You’re Not Broken (E.159)

“You are not broken. This is the lie that independent dentists have internalized for years.”
– Victoria Peterson

Brief Overview of the Episode

Victoria reframes the pressure most owners carry. If you feel tired, stretched thin, or quietly resentful of how much the practice needs you, that is not a personal failure. It’s burnout, and it is often structural, not personal.

She breaks down the difference between a practice built around the owner versus built for the owner, why decision bottlenecks drain you, and what changes when standards and systems are designed to stand on their own.

What This Episode Reveals

• The “I must be the problem” story is a common misdiagnosis for burnout
• When everything funnels through you, your presence becomes a patch for unclear standards
• Freedom is not a mindset shift, it’s a buildable outcome of better structure
• If the practice only works when you are present, it’s dependent, not resilient

What You’ll Learn

• How to tell if your practice is built around you (and why it feels heavy)
• Why this is not an abundance or scarcity mindset issue
• The one word shift that changes your strategy: built around me vs built for me
• The bottleneck questions that expose what needs to be rebuilt:
  • Where do decisions bottleneck?
  • What only exists in my head?
  • What collapses when I step away?
• What distributed leadership actually looks like when it is real

If This Sounds Familiar

• You can’t take time off without anxiety
• You feel like the decision maker, the culture carrier, the quality control, and the emotional regulator
• The practice is “successful” but success feels like responsibility instead of freedom
• You keep thinking: “Maybe I’m not disciplined enough” or “Maybe I’m not a good leader”

Next Steps

Do the free assessment meeting.
Book here: https://calendly.com/productivedentistacademy/coaching-session?utm_source=IGP-Website&month=2026-02

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:04] Victoria Peterson: If your practice needs you everywhere, that doesn’t mean that you’re indispensable. It means that the systems haven’t been designed to stand on their own.

[00:00:16] VO: Welcome to investment grade practices podcasts, where we believe private practice dentists deserve to get the lifestyle today while building an asset for tomorrow.

[00:00:25] VO: Join your host. Victoria Peterson to design the practice of your dreams and secure your financial independence. Let’s get started.

[00:00:34] Victoria Peterson: You are not broken. This is the lie that independent dentists have internalized for years. Hello, I’m Victoria Peterson, the host of an investment grade practice podcast, and today I wanna talk about this.

[00:00:50] Victoria Peterson: Unspoken language that we have that says, I must be the problem as the practice owner. I’m responsible for it all. It must be [00:01:00] me. I must be broken. So let’s start with something that most independent doctors never have told themselves clearly. Please hear it again. You’re not broken if you’ve built a solid practice.

[00:01:14] Victoria Peterson: Patients trust you. Your team relies on you, and your doors are open, but you still fear tired, stretched thin, or quietly resentful of how much the practice needs you. That is not a personal failure. That’s burnout. It’s not burnout because you can’t handle dentistry. Of course, you can’t. It’s also not a mindset issue.

[00:01:39] Victoria Peterson: It’s not about being abundant mindset or scarcity mindset. It’s a predictable outcome of how dentistry teaches ownership. And I wanna slow this down right here, right now, because the moment you realize that you’re not the problem, everything [00:02:00] becomes workable. So here’s how this lie in our brain forms.

[00:02:06] Victoria Peterson: Dentistry rewards early effort. You work harder, you produce more, you grow. Hooray. I’m starting to pay down my debt. I feel better. I can afford the house, I can go on vacations. The feedback loop about working harder is real and it works, but no one ever pulls you aside and says, Hey, this model only works to a point.

[00:02:31] Victoria Peterson: Productivity can get you so far, but then the model starts to feel heavy

[00:02:37] Regan Robertson: At Productive Dentist Academy, we’ve helped thousands of private practice owners find the clarity inside their data and take control again, starting with a free 60 minute coaching session. Head over to investment grade practice.com right now before the next patient sits down to claim your free 60 minute coaching session.

[00:02:54] Regan Robertson: That’s investment grade practice.com.

[00:02:57] Victoria Peterson: You know you’re in that spot when every [00:03:00] decision funnels through you, when time off actually creates anxiety. When success feels like responsibility instead of freedom, you know, you rarely question this structure. Why can’t you take a week off without panicking and checking in with the office every minute of every day?

