Episode 177 – Are Your Buckets Aligned?

“It’s easy for me to focus on the things I’m great at and ignore buckets – or segments of priority – that I should have given equal attention to.” ~Regan Robertson

It is very easy to ignore the areas of your life that need attention.

When Everyday Practices Dental Podcast Co-host Regan Robertson felt like she could feel better than she was, she went back to the drawing board and began segmenting her overall health into the following eight buckets:

Spiritual • Career • Family • Spouse • Friends • Fun • Mental • Physical

In this special episode, Regan and Co-host Dr. Chad Johnson get personal, and talk about what Regan did to recalibrate, refine, and move forward on her journey to better health – something most of us often overlook because we’re either too comfortable or too complacent to change what we might not know needs changing. After listening to this podcast, you can determine:

• What areas in your life you’re great at
• Where you might need help
• How you can develop a better balance between your “buckets”

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Regan 0:00
Hi, Dr. Regan Robertson, CCO of Productive Dentist Academy here and I have a question for you. Are you finding it hard to get your team aligned to your vision, but you know, you deserve growth just like everybody else? That’s why we’ve created the PDA productivity workshop. For nearly 20 years PDA workshops have helped dentists just like you align their teams, get control of scheduling, and create productive practices that they love walking into every day. Just imagine how you will feel when you know your schedule is productive, your systems are humming, and your team is aligned to your vision. It’s simple, but it’s not necessarily easy. We can help visit productivedentist.com/workshop that’s productivedentist.com/workshop to secure your seats.

Regan 0:49
Now, the thing that you have to do yourself is you have to be willing to change. You have to be open to the uncomfortableness of change and knowing that in order to get different results, you’re going to have to sacrifice something. Now, I think that has stopped me in the past because if you’re at a comfortable level, you can get complacent, and that’s also the dangerous part where before you know it, I think health problems can really sneak up on you. Welcome to the Everyday Practices Podcast. I’m Regan Robertson and my co-host, Dr. Chad Johnson and I, are on a mission to share the stories of everyday dentists who generate extraordinary results using practical proven methods you can take right into your own dental practice. If you’re ready to elevate patient care and produce results that are anything but ordinary, buckle up and listen in.

Dr. Chad Johnson 1:44
Everyday Practices, dental podcast listeners, this is Chad Johnson, and I’m here with my co-host, Regan Robertson, Ragan, how’re you doing today?

Regan 1:52
I’m doing fantastic today, Chad, it’s nice to be here with you. You do not have a cold this week.

Dr. Chad Johnson 1:57
I don’t and so I’m thrilled about that because I’ve got my voice back for recording and stuff. Why don’t I open it up to you, you wanted to kind of go into well, with the audience, kind of an idea of how you wanted to balance your life better. Share with us what that means.

Regan 2:18
Yes, so a couple of weeks ago, you and I had a podcast episode dedicated to your health and you talked about the ways that you calibrated your health to stay in the best shape that you could be, and it’s something that’s always given me inspiration throughout the years that I’ve known you. You’re always kind of refining, looking at it, evaluating it, calibrating it and moving forward, and kind of like people at the gym that skip leg day, but kind of focus on the upper body. I think we can, I think we can easily fall into traps around the thought of I’m really good at this, I’m going to keep developing this, and a lot of times I hear people talk about the work-life balance and for me personally, my personal story is it’s easy for me to focus on things I’m great at and over the years at times, I have ignored other buckets, if you will, or places of priority in my life when I should have been giving more equal attention to those skill sets, to those strengths and it’s created a lopsided effect off and on throughout my life. So I thought it would be kind of fun to talk today about how I visually have mapped that out over the last couple of decades, and how I navigate the ups and downs of health so that we can be in the best shape as you know, ever.

Dr. Chad Johnson 3:34
So when did you notice that you needed to re-balance things?

