, you can move on to something else. I did a similar exercise that you're talking about, steve, where I kind of took and I do this for sometimes, people when they feel overwhelmed in a position like take a list of tasks, maybe put a notebook pad by your desk at work and just any task that you do, write it down, and at the end of a week you have all, like, mundane and important tasks that you normally have to do and put them in four different boxes. Right, the first box could be I'm really good at it and I like doing it. I'm really good at it and I hate doing it. I'm bad at it, you know, you know where I'm going and take the ones that you hate, the ones that you hate, and just automatically make a plan to get rid of those off of your plate. Cause number one is that'll make us happy, cause let's get rid of the shit that we hate to do. And then, if you go along that cycle more and more, don't be a perfectionist. Get rid of the stuff that you don't. You know that you can, can siphon off in a good way, and that's just going to make you a better person, a happier person. I kind of look at it. Somebody mentioned to me the hyphen On our tombstone. Right, there's a hyphen. It says Henry Ernst, born 1975 to whatever that death date is. What did you do in that hyphen? Right? Is my tombstone going to say dentist? I hope not, because I want to be a father, I want to be a good husband, I want to have you know good things. That's not a dentist doesn't define who I am.
Henry Ernst:And going the path where I was just head down, working six days a week, it was leading me to something like that. So you have to make that important step, to make it intentional. And the other thing my wife and I did and this was pre-saling the practices we did an exercise where she wrote down a list of things that she wanted to do items, new hobbies and we also wrote down a perfect week. If you didn't have to work, what does your perfect week look like Like, hey, I wanna go to the gym at 9 am, I wanna go take a walk, I wanna, like you know, whatever that looks like.
Henry Ernst:And the both of us did it without each other's knowledge and we had so many things that were so similar, kind of like stepbrothers. Did we just become best friends, you know? So that was one of the things that led us to say, hey, we want to live by the beach, right, and we accomplished that goal and you know, now we're an eight-minute walk from the beach, but I can still work my two days a week in the practice and, like you said, paul, I still care a lot about it. I'm still the leader of the. You know the monthly meetings that we have, the quarterly meetings and stuff like that, and I'm on the EOS meetings once a week, whether it's by Zoom or I'm actually there. So there's ways that you can accomplish this. It just it takes you. Being intentional, I think, is the most important part.
Paul Etchison:Yeah, I think the intentionality is like the big thing from what both of you guys are saying is that this is like the sort of stuff like working with a coach and these are the things we do with our clients is. You could say Steve mentioned what is the only thing I can do that nobody else can do. And then, Henry, what are the things that I want? What does my perfect week look like? These are like coaching things, and this is where you're sitting down, giving it the time and mental energy it deserves.
Paul Etchison:I remember therapy has been huge for me as well. It helps so much has been huge for me as well is like it helps so much. And when I, if I tell you what my therapist tells me, you would say no shit, dumb ass, you needed to pay somebody to do that. And I will tell you yes, I did need to pay somebody to point that out, because it's like when you see a lesion that you missed on an x-ray and you go back and look at it a year ago, you go, damn it, there it was. How did I not see it before? Well, you didn't see it, you missed it, and that's how it is like seeing a therapist, but it helps to sort these things out and see where these feelings and stuff come from.
Paul Etchison:I'm just being completely honest. I don't spend enough time working with my doctors and I need to spend more time working with doctors, which is why the current what I'm doing at my practice right now is I'm stopped all ortho cases. I'm trying to phase out ortho and I'm trying to phase out clinical, because I know there are parts of my practice being neglected that only I can do and I don't have the time when I'm there to do it. And because of the podcast and coaching, I don't have my days off. So a lot of people might say well, you're never at the practice. You must be sitting on your ass all day. I assure you I'm not. I'm here with Stephen Henry. I'm here with Stephen Henry, Still sitting on your ass, though I'm sitting on. I'm going to stand up now. Stand up. Can you guys hear?
Henry Ernst:that yes, look at that. Look at that production value.
Steven Markowitz:Oh my goodness, we're making it.
