How in the world do you get a patient to feel that way, and actually say it to other people? Talk about referrals!!!!

I can only write about my experience because it happened to me. I knew of this dentist’s reputation because he had been through The Schuster Center Management Program quite a few years ago. He had a practice in Illinois, but 10 years ago he moved to Scottsdale, AZ.

Not only was his office decor and design top of the line, his team was wonderful, the dentist was wonderful (kind eyes I like to say when I see some little twinkle of kindness in someone’s eyes). I was shown the entire dental office right down to the sterile room. And if you couldn’t ask for more, the treatment room dental chairs face the gorgeous McDowell Mountains! So close you feel like you could reach out and touch them. The office was mostly very open with many glass partitions and everything was neat and in it’s place.

My new dentist did a thorough examination listening to me about how I felt about my teeth, my concerns over technical quality, margins, etc., what I’d heard from other dentists about my teeth and then of course how I wanted them to look.

I’m an artist, so my view may be different than others, I didn’t want bright white perfect looking teeth. I wanted color variations from tip to top of tooth like my teeth and striations like my teeth. In other words, I wanted my teeth from when I was about 30 maybe, because I’m older now and I didn’t want people to look at me and think, “she just had her teeth redone, “ but instead think “she still has pretty teeth for her age.”

This dentist said to me, “Vicki, I’ve been doing this all my life and I know what you want because I’m an artist, too – just in dentistry.” He said we will pick out color together and will discuss our process together every step of the way.

I was sold before I ever got to the “case presentation” room. I felt he was honest, he was technically good and he was an artist because he showed his work with patient’s pictured “after” on his walls as art. “I was at home.”

Just a side note for all dentists out there, please put together a portfolio of your work. Especially if you’re selling cosmetic dentistry. And, for heaven’s sake, have your own teeth done. I can’t tell you how many dentists do not have their teeth in the state they are trying to sell.

After the exam, I was escorted into a very comfortable private room (not his personal private office) but a room with a computer and room for obviously (at least to me) case presentation with patient, spouse or significant other, and attending team member.

I know a little bit about case presentation (the dreaded “selling” that dentists feel they have to do). Honestly even knowing about it, this dentist listened to my every concern, gave opinions, showed me his work, gave me a price break when he saw I was feeling overwhelmed with paying out a large amount of money in these economic times (and not a lot – just a bit to make me feel that he was trying to help me) and offered delayed payment plans if I needed it.

How much more could I ask? He didn’t get full mouth restoration, but he got half-mouth restoration.

The appointment was set up and of course any patient waits anxiously for that arrival date. It was a 3.5 hr. appointment. That day arrived today. I was shown his wax-ups. They looked great but I had a few concerns about the size my teeth. I’ve always thought my teeth were too big. It’s hard to judge what teeth will look like in one’s mouth vs. on a model.

He explained to me that he did not know what dentistry was done underneath the existing crowns, but he would explain the process to me and we would discover together. Which we did. I was always asked if I wanted a mirror to see what he was discovering. Usually, I did.

A problem arose with a front tooth that I broke when I was 9. I wore temporary caps until 17 then crowns the rest of my life. He found a crack in the tooth so I need a post placed for strength. Pretty much standard stuff under other crowns during the prep and then finally new resin temporaries were placed and I got the mirror again. I shouldn’t have worried about size, they look beautiful and still are only temps!

I was truly amazed at the difference in my appearance. I love the new teeth with just a couple of tweaks which any self respecting artist would make! Meanwhile, I will wait anxiously for my next appointment – for the final porcelain crowns and my new smile.

When I was done I complimented my new dentist and his chairside assistant. I told them that I had gone to three dentists, but when I came here, I felt at home! They thanked me, and I thanked them. Then, the doctor said to me, “You tell Mike for me that he was instrumental in putting me on the right path over 20 years ago – that is the reason I am where I am today!”