Regan 3:39
When I hit burnout a few years ago, there were a lot of different little symptoms of things that I couldn’t quite put my finger on and I wasn’t dedicating a lot of attention to them, and when I did visit the doctor, they said, “Well, this is kind of what getting older feels like your general bloodwork came back fine, you’re healthy. So you know we don’t know what else to tell you.” Yeah, it felt like a little bit of tough love. There’s a couple of things you can do but that’s pretty much it. So little things like getting headaches, not really sleeping well. I mean, you might have a night where you don’t sleep well. Do you really think about it much? Maybe not until it becomes a pattern.

Dr. Chad Johnson 4:26
Correct. Right.

Regan 4:27
Yeah, you know, getting brain fog occasionally. You know, not feeling great after you eat things and so over it starts out so slow, you know, your joints kind of ache, so over a period of a few years and kind of hearing that with the doctor will the doctor says I’m okay except for maybe like one thing so it’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. So I put my focus and my time and my effort into developing my career and getting my certifications and just kept on you know, kind of working on my upper body and I was ignoring my legs, my shins. So, you know and then one day I think I hit a point where I couldn’t really cope with things the way they were any more than I knew, I really don’t feel great about myself and so what do I need to do to attack this and get that balance back in my life?

Dr. Chad Johnson 5:08
When you showed me earlier, did you develop these eight buckets or this wheel? I mean, so tell us about that in a verbal sense. So that way listeners who might not be able to see the visual of it can see this wheel in their mind while they’re driving or whatever.

Regan 5:25
Absolutely. This the wheel, the wheel of life, as I would coin it came from Victoria is the one that showed me first. Dr. Victoria Peterson, our CEO at Productive Dentist Academy. She actually drew it out for me about 14 years ago, but it was in relation to my career. So I told her, I wanted to advance my career. So she put different skill sets into this wheel And then I rated myself from zero, meaning completely incompetent, don’t know anything about it to 10, which is I’m at an expert level, and I could teach this. So a few years ago, I thought, what if I do this with my health. So it’s one thing to say health like, what does that mean? That can mean all different kinds of health.

Dr. Chad Johnson 6:06
Ideal health or practical health.

Regan 6:07
Yes, so it looks like this.

Dr. Chad Johnson 6:09
Okay, hold that up there. I’m going to read this for the listeners. I see family, spouse, friends, fun, mental, spiritual, career, and physical.

Regan 6:23
Yes. Yes, you got it, you got them all. Well, I looked, I looked at those, I went, and I basically ranked them zero to 10. So how does my physical health feel? Not necessarily what the tests were telling me, but how do I feel? How do I feel about being a mom? Like, do I think I’m doing a great job at being a mom? What am I kids say about it? How do I feel? So remember, there’s thinking, which is the analytical portion of it and then there’s the emotional piece. So I am on the Myers Briggs a feeling instead of a thinker. So how do I feel about my relationship with my spouse? My friends? Am I having fun? My mental health? How is that going? And my spiritual health? So I went through all of those ranked it and then sat back and looked at it and thought I need to improve some of these areas pretty dramatically and so how do I go about that, and I know, You’ve been on that journey with me and my spiritual health, I went and did that mission trip down in the Dominican Republic, it was very, very powerful for me, helped me, you know, kind of, I think, reintroduce myself, to my relationship with God and all that good stuff, and so that was, yeah, that was kind of the the precipice of it, I went through and looked and then devise a plan so that I could get my buckets more even. So if you figure like if some of your buckets are like at a zero, and another bucket is at 10, and then you put that wheel on the road, it’s just going to be chunky, you’re not going to be going down the road very smoothly. So I worked on a plan to get my buckets aligned, and it came with some challenges.

