Advance Your Dental Career – Overcoming Fear Leads to Confidence (E.220)

“If you say you can’t do something, then you must.” ~Dr. Bruce B. Baird

In this enlightening episode of The Productive Dentist Podcast, Dr. Bruce B. Baird delves into a topic that resonates deeply with dental professionals: overcoming fear to achieve confidence. Inspired by insights from Dr. Lincoln Harris, a renowned dentist from Australia, Dr. Baird explores how fear can hold dentists back from reaching their full potential and how pushing through that fear can lead to mastery and confidence in their practice.

Dr. Baird shares personal anecdotes and real-life examples to illustrate his points, emphasizing the importance of repetition and experience in building competence. Whether it’s performing complex procedures like implants and root canals or deciding to refer cases to specialists, this episode offers valuable advice for dentists at all stages of their careers. Dr. Baird’s mantra, “If you say you can’t do something, then you must,” serves as a motivational reminder to embrace challenges and continually strive for excellence.

Listeners will gain insights into:

• The psychological barriers that prevent dentists from advancing in their careers.
• The transformative power of hands-on experience and continuous learning.
• Practical tips for building confidence in various dental procedures.
• The significance of finding joy and passion in specific aspects of dentistry.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Bruce Baird: Hi, this is Dr. Bruce Baird with the Productive Dentist Podcast. And I’m excited to kind of talk about something I heard this last weekend from a good buddy of mine, Lincoln Harris, who’s a dentist from Australia and has developed Right Global in education, online education and in person education system that I’m very impressed with but one of the things he said that kind of stuck with me over the entire last few days was his talk of the main reason dentists don’t, uh, move forward with the things that they want to do in dentistry is based on fear and I couldn’t agree more, you know, when, you know, you’re afraid to do something, but on the other side of fear, something happens.  When you get through the fear, all of a sudden you gain confidence and, and what I mean by that is the more reps you do, the more you, uh, the more crowns you do in your practice, the more implants that you do, if that’s what you enjoy, um, the more confidence you get. Unfortunately, probably 95 percent of dentists never get past the fear. I mean, I’ve been with dentists trained at MISH Implant Institute. They went, they learned all the techniques and all the technology and came home and I see him 20 years later, I go, “So how’s your implant stuff doing?” “Well, you know, I don’t do, do a lot of implants. You know, they, I’ve done 15 or 20,” and they spent 20, 000 to go learn from the number one guy in the world. Um, at the time, uh, on dental implants and it’s this fear that’s kind of can be overwhelming. You know, we, we, we’re, we’re, we’re told, you know, don’t hurt our patients. We don’t want to hurt them. Um, so we have this fear of either hurting the patient, uh, of telling them the cost is how high the cost is, uh, and, and all those things. And, and we have to get past that fear. Uh, I used to tell people, I tell people, I tell my kids and I tell, I tell my grandkids, I said, “If you say you can’t do something, then you must,” and I’ve said this before on the podcast. Um, I, I tell my kids that they say, “Oh, I can’t do math.” I go, “What if you say that, you know what that means? You must learn math. You must be good at math,” because I don’t want to go through my life feeling I’m bad at, at something. I would rather, it’s a challenge. It’s something that I’m going to put out in front of me and say, “All right. Um, I can’t play golf. Well, I remember saying that a lot of times and I probably said it last week, but um, I must.I, I, it’s something I enjoy. It’s something I have fun doing. And so I want to work on it a little bit more.