Once again, Dr. Michael Schuster has helped change a dentist’s life. By the way, Dr. Schuster’s Case Presentation course is probably the “best” in the country! If you want to know more about it, please call us at 480.941-9393 or visit our website: www.SchusterCenter.com.

I didn’t ask permission to use the dentists name in this blog so that is the only reason I left it off, but I will refer any one who asks me to this dentist once I get his permission. You can reach me at vicki@cfpd.com. (And dentists, I’m also talking to you – get your teeth done if they need it.)

Law of Attraction

Law of attraction says that all your thoughts, all images in your mind, and all the feelings connected to your thoughts will later manifest as your reality. In other words; everything you have in your life now has been attracted to you through thoughts in your mind.

Understanding And “Consciously” Implementing The Power Of Thought

If you would like to read the entire article on The Power of Thought please visit our website at: www.schustercenter.com, click on FREE NEWSLETTER link for our complimentary subscription to our bi-monthly newsletter, The Schuster Perspective. Every 2 months you will receive our newsletter via a .pdf file that you can download and read at your leisure. We cover dental management, investing in a troubled time, doubling your net profits, dental team development, case presentation and much more. If you are new to our blog site, please take a look at us while you’re on the website for our schedule of events and seminars throughout the United States. 3.5 AGD credit hours apply to any attended event sponsored by The Schuster Center.

Perhaps we haven’t been able to convince you how important it is to “stay engaged” with our program and to return to get refreshed, re-created, renewed and recommitted to our process that has helped hundreds of thousands of dentists for over 30 years.

WE’D LIKE TO ASK FOR YOUR HAND AGAIN. A RE-ENGAGEMENT AND HOPEFULLY A LIFELONG MARRIAGE TO COMMITMENT IN DENTISTRY

We are recommitted to recommitting you to us and our process, our work, our thoughts and our total and complete interest in always making you the best dentist you can be – and the happiest.

Here’s how we can help you re-engage and stay engaged with your business:

THE CEREMONY AND THE INVITATION (The offer)

If you’ve been a student at The Schuster Center:

• Return for recare, refresher courses or alumni advanced courses.
• Learn the newest trends in Case Presentation and how to ethically sell to patients.
• Learn current investment strategies.
• Re-learn what it takes to put together a superb team.
• Re-focus and re-create your vision.

Use us for clarity and implementation of ideas. We can help you via networking, through our support coaches, and aid you with valuable references and resources. As we have learned, so have we taught.

“When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”

If you feel like you’re lost or you’ve wandered off the path and can’t get a clear direction, please call us. Our analysts are ready to walk you through a Practice REALITY CHECK and help identify current areas of challenge and opportunity. Also, our coaching department is ready to help you through any daily difficulties and to provide you with a clear understanding of team issues and a vision of your practice future. We can help you change your life!

We have proved to you that if you slow down, you will be more satisfied in your work, provide better care for your patients and team, and make more money!

Also, if you think you’re doing great and just want to boast a bit, we’d love to hear your success story as well. We want only the best for you!

And, with the creation of Performance Coach, a very inexpensive and yet rewarding program that brings teachers, mentors and colleagues within the dental field together 3 times a year, you can and will stay committed to the ideas and philosophies, business practices and principles you set forth years ago. It is also a wonderful program of renewal, re-energizing your professional and personal life. We have seen lifelong friendships and mentorships created in this program. Ask Lin Golbeck, Performance Coach co-ordinator, all about it at 1-800-288-9393. One of the best phone calls you will ever make.

The Schuster Center – “Creating Wealth and Freedom for Dentists”
1-800-288-9393 TOLL FREE or visit our
website: www.SchusterCenter.com

NOTE: Vicki Smith, owner of Citigraphics, llc, has worked with Dr. Michael Schuster and The Schuster Center for 28 years. She creates graphic design projects as well as editing and writing some of the articles for The Perspective newsletter, brochures, flyers, invitations, the blog and other projects that arise. Vicki has worked in the marketing department in-house for the Schuster Center for 11 of those years. She has helped many Schuster dentists with logo designs and other graphic design needs.

