In this episode I'm getting into the nitty gritty of what I experienced during the peak of burnout during my dental career. My hope is that by telling my story I can help you minimize or prevent burnout!
In this episode I'm getting into the nitty gritty of what I experienced during the peak of burnout during my dental career. My hope is that by telling my story I can help you minimize or prevent burnout!
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Speaker 1:
Hey friends, welcome back to the Joyful Dentist podcast. Today I want to talk to you a little bit about my own experience with burnout. I want to cover some of the most common things I've seen in a lot of the people that I've helped and I'm really making it personal, I'm including myself that I've helped and I'm really making it personal, I'm including myself I'm talking about how I experienced burnout and some of the most common um, some of the things that contributed to the burnout and some of the things that I see most commonly coming up for other people. Um, this isn't a comprehensive list. Um, and, and to be perfectly clear, burnout is a feeling. It's going to present differently in different individuals and it's not a diagnosis. That's like binary, like you're either burnt out or you're not. I believe it's a spectrum. Now maybe you're listening to this episode and you know 100%, no question, that you're burnt out and you're looking for ways to find relief. Or maybe you're suspecting that, like, the way you've been working over the last few years isn't sustainable and it could lead to burnout. Maybe you're actually thinking that you're fine right now, but you're hoping to prevent burnout down the road, wherever you are, whatever your situation is. My sincere hope is that you can find things in this episode that will help you to lead a healthier and a happier life, you know, both within the clinic and outside of the office as well. So I want you to, you know, treat this episode or really any of my episodes for that matter to, you know kind of like a buffet Take what you want, leave what you don't want, and we'll dive right in. I should also quickly give you a little disclaimer. My husband who also works from home, mind you is very animated on a Zoom call in the room next door. I hope that you're not going to be hearing him in the background, but there actually is a chance that you might. So, if you do, you have been warned. Okay, you're ready to dive in. All right, here we go.
Speaker 1:
So when I think about what my life was like at the peak of when I was feeling the most burnt out in my dental career, this is back about roughly eight or nine years ago. I owned my own endodontic practice. I had two young kids, one of which was actually still nursing, and I felt totally in over my head. I often tell the story, like when I go to lecture, that you know I was busy taking care of my patients, I was keeping my staff happy, and then I'd be coming home to take care of my kids. My commute was almost an hour in each direction and I didn't really know how to run a dental practice. To be perfectly frank, people often thought that my husband, who went to business school. They thought that he was somehow helping me to figure out the business end of things, which really couldn't be further from the truth. Of course, I talked to him about things, but he didn't have a clue how to run payroll or how to hire or fire a dental assistant. I mean, the other thing that comes to my mind is I would have really loved to have had a smooth transition when I bought my practice.
Speaker 1:
However, the prior owner wanted to leave cold turkey, and one thing led to another the two staff members that I acquired. Um, it was a pretty small office, so there were two staff members. Uh, they both took off within a month of the purchase. So there I was, scrambling to learn the ropes of running a business. Um, I didn't have any prior you know business experience. Um, I felt extremely underprepared. Most days, if not all days, I was feeling very anxious, unsure of myself, afraid that I didn't have what it took, and I will, for sure you know, relay more details of this story of how I cycled through assistants one after another and ultimately found out that one of my assistants was stealing from me in many different ways. So you know, with two young kids at home, a long commute racing to then get to daycare before it closed, you can imagine that I wasn't exactly the kind of business owner that was micromanaging my staff, if anything. Um, you know, I quickly learned that I was not managing my staff well at all. Um, not just the business, quite frankly, it was pretty much most things in my life. I felt like I was not doing so great at Um, so I did what most of us think we should do to feel better Initially.
Speaker 1:
When it came to just feeling better in the moment, I found a lot of relief in food. I would gravitate towards anything yummy that I could find in the pantry. And as a quick side note for you, for those of you that don't know, I have lectured extensively on health and fitness and wellness tips and weight loss for dentists. The first 50 episodes of this podcast are really dedicated towards weight loss and you know that's because I later learned the importance of processing stress from a day of dentistry. But at that time the only way I knew how to process my stress I'm exaggerating, but for the most part was to go find something yummy in the pantry. Inevitably, that helped me feel great in the moment. Um, but the other thing that I did, which at the time I felt was really my only option, was to sell my practice and return to being an associate. Um. So there's tons of stories that I feel like could be relevant or maybe potentially helpful for those of you that are in a position where you're feeling burnt out at your wits end, considering selling your practice if you currently own um, and considering, uh you know, going to uh be an associate. So there may be a lot that um you know I could share there. Um, at the time, like kind of going back to that time just before I chose to sell um, you know there may have been uh different practice consultants or um. Uh, you know different uh specialists, uh, you know dental specific specialists that uh could have helped me.
