Four ways to become a happy dentist

shutterstock_245560159Simon Hocken says creating alignment is key to dentists moving their business forwards.

There are three main blockers we encounter with our clients. The first is time; they tend to spend too much time working in their business and not enough time working on it. The second is they don’t have the right skills to properly do that. But thirdly if they’re not in some sort of alignment, if their days are not aligned to their values and their personal objectives, they become very frustrated and resigned to their work.

In that case, creating alignment is the key to them moving their business forwards. There are four techniques we use to help them do this.

1. Reverse engineering

If we were sat here in 36 months, what would have to have happened for them to be satisfied with their life? I ask them to give minute detail, down to where they wake up, who they’re living with, the journey to work, who they work with, what they’re earning – everything about this day in three years’ time is written down. Why? It’s easier to stand three years in the future and look back in time and see the path you had to take to get there – much easier than standing here in 2015 and looking forwards at 2018 with all the obstacles and uncertainty blocking the view.

2. The Wheel of Life

A quick and easy audit tool to assess different domains of their life. They grade areas like professional life, friends and family, spiritual life, intellectual life. They measure how satisfied they are with each area, and then they can see which areas they’d like to improve. Often for dentists we’ve just met the wheel looks very ragged.

3. The Kolbe test

An American psychometric test which measures their preference in four areas: finding out information, actioning that information with follow-through, taking risks, and artisan skills. If their business requires them to take risks, for example, and they have a very low preference for taking risks, the business probably stalls because they won’t take the risks to move it forward.

4. Capio E-Colours

A psychometric test measuring how well people in teams innately communicate with each other. It bands people into a combination of two colours out of four: red (the doer), green (the thinker), yellow (the socialiser), blue (the relater).

People with red in their colours are very direct and might be perceived as being rude and rather quick in their communication, especially by someone who has blue in their colours, who is empathetic and wants to understand the reason why people do things.

These tools let us build up a profile of the person, like a jigsaw, and how they can be happy and fulfilled and similarly how they can be unhappy and unfulfilled and so we steer them towards a business, a life, a way of living, that fulfils their preferences.


For more information email [email protected] or visit www.breathebusiness.co.uk.

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