Lisa Knowles Presents Dentistry’s Broadway Show – Episode 52

Lisa Knowles opened her dental practice in 2005… two years before the recession… in Michigan. With economic conditions stacked against her, she built a thriving practice on a model of “making things right for patients no matter what.” Driven by her passion for communication and coaching, Dr. Knowles started Intentional Dental to help other dentists grow referral pipelines using a more mindful approach to patient interaction. In this Dentist Money™ Show interview, she cites five keys to successful dentistry, offers guidance for living in the moment, and compares a dental office to a Broadway show.

 

Show notes:
Website: http://beyond32teeth.com/
Email: intentionaldental@gmail.com

Podcast Transcript:

Speaker: The views on this program are the opinions of dental industry experts and not necessarily those of Dentist Advisors. Opinions shared in the following interview do not constitute personal financial advice. This program is furnished by Dentist Advisors, a registered investment advisor.
This is Dentist Money. Now, here’s your host Reese Harper.

Reese Harper: Welcome to the Dentist Money Show. I’m your host Reese Harper, and I’ve got a special guest today from East Lansing, Michigan. Dr. Lisa Knowles. How are you doing?

Lisa Knowles: Great.

Reese Harper: Are you ready for me to drill you with all these questions that I’ve planned? Because you have an amazing story and I’ve got like 30 questions that I didn’t give you. I’m just kidding.

Lisa Knowles: I’m ready, Reese. I’m ready. And nice pun there. Drilling at me. Right? Probably no intentional pun. Bring it, bring it.

Reese Harper: I’m excited because my pre-interview prep for you that I did on this show was really fun for me because I loved your content. We haven’t met before but you have a really, really cool story and you’ve got, I don’t know, a really diverse perspective on life and balance and work and profitability and health and communication and management. And I just feel like you’ll be a great guest for a lot of the listeners, especially people who are trying to set a good foundation for their careers. So I think this is going to be a great interview. I’ll let you respond to that big, long statement there and see if you agree with any of that.

Lisa Knowles: I hope I can live up to your big expectations. That makes me sound really great. I appreciate that.
I kind of walked into dentistry not really knowing, no one in my family was a dentist and physicians or anything. And I ended up, I went to Alma College, which was right in my hometown, which was way not cool to do when you were in high school. But then once I realized Alma had a really good pre-dental program, and I had the opportunity to play softball there which I loved too. I ended up playing softball there and getting a really good pre-dental degree, and then getting into the University of Michigan for dental school.
In case I didn’t get into dental school I thought, oh I don’t really want to be a physics major, I don’t really want to be a biology major. I’m going to major in communication because my backup plan was maybe to be a journalist or-

Reese Harper: That’s why you’re such a good writer.

Lisa Knowles: I went into mass comm.

Reese Harper: I get it.

Lisa Knowles: Yeah, yeah.

Reese Harper: I was like, where did she learn how to write so well? Because that’s a pretty hard skill to pick up. You have to write at least a hundred papers before you can start writing well, right?

Lisa Knowles: Exactly. And I still don’t say I’m amazing by any means when I read all the New York Times and Washington Post people, but I have a leg up for sure. And at least I can communicate my thoughts and ideas. That was such a surprise to me, how this has blended so well in my career now as doing consulting and speaking and writing and that type of stuff.

Reese Harper: That’s awesome.

Lisa Knowles: I owned a practice. I was an associate a number of years, then I owned my own practice in a small, more rural town southwest of Lansing, Charlotte. Not Charlotte, Charlotte. There’s a different emphasis in that town that I learned about.
I practiced there about eight years and then I was about 38, 35, I don’t know, something like that, and I started thinking about, well I wonder if I could merge some of my past loves of writing and communication and public speaking. And I’ve really done all these stupid things in dentistry, I should really share this with people.

Reese Harper: Hopefully you didn’t do it perfectly, okay? Hopefully you weren’t perfect before you were 35 because that’s when you’re supposed to be screwing up a few times.