Speaker 1:
Um, I don't remember being aware of any kind of dental forums such as Facebook groups like the ones that exist today. Um, for example, I'm a member of Mommy Dentists in Business, as well as Dental Nachos, among others. I'm just using these as examples, places that I later learned about and joined. I don't believe that they actually existed, you know, eight to 10 years ago, but this, you know, these are groups that I later joined and found quite a high degree of camaraderie in. I don't remember offhand, but if you go back to, let's say, the fall of 2023, I have an interview with Dr Grace Yum here on my podcast. She's the founder of Mommy Dennis in Business and you'll see how valuable that group became to me in terms of really providing a sense of community. I know that some of you that are listening are part of that group and you know, for me, even once I found that group, I had already sold my practice. It had been several years, I had gone back to being an associate and it was still super, super valuable.
Speaker 1:
However, however, going back to again how I was before I sold my practice, I felt isolated, I felt alone and I believed that selling my practice was, you know, potentially the only option I had to preserve my own mental sanity.
Speaker 1:
So I did the best thing that I could think of in that moment, which was to sell, and I tell myself every day. Now, you know, if I can help even one person by telling my story, if I can help even one person by explaining the struggles that I went through in the hopes that they might be able to avoid some of the same struggles and potentially find relief, then I'm doing my job and I'm satisfied. So I think back over the brief few years that I owned a practice and, um, it's easy for me and, quite frankly, you know potentially anybody listening to empathize and say, well, you know, those are tough years, especially as a new mom with a new practice, et cetera, and, and those years are just hard, right, and and part of me. When I hear me telling my own story, I'm like, yeah, those are just really tough years and you just need to get through it. Um, and and and. You might be nodding your head and say, yeah, those are just tough times, right, you just have to get through it.
Speaker 1:
But what I know now is that there are several things that probably a better way to describe it is that there are several thoughts that I had or beliefs that I had that were actually making my own situation harder. I was making things harder for myself and I was contributing, like these beliefs were contributing, to my eventual experience of burnout. So that's what I really want to talk to you about in today's episode and already, as I'm talking, I know there's several things I want to bookmark for future episodes and in the hopes that, that those things may be helpful. All right. So back to these things that were making my life harder.
Speaker 1:
If I could encapsulate, like, if I could write it all down and then encapsulate and summarize like, what is it that I'm trying to say? If I could generalize, what would it be? I was believing that if I was going to have a successful business, my own wellbeing was going to need to suffer. Okay, and I'm going to say that again, I believed that, in order to have a successful business, my own well-being was in some way going to need to suffer. Now, at that time, I wouldn't have said that. I would have thought that sounded a little bit extreme. I would have sounded, I would have thought that sounded a little bit extreme, and yet, and yet, it manifested itself in a whole bunch of different ways. And I'm curious as I go through, uh, describing how it manifested. I want to know if any part of this resonates with you.
Speaker 1:
Okay, all right, so here's number one, in no particular order. Number one hustle and grind. And you know like I needed to hustle and grind and choose, work over my personal needs. So what did that? What would that look like? Well, if I was sick, that would mean I would need to duct tape myself together so that I could actually see patients. Okay, it would be very rare that I would need to duct tape myself together so that I could actually see patients. Okay, it would be very rare that I would stay home when I was feeling sick, so I needed to medicate myself, maybe with a concoction of different medications, and I think it's possible.
Speaker 1:
Um, in a prior episode at some point, I may have mentioned having worked for a fantastic endodontist during the years before I purchased a practice, a very, very well-liked endodontist. They taught me that if I ever sneezed in the operatory, I should blame it on allergies, you know, so that the patient wouldn't think that I had cooties that could be spread to them and get grossed out, that kind of thing. To be honest, I actually thought that was kind of brilliant. And at the same time, what was it that I was also subconsciously or consciously learning. Well, it was that if I was actually sick, I should be able to hide it, I should be able to mask it because somehow or another, the show must go on. So that's what I did, even when I owned my own practice. In fact, even more so when I owned my own practice, because I was thinking about the overhead and paying the bills and there was no way I could stay home.
Speaker 1:
It didn't matter if I was sick. I mean, I'd have to really, really really be sick. Okay, also, mind you, I wasn't necessarily thinking about what's in the best interest of the patient. Okay, all right, how else would this thought process of if I'm going to have a successful business, my own wellbeing needs to somehow be sacrificed? Well, the next way that that was manifested was, you know, if my kid was sick. And so certainly in this case, it wasn't my own physical well-being that was being sacrificed, but it was potentially the physical well-being of my children or my own mental well-being.