Dr. Bruce Baird: Uh, I, the, the saying I can’t do root canals. Well, one thing about I can’t do root canals is different than I don’t like to do root canals. What I would say is if you can’t do a root canal. then you need to learn to do root canals and you need to go to the best place in the world to learn and there are multiple locations that you can go learn automated endo and some of the latest techniques and technology to do endodontics. Um, and then, then you can make a decision after that. You learn to do it, you start doing them in your practice, and then you may make a decision at some point in your career that you say, “You know, I just don’t really like doing, I don’t like doing I mean, I don’t like doing, uh, endo,” and that’s okay and that’s when you begin to refer, you know, refer the work out to a, to the best endodontist in your area, period because I want my patients to be taken care of at the highest level. So I, I had a good friend of mine, Dr. John Bond in Fort Worth and he’s retired now, but I would send patients to him to have root canals done and they would come back and praise his work and praise how he handled and how he treated them. You need to find people like that, that you can refer to. If you don’t like doing root canals. Now, anterior root canals, bicuspids, I still don’t like doing them, but I’m very efficient at it. I can do them, um, I can do them very, uh, effectively and Dr. Bond, John, my bud, he wanted me to do those. He wants to see the more complicated, more difficult cases. He wants me to do the easy ones, which is the kind of referring doctor that you really want. He told me some techniques and some things that I should do to, to, to get better and better at doing those, doing those root canals. Say the same thing about implants. There are guys that want you to learn how to do it and you decide, maybe it’s not for me. That’s okay but what you don’t want to do is just not do root canals or just say, “I don’t like doing them. I don’t even want to learn about it.” Well, you don’t know until you’ve done it and I can, I can say this on multiple things.

Dr. Bruce Baird: A great example for me was connective tissue grafting. Took courses with Pat Allen in Dallas and the best guy in the world in connective tissue grafting. Uh, I had a blast at the course. I learned an enormous amount and I never looked at recession. I never looked at those things again the same way. Uh, or the pinhole technique. I went out, got the training, bought the equipment. and learned an enormous amount, went home, did some, well, I just don’t like doing it, you know, I mean, it’s such, it takes me forever. I’m using, uh, you know, sutures and I’m, you know, my partner, Jeff, he loves doing them, you know, so it was a perfect scenario for me. I went, I learned, and I made my decision based on knowledge, based on doing them and so, uh, I think that that’s a different way of thinking and when I heard Lincoln say, you know, fear, and on the other side, you have confidence. How true is that? When you’re confident in doing something and you enjoy doing it, that goes right through to the patient. The patient can see your confidence and I’ve said this many times on the podcast, patients don’t want your knowledge. As engineers, we want to talk about, “Oh, this is what I’m using and this is, uh, the type file and this is,” whatever it is. Um, but patients. The majority don’t really want to know that. They really just want to know that you’re confident. And that comes out, you exude confidence on things you enjoy doing and that’s why you get to do more of them when you’re not confident about something where you don’t really exude confidence and guess what? You don’t get to do very many. So with implant dentistry, it’s the same way. Jeff Bowsky, my partner for years, Jeff was the most trained guy in the world. I mean, he had been to every course, every place. He was amazing but he just wasn’t doing any of the work, you know, whether it be, I mean, across the board from, from,  uh, implants, surgery to all those, he’d been to all the courses and knew how to do it, but he didn’t have the confidence and I told him, I said, “Jeff, you’ve been to the courses, buddy. It’s, it’s, it’s time to quit going to courses and do the work that you’ve learned how to do and then determine if you like it or not,” and I’ll be darned.

Dr. Bruce Baird: He’s probably one of the best implant surgeons I’ve ever watched and he’s phenomenal at it and it was nice to be able to pass the baton to him when I put the handpiece down because I can trust him with all of my patients in so many different things, connective tissue, grafting, um, all, all of those. So it’s something that, um, one more thing, let me tell you about endo and, you know, I told you guys, I don’t like doing them. Um, and I just, I don’t know, I get bored doing it. Uh, it takes a while and I just get bored. So, what I, I came up with my protocol for doing ENDO, I’ll do interiors, um, I’ll do bis, if I got into a buy cuspid and I find a, you know, bifurcated canal or two, you know, if it looked complicated once I got in there, I want to find that information out in the first five minutes. If I get, open up a number 14 and I open it up, I want to, I want to see the canals and I’m looking for MB2 and I can’t find it in the first couple minutes. If I don’t find MB2 in the first couple minutes, what I’m not going to do is an hour-and-a-half root canal or a two hour root canal for a thousand dollars. A two-hour root canal, a thousand bucks, I mean that’s 500 an hour. It is the national average about 425 an hour, so you’re above the national average, but the only reason I would do that is if I enjoyed doing root canals. Otherwise, I’m 10 minutes into the procedure, I tell the patient, you have some extra areas here that it’s really going to require the expertise of somebody who does this every day, all day. I said, “I want to send you to Dr. Bond,” and they would say, you know, “You sent me to him last time. He’s phenomenal.” I just, that, that’s great.Dr. B or, you know, they go, “Can’t you do it?” I said, “Well, I could, but I wouldn’t do it on myself. So that just gives you an idea of how I feel about this particular type tooth. I want it to be done correct so that the restorative work we do on top of that has a great chance of lasting the rest of your life.” So it is, if I, if I get into a bicuspid and it’s got three canals instead of two, and there’s a big curve and a hook or whatever, I broach it out, I clean it out, I put a pellet in it, and I send it to the endodontist. Um, so, being efficient and being a productive dentist has to do with, in my opinion, confidence and fear, 95 percent of the dentists out there are afraid. You get out of dental school, honestly, the dental schools are lacking right now in the education that a lot of the dentists are getting. They come out and they go into an associate position and you just get doing the same crap over and over.