Dr. Chad Johnson 7:51
It became a SWOT analysis. You know, like the Eisenhower quadrants, it became that but an eight-sided SWOT analysis. So that way you can figure out, okay, “I’m doing good on, on having fun, but I do need to work on, you know, my family, or I’m doing great on my family, I need to work on my mental health,” and stuff like that and it’s not necessarily self-help, it could mean that you’re going to get help of some sort or another because it’s not like you just pick yourself up from your own bootstraps but it does require some bootstrap pulling for you to get your, you know, self in gear and move to the right direction. So like, if you’re a four out of 10, and you’re like, “Okay, I need to talk to my doctor about this.” Yes, but that conversation doesn’t necessarily always go over well, right? I mean, hey, I don’t feel like a, like I’m a 10 out of 10 healthy and they’d say, “Well, your bloodwork says you’re 10 out of 10, so you’re nuts, so get out of here.”

Regan 8:57
Do you know what I did?

Dr. Chad Johnson 8:59
What’s that?

Regan 9:00
I went and treated myself like I was my own best friend. You know how cheesy that is, but that’s what I did.

Dr. Chad Johnson 9:04
No, that is stoicism. That is yes. I’m trying to think of what Seneca I if I remember, right? He’s just, you know, like you need to what would you tell yourself if you were your best friend? Interestingly, that’s a neat little foreshadowing, because our upcoming podcasts if we get around to this, but I’d like to, I’d like to talk about some of the books that we’ve both gone through on Audible or otherwise, and kind of give a synopsis and talk about those, but it reminds me of one of the synopsys that I was going over recently with a presentation to talk about Seneca if I remember right and that he was saying, you know, like, “Treat yourself as though you are your best friend.” What would you objectively tell yourself that you need to do? It basically takes well, it forces that objective mentoree of yourself. It’s stoicism, you doing stoicism.

Regan 10:03
Oh, that’s great. I laugh here because it was a couple of really bumpy years. It was, it was, I would say two and a half, very bumpy years of trying to clear out clutter, get the buckets align and get myself on the right track. So I’m a huge proponent of, again, for Victoria’s success requires support. So some of it, the thing that you have to do yourself is you have to be willing to change, you have to be open to the uncomfortableness of change, and knowing that in order to get different results, you’re gonna have to sacrifice something. Now, I think that has stopped me in the past because if you’re at a comfortable level, you can get complacent and that’s also the dangerous part where before you know what I think health problems can really sneak up on you in any of those buckets.

Dr. Chad Johnson 10:50
Of course.

Regan 10:50
Yeah, so I tried, I tried with my I had weight gain, for example, that just didn’t want to go away. So there was like the COVID 15, but mine was more than that and it was really like hurting my body. So I thought, that’s fine. I’ll just, I’ll hire a trainer, a physical trainer that’s worked with bodybuilders award-winning bodybuilders, bikini fitness models, like she will get me in shape, right? And I will do exactly what she says and I did. I did gain muscle, but nothing was moving, my weight was not moving at all, I should have been shedding pounds. I went on a meal plan and nothing was happening and that was really frustrating, because I felt like I was doing something wrong and could not figure it out, especially if I was on a meal plan that, you know, these physique trainers were in so I had to be an advocate for myself. So rather than just blaming myself and saying, “Well, it’s not it’s not working, I guess I’ll just stick at it.” I had to be an advocate and say something isn’t right and I switched doctors and found a completely new path that helped me lose weight almost immediately, and put me on a completely different trajectory, but it took looking deeper, it took asking for a second opinion. So I think that’s the other part is what would I tell my friend, I would tell my friend, “Well, if the doctor told you that everything’s fine, and you still don’t feel like you’re fine, fine, go get a second opinion,” and they did a different panel and found different things.

Dr. Chad Johnson 12:11
Yeah. Do you think on your wheel, the more balanced that you make your deficits, the more that it balances the other parts of the wheel?