You can kiss your business “goodbye”.

Or, say “hello” to it!

Your business is like a lifelong friend who’s become a bit flaky with bad ideas taking shape, conflicts arising and self-indulgence appearing. Your friend also likes to borrow money from you. And he or she never pays it back, and wants you to go out with him or her all the time leaving family and friends alone and personal projects undone. So, you’ve decided to ignore this friend for the time being. Go along just to get along. Maybe he or she will pay you back, get on track and become the old friend you had when you first met.

Ever looked at your business that way? Are you just ignoring it now?

Would you allow any friend to treat you that way and still be friends?

No?

Then probably you shouldn’t allow your business to treat you that way either.

COMMITMENT TO YOUR BUSINESS

If a friend was in trouble, wouldn’t you help? You’d get focused, think of some plan to help, follow through. Get and give your friend advice. There’s nothing you wouldn’t do for your friend to help him or her get back to prosperity and good health.

Put your arm around yourself, and help your friend (your business) in the same way.

RECIPE FOR SUCCESS:

• Re-commit to your business (practice)
• Diagnose any problems
• Seek advice
• Set a plan in motion
• Create new ideas for success
• Follow through with the plan
• Make adjustments if necessary
• Stay engaged and focused
• Don’t forget to plan new goals
• Love the one(s) you’re with (your team)
• Success breeds success
• Get paid back
• Stay committed (A viciously delectable cycle!)

Kiss yourself on the cheek. You’re now back in business! Though you thought you were in business all along, really you’ve just been going through the motions – going to work every day. Doing the same thing every day – with the same results. Tiresome habit.

We are the first business school ever created for dentists who wanted to learn how to ethically practice dentistry with commitment to their patients, team and personal growth and development. It’s nothing new. We have taught this for over 30 years.

Easy to lose your way and your focus. Here’s how to regain it! See next article: Commitment To Community…

1) Income = Wealth

2) You can run a business on an accounting statement

3) You can run a business by the seat of your pants

He also explains the creative process, structure and the belief systems necessary in order to actually manifest true growth and wealth. Take a moment to hear the author speak about his widely popular concept, The Science of Creating Wealth™.

(Click the play button below)

 –Contact The Schuster Center to purchase the book for yourself: 1-800-288-9393.

If you aren’t going to inherit enough Wealth to be able to support yourself for 20-25 years of retirement(which is a minimum of $3M for a dentist), then your practice has to become your source of Wealth Creation.

Herein lies the importance of a BUSINESS MODEL.

Most PRACTICE MODELS are production based models. The thinking is that if you produce enough revenues, eventually you will Create Wealth. This MODEL not only fails to Create Wealth, it destroys lives in the process.

Other PRACTICE MODELS focus on the DOCTOR LIFESTYLE and these models also fail to Create Wealth.  This model also fails to Create Wealth and the Freedom that Wealth brings.

Anyone could make money in the 1990’s and then the GAME CHANGED.

There is ONLY ONE BUSINESS MODEL that allows for the Creation of Wealth in ANY ECONOMY.  Up, down or sideways…and this is the MODEL that The Schuster Center has been promoting and teaching for over 30 years.

This is a HIGH QUALITY–RELATIONSHIP DRIVEN–HIGH PROFIT PRACTICE MODEL.

We are so sure of the predictability of this MODEL that when you learn and apply this MODEL to your practice, WE GUARANTEE you will DOUBLE YOUR NET PROFIT!

Register for The Science of Creating Wealth™ or one of our other CE events at 1-800-288-9393. Or just call us directly and ask how YOU can DOUBLE YOUR NET PROFIT.

Dr. Michael Schuster

www.SchusterCenter.com

1-800-288-9393

Timothy Miller wrote a book in 1995 that I’ve read 50 times…HOW TO WANT WHAT YOU HAVE!

I suggest you read it.  Step one to ever being happy with what you have is GRATITUDE. Interesting that in Lee Brower’s new book, The Brower Quadrant, he also focuses on the importance and power of gratitude.

