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
The Hidden Beliefs That Keep Dentists Overworked and Underpaid
Ever follow a GPS with total confidence only to realize it’s steering you the wrong way? That’s how ownership can feel when mindset traps masquerade as good guidance. We dig into three hidden patterns that quietly create burnout for dental practice owners and map out a better route built on leverage, systems, and leadership.
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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.
Have you ever followed your GPS only to realize that you're totally freaking lost? You trusted it, but it was guiding you in the wrong direction because when you set up the destination, you press the incorrect thing. Practice ownership has its own kind of faulty GPS. They're the mindset traps that they look like they're guiding you, but in reality, they're steering you towards stress, burnout, and frustration. That is what we're going to be talking about today. Is that sometimes the worst traps in ownership, they aren't in your systems, they're actually in your head. Now you are listening to the Dental Practice Heroes podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Paul Edgeson, author of Dental Practice Hero and Dental Practice Hero 2, two best-selling books on dental practice management. And in this podcast, we teach you how to grow your practice, make more money, and take more time off, all the while becoming the leader that your team and your patients deserve. Okay, let's talk about three of the biggest mental traps that might be facing you as a practice owner. The first one is called the Dunning Kruger trap. Have you ever heard of the Dunning Kruger effect? It's this idea that when you're new at something, it's very easy to have overconfidence. And then when you become proficient at something, it's very easy to have underconfidence. So let me give you an example of this. Imagine someone has never cooked before. They watch a couple of TikTok recipe videos, maybe they watch a few YouTubes, they get by some ingredients, they decide they're gonna host a dinner party for like eight people, and they jump in, buy some ingredients, and they start trying out some of these dishes. Now, their roommate at the time is like, dude, this is really freaking good. This is awesome. Wow, this is you're so good at this. Like you're natural. And they're starting to get really confident. They're like, dude, I got this. So then all of a sudden, it's like, hey, let's have a dinner party. Let's invite eight of our friends over, and I'm gonna cook for everybody. And then they jump in without a plan. The pots are boiling over, the chicken's raw in the middle, smoke alarms going off, everything that's going wrong could. And the thing was, is they thought it would be easy because they just didn't know what they didn't know. Cooking one dish and cooking for eight or nine people, that is a completely different ball game. Their overconfidence sets them up for failure. Now, let's flip it the other way because the Dunning Kruger effect also says when we get proficient, we're more likely to underestimate our proficiency because now we know that there's a lot of elements that we didn't know about. Whereas in the first one, we didn't know what we didn't know. So let's say you've been cooked, this person's now been cooking for years and years and years. They've gotten really good, they've mastered tons of recipes, they get the flavor, they get the timing, their food always turns out great. This is like my mother-in-law, dude. She's Italian and she kicks ass. And I keep telling her, I'm like, no, no, you gotta open, you gotta do a YouTube channel. Like this stuff is so freaking good. But she doesn't think she has what it takes. So this person, you tell them, you're an amazing cook. You know, you should sell your food, you should open a restaurant, and they say, I'm not that good. You know, there's so much I just don't know about it. I just, I don't know, I don't know. And the thing is, is that their deep knowledge and their experience makes them much more aware that there's a lot that they don't know. So they actually sell themselves short. So that's the Dunning Krueger effect in action. At one end, you're dangerously overconfident because you don't see the complexity. And at the other end, you undervalue yourself because you see all the complexity way too clearly. And where does this show up for practice owners? It often shows up when we're at the associate level. We get what Michael Gerber calls the entrepreneurial seizure. We say, This is easy. I should open my own practice. And you think you got it, and then all of a sudden you realize not as easy as you thought. You crash into some problems that you're not ready for. Yeah, we've all been there. All of us have realized running a practice is much harder than we had anticipated. Now, on the other side, I see these dentists and they've gotten really far in their careers, but I'm working on them with their leadership and their inspiration skills. And they just think they can't handle these issues with the team because they haven't handled them before. They're selling themselves short. They got there, they are experienced, they have the leadership skills, they just have to lean into them and have a little bit more confidence and willingness to try some new things. They've got the skills. So that is the first mental trap, is first when you're early in your career, not realizing that you don't know what you don't know. And if you're later on in your career or if you're later on in certain elements of the career, knowing