[00:03:24] Victoria Peterson: Thinking two weeks at a time is unbelievable. A month off. Are you kidding me? So this is what’s possible. This is what should be a natural rhythm in dental practice ownership. We don’t get there because of the heaviness of all the decisions bottling through us. So oftentimes I hear doctors questioning themselves.

[00:03:48] Victoria Peterson: They will make these assumptions like, I must not be disciplined enough. Maybe I’m not a good enough leader. You know, other owners probably handle this better than me. Or maybe I just need to [00:04:00] push through this season and then it will get better. I’m here to tell you that those are all lies that we tell ourselves.

[00:04:08] Victoria Peterson: What’s actually happening is structural, not personal. Let me repeat that. What is actually happening here is a part of the design, the business structure, not you personally. So let’s see if we can get you into the real problem that no one ever says out loud. The practice. If you’re an independent solo practice practitioner, say you’ve got one practice by yourself, you’ve got associates, maybe you have four associates, you’re in a big building, or you have two locations, or it’s three locations.

[00:04:45] Victoria Peterson: These types of practices are often built around the owner. Not for the owner, and those are key words that one word shift is, is my practice built around me or was it built [00:05:00] for me? This is the whole concept of building an investment grade practice is to build a practice that works for you. Here’s what happens when it’s built around you, your presence compensates.

[00:05:12] Victoria Peterson: It compensates for unclear standards. So people are asking, should we do this crown? Should we not? Last time we did this, maybe we should do that. Every new person onboards in a different way. Clinical calibration is very unclear, so we have very unclear standards. When you set it up on BAT foundation, your leadership becomes uneven.

[00:05:34] Victoria Peterson: I say yes today and no. Tomorrow team can feel like you’ve got some favorites or sacred people that you don’t actually discipline when you should. So you start questioning and judging your own leadership because you haven’t given yourself the structure for consistency and systems that depend on your intuition or what rule of the day, not clarity about best practices.[00:06:00]

[00:06:00] Victoria Peterson: So you become the decision maker. You carry the culture. You are quality control for the systems, and you’re the emotional regulator. So when things get a little too heat, you have to step in and fix it. Trust me, I have limbed this. For 20 years before I learned these lessons as a, as a coach, as a marketer, as an owner of five dental practices with 55 employees, as the co-founder of Productive Dentist Academy and building a network of, of virtual employees across the country, it took me getting regulated inside to realize that I’m not the problem, I’m the problem, and that I didn’t build a structure.

[00:06:42] Victoria Peterson: Because here’s what happens eventually carrying everything becomes the cost of keeping everything. Carrying everything becomes the cost that you pay for keeping everything status quo. That’s probably why we have, [00:07:00] um, Facebook groups like trapped in the operatory. This is not a leadership failure. Please take a breath.

[00:07:07] Victoria Peterson: Breathe that in. This is not a leadership failure on your part. This is an architectural misalignment. This is a design flaw in how you’ve set the business. So let’s take a minute and kind of reframe your responsibility here. This is the reframe that changes everything. If your practice needs you everywhere, that doesn’t mean that you’re indispensable.

[00:07:33] Victoria Peterson: It means that the systems haven’t been designed to stand on their own yet. And this is important because it shifts the work from self-improvement to practice design, and I am a self-improvement junkie. I thought I was the problem for so many years. I’ve got every book on my shelf. I’ve sat with so many mentors, and that was very helpful.

[00:07:56] Victoria Peterson: There were things within my character that needed to be weed out, but at a [00:08:00] certain point, if you’re. Team is showing up. Your patients are happy and you’re stuck in the middle making every decision. That’s a practice design differentiation. So you don’t need more grit. You need clearer standards. You actually don’t need to be more available.

[00:08:18] Victoria Peterson: When you improve the standards and you improve the systems, the team actually kicks you out the door and says, we don’t need you. And this is what I call distributed leadership. It’s building a team that steps up. Each department carries its weight through accountability to the systems and the structure.

[00:08:39] Victoria Peterson: So again, most of the time we think about accountability as personal accountability, and that person should be more accountable. But if we haven’t built the systems and the standards and the structure for communicating with clarity, there’s nothing to be accountable to. So once you stop internalizing [00:09:00] structural problems.

[00:09:01] Victoria Peterson: Your emotional load is going to drop immediately. Immediately. So seriously, say this to yourself. This is not a leadership problem. This is not a personal problem. This is a structural problem that is very fixable, and this is what happens when you stop blaming yourself. The moment you stop believing that you’re broken, you will begin seeing your challenges with more accuracy.