Regan 12:24
I think it highlights, it brings to attention for me the areas where I’m still working on and it pronounces it and makes me very eager to tackle those next. So Dr. Heather Hamilton, I worked with for two years and I went through her breakthrough program. You can look it up online, she’s on LinkedIn and she’s speaking all over the United States and Canada now. So her breakthrough program is a really interesting, interesting weekly program that walks you through the underlying reasons why people may emotionally eat, or they may be suffering from anxiety, depression, weird things like ADHD. So she kind of helps get you out of your, out of your head a little bit and she takes a very scientific approach to it. So she got me on this, on this wheel of how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time. I don’t want to eat an elephant people, but you know what I mean? So it taught me how to tackle things in little bite-sized pieces. So there was no expectations set up in the front, like, we’re gonna snap our fingers, take a pill or whatever, and everything’s gonna be great. It’s we’re going to work this out real methodically, which in the business world is creating your milestones. So she helped me do that and so now with the progress that I’ve had on my wheel, to answer your question, Chad, the areas where the deficits have been made up, yes, it makes my ride much smoother, but it also motivates me, now that I have those proof points. It’s like, it’s just like building a kid’s confidence up. You build those little micro-moments of trust and now the wheel is turning. So now I am even more hungry, more excited, more optimistic about solving for the other areas. I want everything to be as close to a tennis I can get it and now I have a lot of confidence that I can get there.

Dr. Chad Johnson 14:11
Good. Yeah, that’s awesome. One bite at a time, hey, hold that we’ll up for or whatever or read those again, here we go. Just so that way people can you know, reference it. Family, spouse, friends, fun, mental, spiritual, career and physical. Good.

Regan 14:33
Yeah. Would you ever think of health that way? I don’t know that I would have always thought of it that way. Fun.

Dr. Chad Johnson 14:39
Health, not as holistically in different departments. I mean, I think sometimes people, I almost think that I referenced it in my health podcast, the last one where I maybe said you know, like, physically and mentally and spiritually and then work or some. So I was getting there, but it wasn’t as well-rounded as that one. Yeah, well, listeners, if you have any questions on our Facebook forum, you can always follow up and write in, you know, the comment section below and we’re glad to answer any questions that might pop up but I hope this was concise yet thorough enough that it allowed for you to kind of get a peek into Regan’s health journey, and where you can translate that into deficits that you might have as well. Things that you might not have thought of before on that wheel. It’s not anything that’s brain-busting, like, I have a family why, you know, but at the same time, it’s like, wait a second, are you taking time to subjectively evaluate, you know, like, how do you how does your heart say that you are feeling about, you know, your connectedness to your family? Are you over-connected with work? That might even be an issue, or are you under-connected with your family? Are you under connected with your mental status? Are you kind of suppressing that or repressing it, you know? So hopefully, those were good tips and whatnot from Regan to be able to self-reflect on those eight points of the spokes of the wheel, to be able to make your life in balance. Regan closing thoughts?

Regan 16:24
Yes, take it. It’s like a risk assessment, take a risk assessment for your health, and ask yourself if the areas where you’re overdeveloped. Is that a place where you’re hiding out? Is that a place that feels good to you so you keep you keep doing that and it becomes a coping mechanism? I think that’s the part you mentioned, Chad, with like if you’re doing work too much, if you’re over-indulging in any of those areas, is there a reason for it? And ask yourself why, start with why, write yourself and be an advocate for yourself so you know your intuition best and you know how you feel. So this is just a quick tool that can help you get on the road to better satisfaction in your life and your health overall.

Dr. Chad Johnson 17:04
There you go. Well, listeners thanks for listening to Everyday Practices Dental podcast, until next episode, thanks.

Regan 17:14
Thank you for listening to another episode of Everyday Practices Podcast. Chad and I are here every week. Thanks to our community of listeners just like you, and we’d love your help. It would mean the world if you can help spread the word by sharing this episode with a fellow dentist and leave us a review on iTunes or Spotify. Do you have an extraordinary story you’d like to share or feedback on how we can make this podcast even more awesome? Drop us an email at podcast@productivedentist.com and don’t forget to check out our other podcasts from Productive Dentist Academy at productivedentist.com/podcasts See you next week.