that you do have the skills to handle a lot more than you think you can. Just sometimes you just need to trust in yourself and try to find that initial confidence that you used to have when you were early on. So remember, just because you feel confident, it doesn't mean that you're competent. And just because you doubt yourself, it doesn't mean that you're failing. It probably just means deep down you're growing. All right, trap number two, the I will just work harder trap. What do we think? I want you to think about this. What makes somebody successful? And we see this grind hustle culture on the internet. And I see it all the time, and it kind of bothers me where you know someone will say, well, uh, nobody can outwork me. Uh, nobody can outgrind me. Nobody cares more than I do. Nobody's gonna try harder than I'm. If you think that's what's gonna differentiate you and make you more successful than your peers, you are mistaken. You don't have to grind harder, you don't have to work longer hours, you don't have to care more, you don't have to all these things, all the above. You've got to do the right things, the things that move the needle. It's not about working harder because after adding more hours and cutting your vacations and packing your schedule, you don't see the gains that you should be seeing. There is a law of diminishing returns. And if hard work alone built great practices, every single burnt out owner would be a billionaire, right? It just doesn't work that way. More hours in the chair does not fix broken systems. What does is leverage. You know, think about those levers there. Think about like, you know, the further away from the fulcrum, the more force you're able to generate. You need to gain leverage. You need to move further away from the fulcrum. How do you do that? You start growing the things that scale your practice. You start growing the leaders in your practice, you start creating systems and training your team, setting up systems for communication so everybody can communicate and grow on their own. You start inspiring your team with certain principles that get dental employees motivated and teach them how to self-act and do things on their own without your guidance. You stop being the bottleneck. That is how you grow. Not working harder, not grinding more, none of that stuff. I don't care how many giant framed $100 bills you can strap across your wall that say these hustle porn phrases like, uh, get shit done, or I don't know what else. You know what I'm talking about. There's like one company that just sells a total, a whole bunch of these things. They make me laugh. That's not how it is. If it was about hard work, everybody would be rich. It's not about hard work, it's about the right work. It's about learning the right things that create leverage. That's how you grow a business. All right, trap number three, the control trap. Believing, well, if I want it done right, you gotta do it yourself. You handle everything, you handle the upset patients, you handle the refunds, you handle the supply ordering, you handle all of the bills, the payroll, the invoices, you handle all of the HR stuff, you're doing the compliance, the OSHA, the HIPAA, the all this stuff. Please stop doing it. Please stop. You do not have to control everything. Controlling everything, it feels safe, but it is really a prison cell. When you have to do everything, you are trapping yourself to an eternity of burnout and stress. If everything depends on you, nothing can scale beyond you. So create your systems, set everything up, build your leadership team. And if you need help doing it and you don't know how to do this and you want someone to guide you through it and hold you accountable through the process, go to dentalpracticeherous.com, check out our coaching packages, have a free strategy call with me. I will give you some ideas, I'll give you some next steps, I'll give you some things to do, and I'll also tell you how DPH can help you if you want to go that way. So remember, the best GPS in the world is useless if it keeps sending you the wrong way. Ownership is the same. These mindset traps, they feel like guidance, they feel like you're doing the right thing, they feel like you're going the right way, but they actually keep you from the freedom that you wanted when you first bought the practice. So if you want that true practice owner freedom, we will show you how to do it. There's very simple ways, systems to implement. We've got this down to a process and a recipe. So the real battle isn't in your schedule or your profit and loss. It is in your mindset and in what you believe creates success. Success, it's just as much about avoiding these traps as it is about taking action. It's both. So I hope right now you listening to this, you got some ideas of some things you should change and maybe change your mindset a little bit. Maybe one of these traps hit home very close for you. I want you to know that you have the power to have whatever type of practice you want. Do you want a practice where you work one or two days a week? Do you want to make seven figures every year for the rest of your life? Do you want to feel fulfilled as you change the lives of your patients and you create a work environment that your entire team loves being part of because they feel fulfilled being in your practice? All of that is possible. You have the power, and we can show you exactly how to do it at Dental Practice Heroes. Please reach out to us if that interests you. Thank you so much for spending some time with me today. I really appreciate your support, and we will talk to you next time.