Lisa Knowles: Well, it’s the practice of dentistry. And I hope that doesn’t scare any of my previous patients or anything. But the main thing you need to know is when you do it wrong, and if you do it wrong, and to make it right. So that’s what I really prided myself. I’m not perfect, some things will go wrong, whether it’s my fault, supply, a lab, a team member, whatever it is. But we’re going to make it right for you. And my word is on that. Small town person, your word is everything.
That’s what I did, and that was my model, and that was my mission. And I thought, there’s a lot of people struggling right now, getting their practices to run well. I was in Michigan in 2007 when the recession hit. A lot of companies are going out, the whole scare of bankruptcy, and all this crazy stuff was happening to the Michigan economy. And the cool thing was my practice just kept growing and growing because we had already put systems and things in place and really buffered some of those things. I’m not saying it was easy, but I caught things early because of the systems I had put in place. My communication, the relationships you build with patients, all that stuff.
So again I was like, wow if I can do this then I really should be sharing this with my writing. I love to teach, that’s the other thing. I’m kind of innately gifted. I don’t want to say that too superiorly, but I really love to teach. I teach at the University of Detroit, Mercy right now in one of their communication courses in the summer. I love to pass that knowledge on. I had so many great teachers and mentors myself.
Anyways, here we are. I decided you know what, I want to go into speaking and writing, how can I do this? Maybe a little consulting. I had totally jumped off the cliff and said let’s do it. I actually had a couple associates I thought that might help give me some free time, but managing associates is not always easy either and it’s time consuming because a lot of times they’re a little bit younger, a little less seasoned and so you’re passing on that knowledge. And I found that wow, if I really want to do this, if I really want to get this going, I probably need to sell my practice. And that’s what I did.

Reese Harper: You bought the practice in ’05 and you sold it five years later? Six years later? When did you sell it?

Lisa Knowles: It was ’04 and then eight years later, whatever that is.

Reese Harper: Okay. So 2012ish.

Lisa Knowles: Yeah. And I went to Duke University’s integrative medicine program and got my certificate in mindfulness based stress reduction for healthcare professionals. Awesome.

Reese Harper: That’s a thing?

Lisa Knowles: Yeah. And I started really reading a lot of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s work on mindfulness and-

Reese Harper: How long is that program? Is it like a weekend crash course or is it six months?

Lisa Knowles: Yep, weekend crash course. And then followup. And I’ve been back. And you know you’ve really got to do it, keep doing it, to get the most out of it. A mindfulness practice is a daily practice, and it just means being present in the moment on purpose, intentionally and without judgment.

Reese Harper: So how do you think this can affect, how do you think this mindset will affect dentists? How did it affect you and your life? What did it heal or help with in your life?

Lisa Knowles: It helped me not, from a physical standpoint, it helped me not think so far ahead. Because your mind just goes reeling when you start thinking-

Reese Harper: You didn’t live too far in the future, you started living closer to the present.

Lisa Knowles: Correct.

Reese Harper: In the moment.

Lisa Knowles: And I enjoyed it. And I enjoyed it more, and I enjoyed my relationship with my kids more, my spouse more, my patients more. I think from a practical, clinical standpoint I went back to more of my observation skills that I’m good at, but I enhanced even more. When you live in the moment, and you’re on purpose and you stop thinking about oh gosh I’ve got to do payroll tonight, oh my gosh I’ve got the next hygiene check in 15 minutes, and you’re just with the patient that you have right now, you see more, you observe more, you’re in tune with them more, and you can fulfill their needs more. You’re listening better. A lot of us are half listening. I think a wrote a content article about that, are you half listening?
I would catch myself, I was half listening. And I was missing some things that I should’ve caught, or I should’ve written down because I wasn’t being in that mindful mode when I was practicing. And so I just really think it’s always a reminder to me, who loves to have my hands in 80 things and do a hundred things, is whoa, you need to balance to make yourself better, a better practitioner, a better family person. It’s a way I think I can help.