[00:09:29] Victoria Peterson: New questions will start to arise. Questions like, where do decisions bottleneck? What only exists in my head? I wish they knew this or we used to know this, but then we had teen turnover and now we don’t know this. It exists in my head and what collapses when I step away? What happens when I take a day off?

[00:09:51] Victoria Peterson: What happens when I take a week off? God forbid I take two weeks off. What would collapse if I stepped away [00:10:00]and see if you could name it. I want you to really get a little negative here. If you, if you think that positivity is the key here, I want you to think about these things in, in a real light. Where do decisions bottleneck?

[00:10:15] Victoria Peterson: What only exists in my head? What collapses when I step away? Because if you can step back and ask these questions with curiosity and not judgment, your energy will immediately return because clarity is energizing, confusion is exhausted, and I can tell you nine times outta 10 when the phone rings and I’m doing a consult with a doctor, the place we start is I’m exhausted and I don’t know where to turn.

[00:10:46] Victoria Peterson: When you’re confused and exhausted, your brain turns off. We’re here to help you turn it back on because most owners aren’t tired because they work too much. In fact, once we take the stress out, they wanna work more. They love [00:11:00] being clinical. You’re tired because you’re carrying what? What should be shared with others?

[00:11:06] Victoria Peterson: You’re carrying the load for other people on your team. So I want you to think about just standing where you are. That’s what this whole podcast is about. You’re not broken, so let’s get a clear lens and stand about where you are, because here’s something that’s very counterintuitive. Growth does not begin with change.

[00:11:30] Victoria Peterson: Growth, your next level of growth, it begins with stability. So if you feel like, you know, last year we were doing better than we started out this year, I need to change something. I’m gonna invite you to think a little counter intuitively and say, growth begins with me stabilizing and seeing the systems for what they are.

[00:11:53] Victoria Peterson: Because when you can stand fully in what already exists without the self-criticism, [00:12:00] you create the C conditions for sustainable growth. Hear that again. When you stand fully in what already exists without criticizing yourself good, bad, or indifferent, this is where we are. You’re going to create the ecosystem, the conditions, the soil for long-term sustainable growth.

[00:12:21] Victoria Peterson: This will not feel like forced growth. It’s not like I’m bringing a consultant in and they’re gonna force this change on us. It’s not about that. It’s about aligned growth. Line growth is where the team can rise up because they know the standards, they know the systems. It’s when the practice begins to gain real value because it can operate without you.

[00:12:45] Victoria Peterson: And it’s when freedom, personal freedom stops being theoretical. That thing you’ve heard about and it starts being felt like you can feel the freedom. You may actually, doctors tell me, like they walk around, like, I feel like I have nothing to [00:13:00] do. That’s when you get to develop hobbies in a personal life.

[00:13:04] Victoria Peterson: So let’s figure out where you are today. Get a plan for sustainable growth, not forced growth. So you can feel this value. You can feel the freedom. I really do believe that you’re not depleted because you’re doing something wrong. You’re depleted because your practice is asking you to compensate for what hasn’t been designed.

[00:13:25] Victoria Peterson: You’re working off an old model. If you want help getting clear on where your energy is leaking and what could actually stabilize your practice, I offer a 30 minute no obligation clarity call. Again. I’ve walked in your shoes as a consultant for three decades as a practice owner, multi-practice owner.

[00:13:47] Victoria Peterson: For eight years, I’ve, I’ve learned how to leverage these systems. So that I enjoy freedom and I can’t wait to help you do the same. I hold five spots per week for independent dental practice [00:14:00]owners with one to three locations. So clarity is how we’re gonna help you reclaim your energy. Remaining inside.

[00:14:08] Victoria Peterson: A confused business structure is going to continue to drain you. It’s gonna be quiet over time. That quiet drip, it’s almost barely recognizable. Until you wake up and label it as burnout. So you’re gonna find a Calendly link low. If you’d like to book a clarity call, I’m here. ’cause I believe success requires support.

[00:14:33] VO: Thank you for tuning into this episode of Investment Grade Practices Podcast. If you find value in this episode, help us spread the word by passing it along to a dental friend. Subscribe and give us a like on iTunes or Spotify. Learn more about building your investment grade practice@productivedentist.com today.