Paul Etchison:I don't know if that's going to record on the track, but I just had a little. I got this. I should use that more, but yeah, so I think the thing is is like figuring out how do you let go is you've got to be comfortable with it in yourself, but you got to realize that you letting go and getting out of the way is not going to crash and burn your practice, and you've got to set up the delegation properly to do that.
Steven Markowitz:And you're going to learn, even if it's never going to crash and burn, but like those failures, that's going to help you actually learn where the bottlenecks in your practice are.
Steven Markowitz:So you have to be okay with letting it fail a little bit to the point where you can actually learn. If you're going to be in there and you're going to do everything and there's never going to be a light that's going to be out in your practice, you'll never fully understand when or how to step away or let go, and I don't think that letting go means being there less. You can do both. If you really love clinical dentistry and you want to do it four plus days a week, by all means go, do it Like, but then let someone else do other parts of your practice that you might hate and empower them and let them mess up, truly mess up, and then be able to pivot and coach and build up your team around you. And I think that's true. Letting go is truly enjoying where you are, when you're there, and that for most not just dentist owners, but for most people is really hard to do.
Henry Ernst:Yeah, and I would say it's not gonna happen overnight. We'll take little wins. So I think we're listening to this podcast. You could be somebody who has a one, you know one doctor practice and there's four or five chairs and you're not a huge person that has like six offices or 18 chairs or something like that. You know. But how do I do that?
Henry Ernst:I had a coaching client that we're working with now and you know she goes home and on the weekend she's doing insurance statements and she's doing this. I said wait a minute, and I had her do that exercise I mentioned before and we're just getting rid of a few things a month and we're getting wins. Hey, I've successfully off-boarded these four or five things. So step number one in the short-term plan is let's get you out of weekends. I don't want you doing anything on the weekends. I want you spending time with your son and your husband, and that's it Right. And then maybe in the next 60 days we'll do something else where we get rid of some stuff in the office. So, as anything, that anybody that is successful has either a coach or a mentor I've had multiple in my career too and that's where you can come up with these little short-term plans, long-term plans, like person I'm mentioning, like I don't want you going home and doing shit when you've already worked a five-day work week, yeah.
Paul Etchison:And I think a lot of practices with solo owners have a doctor that will work four or five days a week seeing patients and then when they're supposed to do all this other stuff that needs at a high functioning practice, they don't have the energy to do it. They don't and it's a completely neglected part. So I think, like for me, I feel like I have still not completely let go. I have not perfected this. It's continuum and I can't. I don't think I'm there yet. But the last one star actually it was a two star review. I read it on. The episode probably came out about a month ago. I read this two star review. Those still piss me off and I don't know if I'm thinking about this wrong. Maybe this is a better question for my therapist, but have I truly let go if that still pisses me off?
Steven Markowitz:Why does letting go have to not mean that you don't care? Like if someone talked crap about something that you care a lot about. You think that they're wrong. It is okay to be upset about that. You're allowed to be upset about things that you care about. That don't go the way you want them to, but yeah, you're right.
Henry Ernst:It's a learning experience and I think the same exact way. I still do the same thing, paul. We see bad reviews. I take them like how can we get better from this? Is what part of this is true? What part of this is, you know, we really can learn from Right? And but I still take those personally to this day. So maybe I a hundred percent haven't let go also. So I don't think letting go means not caring. I think those are two different definitions there.
Steven Markowitz:Yeah, big time, big time, because when I, when I get a review right now, if I get a bad review, I want to respond immediately. Me too. But letting go to me means I do what I need to do. I respond to the review, I let the team know, and then I don't take it with me. I'm not carrying that monkey anymore, so I still care deeply about that review. It hurts me, but I do what I needed to do, which is respond to it, and then I don't carry it and then, therefore, I let go.
Paul Etchison:Yeah, I think that's a great point to end on. Totally, I think it's just about we've got to it's delegation. It's comfortable delegation and realizing that you don't have to do it all and that you have to keep yourself sane. So if you need help with trying to let things go at your practice or you're just trying to delegate more so you can have more time off and more peace of mind, please reach out to us. Hire us as your coaches. We are happy to help you. We are month to month because we have to earn your results. We don't believe in contracts. So check that out. Dentalpracticeheroescom. Thank you so much for listening everybody. No-transcript.