Reese Harper: That’s really insightful. I think it’s really common for dentists to live out in the future, farther away from today, whether it’s tonight, tomorrow, next year, five years, when I retire. At this point in my life I’ll have this much money, and that’s when I’ll be happy. All of these things kind of create anxiety and impatience. And I think gratitude kind of plays into that too.

Lisa Knowles: Yeah. And I don’t want to say that we don’t ever think of that, and I know your business too, for me it’s like get it done. Get your business plan done, get your financial situation in place, and then let it go. If you think about it, yes you need to think for the future, you need to plan out your finances, you need your retirement plan figured out. That’s on the weekend or that’s at night. You meet with your financial people and you get that figured out, and you’ve got it in place. Check, you’re done. And so you don’t have to always keep thinking about it, it’s not nagging at you. Then you’re not worrying every deposit that you, oh my gosh, did I make enough, did I hit the goal? That’s too stressful. Just being able to have some of those things taken care of, and assure your mind that it’s done, and then you can live in the moment more too. It’s planning. It’s not just, oh I’m going to live mindfully on purpose.

Reese Harper: But that’s the on purpose part of that statement though. In our business at least, we have a whole analyst department that we call them, and their job is to do financially planning every month for every client on specific items. They’re doing … January they’re measuring how much people saved for the year and telling them, and adjusting their savings so that next year’s automatic drafts are slightly more effective based on how much they earned. And then February they do insurance, and March they do taxes, and April they do profitability analysis.
But the point is that someone at some point has to say, on purpose I want to deal with this, I’m going to do the planning. But I feel like financial stuff sometimes is something, like other areas in life, something that if you assume all the responsibility for all the little tasks that have to be done, it makes it a little bit hard for you to be in the moment, mindful. Because you just have too many little, nagging things that you have to get to at some point.

Lisa Knowles: Absolutely.

Reese Harper: Proper delegation-

Lisa Knowles: I’m a huge proponent, I’m just going to say that, I’m a huge proponent in delegating that task. I do what I’m good at and that’s doing dentistry and being with patients. And then I really rely on a good team to take care of those things for me so that I can, like you said, be more in the moment with the people I want to be with and then you know you’ve got it covered. Somebody is looking at those numbers and doing those things. And if I love that and I want to have a financial update every month from someone like you, an accountant or whatever, great. But if I don’t I can be like, catch you in six months and let me know if I need to do anything else.
But I do think you need people to keep you in check because we just kind of, you know we can get in a little rut of oh I’m just doing dentistry and I’m pretty comfortable. You need somebody to say, well what happened this quarter? What do you mean? I like numbers, I’m a numbers … I kind of like data, not to an excessive point, but I like data to tell me trends. Like I said back in 2007 that’s what saved me, was being able to watch some of those numbers and making some adjustments quickly so that we didn’t stumble too hard and take big losses like a lot of practices-

Reese Harper: You made adjustments. You made course corrections.

Lisa Knowles: Yeah. Right.

Reese Harper: So talk to me a little about that. You talk about running your practice like a Broadway show. That your staff is always on stage. Can you describe what that looks like a little bit, and how have you seen that approach translate to more profitability, more success for owners?

Lisa Knowles: Exactly. Honestly I have to give Paul Homoly some credit for that because I listened to one of his CD courses, probably 10, 15 years ago and he talked about backstage details. And I was like, oh that’s kind of a good analogy. Think about it as you’ve got some backstage stuff, you’ve got some onstage stuff. And that just always kept, stuck with me. So I just kind of took it, expanded it, and use it, put my own personal experiences in it to kind of help others understand what I meant by creating this show or this culture. The show is the culture in your office.

Reese Harper: Only the writer in you would actually give credit to another writer.