Speaker 1:
So, if my kid was sick, mind you, I have two children and there were plenty of times that they were sick, and I didn't necessarily have a, so let's say they were in. This was during the years that they were in daycare. I didn't necessarily have a backup babysitter or person or family member that could come and take care of my sick kid, and I really hate admitting this, but on more than one occasion, you know. Let's say, the morning came around, I discovered that one of my kids was sick. I didn't have a backup babysitter. They certainly couldn't go to daycare. So I had to look on, you know, websites like urban sittercom or carecom, uh, to find a brand spanking new babysitter that would show up to my house. Um, my kid never would have met them previously. Um, I would never have met them previously. They just show up and I felt horrible leaving a sick child with a brand new person.
Speaker 1:
Um, by the way, I'm telling you this, um, I'm not judging you if you've ever chosen to do any one of these things. We all have to make the best decisions that we can in the moment and we have to find what's right for us in any given situation, and my goal isn't to tell you that you need to stay home with your kids or you need to take an hour for lunch or you need to do anything that you're not currently doing. I'm telling you this because the bottom line is how might you be able to make a decision that's really in alignment with what you want and do you like your reasons? And I'm telling you the story because I was making decisions that didn't feel good to me. I felt really guilty and I felt like I was cornered into picking. You know, either I had to kind of pick between my business or my kids or my own well-being Right Now.
Speaker 1:
Another example of this was not taking a lunch break, or really any breaks for that matter, or very, very few breaks, typically working straight through. I did this a lot. I rationalized that this was my way of maximizing productivity, and you know why would I want to take a break and be paying my employees while I was taking this break? And you know why would I want to take a break and be paying my employees while I was taking this break? And you know the bottom line there was. I was often equating my breaks and downtime with dollars that were being foregone. Right Like I should be maximizing every moment in my dental practice, and that went for lunch breaks as much as it did for, you know, any time spent at the office, and it also translated into vacations or time away from the office, right Like why? My thought was well, why would I be taking days off, or why would I be taking, choosing to take a vacation If I'm going to be paying through the nose for it, which, of course, to me was translating into the overhead. And I have to be honest, this was something that I heard a lot of female dentists talk about. You know, just the cost of being away, and it's not something I've ever really heard men talk about, or or, if they do, it doesn't seem to be to the same extent. In other words, um well, here's another example.
Speaker 1:
I remember, um, you know, choosing to have my kids in daycare just on the days that I worked, with very few or minimal hours, uh, extra outside of my work hours, like very minimal buffer time, which meant that as soon as I was done at work I went straight to get to, you know, get the kids not really baking into the equation. Time for myself to go to do errands or to go work out or shopping or whatever I needed to do. There seemed to be a lot of guilt involved, need to justify, have a good enough reason, and you know I w I was always coming back to this concept of you know, there was so much mommy guilt involved, um, or guilt of spending and needing to justify, um, uh, you know, having my kids with other people, and so I might as well either be at work or be with the kids again, no judgment either way. Uh, we, you know. However, you're doing things, it's totally fine.
Speaker 1:
However, I did not feel in alignment with the decisions that I was making, and I'll tell you what the price tag that I was paying was with my own mental sanity. The price tag was undervaluing my own well-being and my mental health, and for me, I you know, it wasn't until I got to my breaking point when I decided that something needed to change, and so, for me, the only option I saw was to sell, because I didn't see a middle ground. You know, I didn't see how I could practice and maintain my own sanity. To be honest, the only people that I saw, um, doing dentistry, um, uh, reasonably well and and and being really happy, were men that had a wife at home taking care of all the other stuff, you know, the stuff that I was coming home to do, um, and you know I'm not knocking on my husband at all, because he's super supportive and super involved with the kids. And yet, um, I didn't have a lot of female dental role models that were able to really balance things in a healthy way.
Speaker 1:
I could honestly go on and on and on, but the bottom line was that for years I was believing I had to sacrifice my own well-being for the sake of my business. I know I learned this from other successful dentists that somehow you know potentially female dentists that somehow made me believe that if I paid my dues and, you know, just kind of worked my tail off, that somehow it would all be worth it in the end and that somehow maybe I'd be able to slow down or change the pace or get to a point where I'd be able to care for myself again. But is that the case? You know, I have seen so many of us run ourselves ragged, thinking that happiness is just around the corner, that, you know, if we can just make enough money or get to a certain point in our success, that we'll be able to somehow reorient our priorities and take care of ourselves.
