Time to make a dental coach part of your team?

Dec 27, 2009

Editor's note: The Coaches Corner column appears regularly on the DrBicuspid.com advice and opinion page, Second Opinion.

Life coaching can be intensely challenging and fulfilling. Coaches come from many realms of experience -- such as former business owners, executive management, finance, accounting, real estate, wealth planning and others -- but how good can it get if your coach is also an experienced dentist? The Dental Coaches Association is organized to provide you with peer-reviewed dentist coaches.

Coaches tend to be both process and results-oriented and are often seen as facilitators of both subjective and objective activity designed to advance your agenda, not theirs. Like dentists, coaches need strong people skills in order to successfully deal with the diverse personalities, emotions, and challenges that present themselves during the relationship process. Treatment plan implementation and staff empowerment, for example, are relationship areas that coaching skills are designed to augment.

Depending upon your past experience, you may bring a very strong numbers orientation (left-brain) or a strong people and relationship focus (right-brain) to your practice. The dentist who can integrate the logical and linear abilities of the left brain with the relationship and conceptual attributes of the right brain, is probably going to enjoy greater success and earnings.

A dentist coach's role is to facilitate this learning, to manifest the reality you want. A dentist coach will get you ready to run, help condition your mind, and bring forth the "right" attitude based upon how you define success, while your practice management consultant will help you by telling you which races to run.

The objective of a dentist coach is to help you integrate the business side of your practice with the non-financial activities that the data reflects so that you can approach the running of your practice with greater clarity, congruency, and credibility. Dental coaches work with what you want and the direction that you want to head toward.

Dan Kingsbury, D.D.S., life and dental coach, is a co-founder of the Dental Coaches Association, an organization of dentists who are professional coaches committed to bringing coaching to the dental profession. Learn more by visiting www.dentalcoachesassociation.org.

The comments and observations expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the opinions of DrBicuspid.com, nor should they be construed as an endorsement or admonishment of any particular idea, vendor, or organization.