Lisa Knowles: I know. It’s pretty rampant that nobody gives credit, right? Everybody just takes everybody else’s ideas. I found that out the hard way, Reese. I do, I think it’s important. I want to give him some credit.

Reese Harper: Well anyway, I didn’t mean to-

Lisa Knowles: So anyways so, let me just give you … Give credit where it’s due. It was memorable and so I’m not saying … I went out and expanded it and added some personal things to it.
I’ll give you kind of an example of this. This is a recent example about how I thought of this. I’m going to use myself. I guess it was maybe a month ago or something. I wasn’t having the best days. Things were kind of going wrong. The schedule was off, we were late, wrong supplies came in, I was annoyed, I had a couple of equipment failure things. And I just wasn’t as productive as I would’ve liked. It was kind of like this perfect storm and I was starting to get all grumpy and out of character. Truly out of character. I had my emotions on my shirtsleeve, and I just wasn’t my usual smiling self, and I wasn’t as talkative. When I was talking I was more complaining.
So this turn, this kind of affected the atmosphere in the office. It got more negative. And I was less tolerant of people’s errors, I lost sight of my story, my play, my show. And thankfully I have to say one of my quote, I’ll just call her stage managers, I’ll call her, sat me down and said “What’s going on?” And I said I realized I was out of character. I wasn’t a happy actor. So I needed to change that for the sake of not just me, but my team. And as doctors we have to always remember our actions or our inactions or our words or lack of words or our expressions, our responses, whatever it is, when we’re in the office we’re on stage all the time when we’re at work. That sets the tone. Our actors in the office feed off of this positive or negative energy and it can really make a bad show.
After I talked to the stage manager I realized I was pretty annoyed. It was a lot of the backstage stuff that was ruining quote “my show”. When we didn’t have our backstage stuff in order, the schedule was not good, it was crammed, it wasn’t varied enough, and things were stressing people out, not only just me but in hygiene. Little things like the equipment working properly were super important to the overall show. One of the things, I’ll just give you a real specific example, as I joke with my assistants is if the [inaudible 00:16:08] holders aren’t oiled regularly, they don’t tighten down. And I get so … This is a total dentist neurosis thing, I get totally upset because you break off a piece of the filling and then you’ve got to start all over, or you inadvertently pinch a patient. And all because this stupid little tiny [inaudible 00:16:27] holder did not get lubricated regularly.
It seems so trivial and insignificant but these little details make up part of the show. It’s like a prop being in the wrong place. It can affect the whole show. When I’m creating these show stopping experiences for patients, it entails the whole picture. Backstage details are especially important. And rehearsals, getting things right to create the amazing daily dental show like the Broadway show. So it really is putting it all together backstage so you can have that front stage experience. And so that patients when they come in, it just seems seamless, it’s effortless, they’re engaged, they’re entertained, things run well, and they want to tell all their friends to come see your show too.
That’s the analogy that I really work towards and I talk about. It just helps people think about it in a different way.

Reese Harper: That’s super insightful. I think that’s a great way to think about managing your practice, because I think the tone that you set through that show really affects your referral base, it affects how many people want to come back to the show, it affects the emotions they feel.
I just went to a really, really good, in Salt Lake City we just had this new, big Broadway show house that just opened. It’s like 3,500 person, four tiered, beautiful new theater. It just opened. They brought in this new Carole King … I’d never seen the Carole King musical “Beautiful”, and I just was so happy for like four days after I watched that musical. I was so-

Lisa Knowles: Well I’m going to go see it then if it comes around here.

Reese Harper: It was so good! But I love Carole King, so for me I love the music. It was amazing. The actors, the energy, the ambiance, the lighting, the props, the set, the stage, the motion, the music, the orchestrations, the conductor was great. I was walking the orchestra pit. I had great seats so that was great. Everything about these experiences, they’re very relatable. Every one of our businesses is on show, they’re on display. From your entryway to the views from your operatory, to the music that’s played or not played, to the sounds people hear, to the way that they’re spoken to, the way that they’re serviced before and after the appointment. It’s a huge issue for any industry.