Speaker 1:
And look, I believe, when I think back at my years, at my years owning a practice, I do believe that I had what it took to have potentially kept my practice and maybe have found a a healthy balance where I would have been able to manage my practice and be able to take care of myself. And yet that wasn't available to me at the time, because I didn't even see that as a possibility. I didn't know how I was limiting my own self with thoughts and beliefs that were keeping me in a vicious cycle, in a treadmill, so to speak. In my own practice, these were thoughts that were contributing to feelings of burnout, and you know there's so much more that I think about. That comes to my mind like seeking perfectionism, getting overwhelmed with a long laundry list of things to do, having a lack of boundaries both with my staff or with my own personal time, or communicating my needs and really working for the business instead of having the business work for me, anyway.
Speaker 1:
So I could really keep on talking at length about this topic, but I'm curious if anything that I've said so far resonates with you. What sounds familiar to you, if at all? How are you currently practicing, and do you like your reasons for the choices that you're making? Do you feel stuck like I did so many years ago? Do you feel like your only option is to sell for your own mental sanity. I just want you to know that there's a better way.
Speaker 1:
Maybe it involves scaling back. Maybe it does involve selling your practice, if you own. You know all of the people that I work with. They know that one of the biggest things that I talk about is truly liking your reasons for the decisions that you're making and not taking action from a place of reactivity or chicken with its head cut off energy. I know that sounds ridiculous, but, believe me, when I sold my practice, I was fully embodying chicken with a head cut off energy. In other words, I couldn't sell my practice fast enough. I was desperate to sell, and I don't want that for you. You know like, regardless of whether you own or don't own, I don't want you desperately feeling like you need to get out of your situation. You know, yes, you can change your situation, but imagine doing that from a place of being, of feeling grounded, of feeling calm and knowing that you're going to be fine either way. You know, whether you change your situation or not, knowing that you can do it in either way, your mental sanity is not at stake. Do you see what I mean by that? I'm going to bookmark that thought because I could talk about that at length, and that should be a future episode.
Speaker 1:
Okay, in any case, if anything I've said in this episode resonates with you and you want to learn more, I want to invite you to take advantage of two things. The first one is to go and download the Busy Dentist Guide to Self-Care, if you haven't already. This is my top six things that I truly wish someone had taught me when I was at the peak of feeling burnt out. These things may have really helped me to look at the bigger picture and to tune in to what I needed most, so that I could start making decisions that were going to help me to help me to feel better without actually having to even change my situation feel better without actually having to even change my situation. So if you don't already have that, you can get it. You can get the Busy Dentist Guide to Self-Care by going to drnatanyacom forward slash self-care, and that is linked in the show notes.
Speaker 1:
The second thing I'll invite you to do whether or not you already have the Busy Dentist Guide to Self-Care or not is if you'd like to have a conversation with me to see how I might be able to help you to enjoy your life in dentistry just a little bit more. Maybe you are considering selling, like I've mentioned. Maybe you don't own, but you know you don't want to end up burnt out or whatever the case may be. Maybe you know you want to practice and actually enjoy your life without feeling like you're on some kind of a treadmill. Maybe you know that the way you're currently working isn't sustainable and you want to make some changes. I'd be happy to talk to you and to see if working with me as your coach could be helpful to you. All of that starts with a simple conversation to see if working together could be a good fit for you, and you can schedule a free call with me by going to drnatanyacom forward slash connect. I'll also link that in the show notes and I'm just going to really quickly end with a disclaimer.
Speaker 1:
I'm not the coach for you If you want to learn how to increase your profitability month after month. I'm not the coach for you If you want somebody to look over your KPIs that's, key performance indicators or, you know, help you to market your dental practice. Look, there's tons of other amazing coaches that specialize in that kind of thing. I know some of them. I would be happy to give you a recommendation if that's what you're looking for, but what I can specifically help you with is to find the time, the space and the mental energy to take care of yourself, both physically as well as mentally.
Speaker 1:
Not just you know when you have an hour or two, which is amazing, but each and every moment of every day, both during your work day and in the evening and on the weekends, I can help you to foster joy and happiness and live your life with more intention. It all starts with how you make the tiniest decisions on a daily basis. That's how I help people, and if this sounds interesting, I would love to help you too. So, again, to schedule your free conversation with me, go to drnatanyacom, forward slash, connect and again, I will link that in the show notes. Okay, my friends, that is what I have for you today. I hope you have a fantastic week and I will see you next time.