It’s a proven fact that people who are grateful for what they have, perform better and have a much more profound impact on their life and the lives of others.

Two other elements that Timothy Miller writes about are ATTENTION…being actually present to what is going on right now and COMPASSION.  I find that people who really try to understand us become much more involved with life and come much closer than those who feel and show little compassion for others.

But in the end, how can anyone WANT WHAT THEY HAVE, it they DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY WANT.  So many dentists have lives that contradict their core values, or go against NATURE’S PRINCIPLES of human behavior. No matter who you are, you’ll never BE HAPPY, CONTENT OR GRATEFUL if you don’t focus on and act on what you TRULY VALUE AND WANT.  

And you’ll also have a very difficult time feeling GRATEFUL if all you do is PROBLEM SOLVE.

We all have problems and we all must face our problems and do something about our problems. But its far better to FOCUS ON WHAT YOU WANT…the ONE THING THAT CAN AND WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE.

When I wrote THE SCIENCE OF CREATING WEALTH…I did so because we all have so much more potential…I think one of the major reasons the majority of us fail to even come close to our God given potential is because we ARE NOT GRATEFUL FOR WHAT WE HAVE.

Think on these things.

Dr. Michael Schuster 

–For help with dental practice management, dental case presentation, hygiene as a profit center, business plans for the dental practice, dental continuing education seminars and more, go to www.SchusterCenter.com or call 1-800-288-9393

The greatest challenge that you will ever face is the conquest of fear in the development of the habit of courage.  Winston Churchill once wrote: “Courage” is rightly considered the foremost of virtues, for upon it, all others depend.” 

Fear is, and always has been, the greatest enemy of mankind. When Franklin D. Roosevelt said; “The only thing to fear is fear itself,” he was saying that the emotion of fear is the greatest RESISTANCE to pursuing becoming the person you have the God-given potential to become. Fear is the cause of much associated anxiety, stress and unhappiness.  When we develop the habit of courage and work to develop an unshakable self-confidence, a whole new world of possibilities opens to us.  Just think: What would you dare to dream, to be, to do, if you knew you couldn’t fail? 

Fortunately, the habits of courage and self-confidence can be learned, just as any other habits or skills were learned.  To do so, we need to go to work systematically to diminish and eradicate our fears, lower our resistance, while simultaneously building the kind of courage that will enable us to deal fearlessly with the inevitable ups and downs of life. 

Syndicated columnist Ann Landers wrote,  “If I  were asked to give what I consider to be the single most useful bit of advice to all of humanity, it would be this:  Expect trouble as an inevitable part of life, and when it comes, as it will as surely as night follows day, hold your head high. Look it squarely in the eye and say, “I will be bigger than you.  You cannot defeat me.”  This is the kind of attitude that leads to victory every time. 

The starting point to overcoming fear and RESISTANCE and developing courage is to look at the factors that predispose us towards fear.

The root source of fear is childhood conditioning that caused us to experience two types of fear. First, the fear of failure, which causes us to think: “I can’t do it.  I can’t change. I can’t risk failing.  The other is fear of rejection, fear of saying what has to be said to move myself or someone else to action which causes us to think, “I have to, I have to, I have to”. 

Based on those fears, we become pre-occupied with the idea of losing our money, our time, and our emotional investment in a relationship.  We become hypersensitive to the opinions and the possible criticisms of others, sometimes to the point where we are blocked, we are afraid to act, even in our best behalf.  Our fears paralyze us. Our fears put the brakes on us becoming the people we truly are. Our fears create RESISTANCE. Our fears discourage us. Our fears force us to procrastinate…to do anything but what we should be doing. 

We make excuses and don’t do what is essential to do to act in our own behalf.

• We don’t exercise every morning.
• We don’t eat the right foods.
• We fail to give thanks for what we have.
• We fail to be grateful.
• We fail to take quiet time for ourselves. 