Lisa Knowles: I never expected that when I got out of dental school. I didn’t get that. I was pretty naïve. There was this huge reality point when I gave my hundredth time doing post-op instructions. And I realized, oh my gosh, I’m going to say these post-op instructions, or someone in my office is going to say this, a zillion times in my life. I’m going to have to say it with enthusiasm and interest and acknowledge the patient’s questions and all this. It sounds so stupid like, yeah, duh, wouldn’t you think that? But it never hit me until doing it over and over and over and over again. It might be the first time this little three year old’s first appointment and the parents are so excited, and you’ve seen it for the 500th time. It really does become a little bit of acting. And I’m not saying to not be genuine, but really good acting is being genuine when feeling those emotions.

Reese Harper: Putting on your best face. It’s putting your best foot forward and having the energy that you need to do your job the right way.

Lisa Knowles: Right. And that is part of our job, to make sure that new parents or that new patient understands the importance and feels the good energy in your office and they feel good and they have a good experience there.

Reese Harper: That’s why health and wellness is so important, and we didn’t even have time to go into that today.

Lisa Knowles: But taking care of yourself, I’ll just say that, taking care of yourself is so important. Because if you don’t … It’s like if mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. I really believe that. You’ve got to take care of yourself because it just trickles down. And so that’s why the whole mindfulness and eating healthy and exercising, mental health, we don’t like to talk about that as much but it’s so, so important to-

Reese Harper: I don’t think people realize too how much their diet and their exercise habits affects their mental health and the energy they can bring to their work and the quality of clinical dentistry they can perform and the overall Broadway experience that people are going to have at their office. It’s crucial.

Lisa Knowles: It is.

Reese Harper: I know from bad experiences. I know because I eat like crap and I’ve had to work really hard at not eating bad.

Lisa Knowles: Yeah.

Reese Harper: I know you talked to a lot of dentists about how to strengthen relationships with patients through communication. We’ve talked a little bit about that today, but I want you to talk about this AWE technique that I’ve read about. You teach it in your sessions. So tell me what’s the AWE technique?

Lisa Knowles: Obviously AWE, being in awe, you want your patients to be in awe and have a good experience when they come to your office or they interact with you or one of your teammates. Obviously I can’t give you all of the information about what AWE stands for, but let me give you the A in the acronym AWE. And that stands for awareness. To me that’s the most important part of it. The W and the E can be for later.
So that awareness, whether it’s verbal or physical cues, it just makes such a difference. And sometimes it’s just … I need to observe people, I need to observe what’s going on and being in the office and see what’s happening. And a lot of times in consulting that’s really hard to do. That’s time consuming, it’s expensive bringing someone in. But honestly I do feel like if that’s, if you want to make the fastest progress in a short amount of time, you’ve got to have someone in watching you and truly being critical. It’s hard but that’s one of my strengths and weaknesses, being critical.

Reese Harper: If I don’t know how to communicate and I’m worried about whether I should communicate, how do I start making improvements in that area? It seems absolutely paramount but I don’t really know how to analyze myself. You said bring in a consultant, that can help. Can I read a book? Can I watch some examples of stuff online to see what you’re talking about?

Lisa Knowles: Absolutely.

Reese Harper: What resources are out there?

Lisa Knowles: There’s tons of books you can read. Honestly, I don’t have a book right off the top of my head.

Reese Harper: Do you have an article you’ve written that talks about this a little bit you can think of that’s on your site, on your blog?

Lisa Knowles: If you check out my blog, beyond32teeth.com, I’ve got a whole bunch of articles on communication. So that would be a great resource too.

Reese Harper: I saw some there on Beyond 32 Teeth, I thought that would be-

Lisa Knowles: And I try to … Maybe my next one will even be specifically geared toward it. I’ll do that dedicated to you, Reese.