Dr. Bruce Baird: The, the, the DSO or the group says, we want you to do root canals. We want you to be able to do third molar extractions. These are the things that they don’t want to do. So as an associate, you’re going to get to do it. Uh, then you get disgruntled or not disgruntled, disenchanted, because gosh, I’m not sure if I like doing this. Uh, when I went into military, uh, I was, uh, I was the oral surgeon with quotation marks for a 28 chair clinic for two years. I didn’t, I mean, I’d taken out teeth and I’d taken out quite a few, but I learned to do CB impactions, uh, four in 20 minutes. It didn’t, that did not happen overnight, I can promise you, but over a couple of months, I got more and more confident. I wouldn’t probably have done that because I would have been afraid of doing it, but when I had the opportunity to learn about it and become the oral surgeon in this 28-year clinic where everybody was referring to me, Man, I got, uh, my education went up. I started going to other courses on extractions, Implants became a thought process in my mind and later on became a big part of my practice. So, these are things that don’t let fear stop you from being successful. Don’t let fear stop you from being the dentist that you really want to be. There are so many dentists out there right now, and we’re going to talk about mentorship next. We’re going to talk about a lot of things, but there are so many dentists out there that are disenchanted because they’ve been put in a situation that may not be the best situation for them. Um, so, you know, this was something that really hit me between the eyes when I, when I heard Lincoln talk this, this past week and, and, uh, I just really wanted to share my thoughts about it because I feel like, uh, The sky’s the limit with dentistry. There’s so many dentists that are disenchanted, but they’re just either not in the right situation. Uh, they haven’t figured out what they really want to do yet. That’s okay. You’re not going to do that overnight. This is a, this is a, uh, well, for me, a lifelong passion was dentistry. I wanted to help my patients. I wanted to make sure they got top quality care. I was never afraid to refer somebody to the best. Whoever that was, whoever I found out was the best at whatever procedure. I do all kinds of implants, sinus lifts, grafting, uh, you know, all of that but if it was a case that was going to be beyond my capability, I had two choices. I either learn how to do that. We’ll talk zygomas, you know, I could go learn it. I’ve got great buddies that do zygomas. They could teach it to me, but you know what? I enjoy doing what I’m doing now in the implant realm. If I had a, uh, it’s not a fear of zygomas, it’s just there’s certain cases that need it and I’d refer, I’d prefer to refer that out. I don’t want to spend my time and the older you get, uh, out of dental school, you start to find your niche, the things that you really love to do. So guys do what you love, um, don’t be afraid and don’t be afraid to do things and you’ll make the determination as you become confident in a procedure, confident in something  that you either like doing it or you don’t like doing it. You know what? At least you know and at least you’re good at it and at least you can tell when good work is being done by a referral source that you’re sending, that you’re sending your patients to. So, I hope this kind of hits you between the eyes if you’re a young dentist or if you’re an old dentist. There are things that you haven’t even tried that you don’t even know if you like. So think about it. Um, guys for voting us number one podcast in dentistry last year. I’m looking forward to, to our next podcast and our next time together.