Fear and RESISTANCE are also caused by ignorance.  When we have limited knowledge and information, when we surrender our MONEY, our TIME, our INDIVIDUAL POWER to others who are not capable, we tend to become tense, stressed and insecure about the outcome of our actions. We lose ENERGY.  We lose time. Life takes on less meaning. We move into BURNOUT.  We lose our enthusiasm. It becomes tougher to get going, to do what we know we must do to shape our lives and businesses.

The reverse is also true. When we have the courage to act in our own behalf, to gain control of just one thing, say our health, or our money, or what we eat, or when we take important time for ourselves each morning, we eliminate fear, we take a stand, we improve a part of our lives which impacts other aspects of our lives. 

We begin to overcome RESISTANCE, overcome our FEARS and every moment of every day we take back what we might have given up. Our fears never truly go away. In my view, fear is Satan at work. Anything good for you will be resisted by a fear. It has always been that way and it always will be that way. 

Those who become all of who and what they truly can be, have overcome fear to move to the next level in their life, in their relationships, with their health, and with their finances.   

Dr. Michael Schuster

–For help with dental practice management, dental case presentation, hygiene as a profit center, business plans for the dental practice, dental continuing education seminars and more, go to www.SchusterCenter.com or call 1-800-288-9393

Commitment

Confidence

Like it or not, agree with it or not, every dentist sells.  A person cannot
NOT communicate.
 
The 3 C’s come into play for every person in every situation in their lives.
 
Competence:  you are either good at what you do or not. Of course there are various levels of competence, from average, to good, to excellence.  Excellence within any person is a way of being, a habit. In fact all levels of performance are habitually driven.  Some continue to strive for improvement in their competence, Others are continually satisfied with average. In my personal experience there is no end to how competent any of us can become.
 
Commitment:  one of my favorite quotes has been on the back of my business card for over 20 years…“Commitment is the willingness to be uncomfortable to produce results.”

Without a commitment of heart, mind, hands and soul, no one ever makes the effort to be as good as they can become.  There’s no excuse or reason for this. In my experience, some people are committed and many are in doubt.  The doubting undermines our effort and our experience of moving up the ladder of performance as much as commitment helps move us up the ladder of success at whatever we are attempting to do.
 
Confidence:  protect your confidence is a password we use over and over at The Center and Performance Coach.  Some things and some people simply get in our way of sustaining or building confidence.  Some events that keep repeating themselves tear away at our confidence and we have to be aware of these people and events.  We must eliminate those activities and people that tear away at our confidence. In the end, whenever a person loses their confidence, they lose their ability to make the choices which determine whether we advance, stay the same or go backwards.
 
Show me any athlete, sports or corporate athlete, dentist or otherwise that loses their confidence and I’ll show you a person that is underperforming.  Show me a person without commitment and I’ll show you another underperformer. And lastly show me a person without competence and I’ll show you a person who can’t perform, no matter the commitment or false confidence.
 
The world is always watching, and giving back to us what we give to it.
 
Michael Schuster

–Dr. Schuster is a regular columnist in Dental Economics and has been the leader in dental practice management for over 30 years. Contact him at The Schuster Center, 1-800-288-9393 or go to www.schustercenter.com for info on practice management education and dental continuing education seminars.

Perhaps it’s because their vantage point is unobstructed by anyone or anything in front of them. And they aren’t held back by those who can’t keep pace with the constant changes. They find OPPORTUNITY while others can only see DOOM.

Where others are frozen by FEAR, they find STRENGTH. In simple terms, Leaders LEAD. As a result, they will chart the uncharted in today’s challenging economy, slip the stream of negativity and deliver on the promise of their business.

I salute these ‘changers’, these ‘leaders’, these entreprenueurs who realize that change is constant and continuous in nature, but attitudes and reactions to change are optional.

STAND UP–LET’S GET GOING!

—Dr. Schuster is a regular columnist in Dental Economics and has been the leader in dental practice management for over 30 years. Contact him at The Schuster Center, 1-800-288-9393 or go to www.schustercenter.com for information on continuing education for dentists.