Reese Harper: Get my name in it!

Lisa Knowles: Yeah, exactly. I will. I’m always thinking about it. I also write for a couple different trade journals and online journals, drbicuspid.com, Dental Economics, some dental products reports, things like that. You’ll see some of my things sprinkled out through the dental community. And usually I’m talking about communication, wellness, balance, leadership, some business systems things. I definitely would recommend it. It’s out there in the literature and it’s really becoming more popular now. Everybody is jumping on the bandwagon. I’m like hey, hey, hey, I had this great idea, communication background and everything. But you know what, I’m actually very thankful because my whole goal was influencing that we need to know more about that. And so I couldn’t ask for a great gift that it’s just blossoming out there. Even though no one credits me sometimes, Reese, like I did with Paul-

Reese Harper: You’re not bitter.

Lisa Knowles: I’m not bitter. No.

Reese Harper: I’m just kidding.

Lisa Knowles: It’s all about the love.

Reese Harper: Eventually it is good to see that maybe the things you are passionate about do start inspiring other people to do the same thing.

Lisa Knowles: Right. Okay so number two, financial fiscal responsibility. That’s my number two. You’ve got to be financially and fiscally responsible. If you do not track numbers, identify trends, you are going to be hurting for certain, that little saying. Because you have to know your numbers. That’s the way you’re going to make those changes. That’s the way you can tell if what you do is working. If you change something and you have no idea what you started with, well then how do you even know it worked or didn’t work? So tracking things, numbers. Asking why things are happening and correct them before months and months go by. That was number two.
Number three, hire well. Get people on board that are motivated, trustworthy and have a good business sense, and can converse with patients. That hiring thing, it’s a hard mountain to climb and to get proficient at it, but once you get better at hiring and firing if you have to, then life is much easier and better.
Number four, take care of ourselves. And I talked about this already. We have to take care of ourselves and our teams. This is from our personal health standpoints, if we’re not feeling well, we’re injured, we’re sick, the whole ship goes down from a dentist’s standpoint. We cannot afford for that to happen. It’s imperative that we be physically and mentally fit and take action to ensure that both happen intentionally. Intention again.
And number five-

Reese Harper: Oh there’s a fifth one?

Lisa Knowles: Go ahead.

Reese Harper: Okay, awesome. I didn’t know. I want to hear this last one. I was going to repeat them so I don’t forget. Number five.

Lisa Knowles: Number five, and I mentioned this once already too I think, is that you have people that can keep you in check and keep others in check. We don’t know, we think we’re doing a good job, but we all have biases and we all have our weaknesses. Being able to be open to feedback and criticism … I know a lot of my former team members and staff that I’ve hired they probably just laugh when they hear that I am the one speaking about communication and leadership because they’re like, “She was horrible!” You know? And I was. And I’m still not perfect, and I still do stupid things. Like I said, I was off track a few months ago. It’s just being open to that we’re not perfect and that we need some constructive criticism too as doctors. A lot of times we put ourselves in our positions and our private practices where we’re at the top of the pyramid, so to speak, as the boss, and then no one is telling us. No one is telling us our mistakes or how to grow or be better.
So again consultants-

Reese Harper: Who are these people though? Who are the people? Is it a consultant, is it a coach, is it a spouse? Can it be multiple?

Lisa Knowles: Yeah. I mean that’s why I started doing some of it too because I’m a pretty straight shooter. I’m like, if you want to know, I’ll tell you. But don’t hire me if you don’t want to know because I will tell you what you can work on. And I’m not mean about it by any means. A developmental and coaching model to it. But I’m lucky because I’ve been a dentist, and a lot of consultants aren’t necessarily dentists. They have their expertise in certain areas, but I feel, again, fortunate that I’ve had the background that I had, I have the dentist business mind and background. So I see it. I just see what’s happening quicker and can offer that feedback and say, okay here’s what I think we need to work on and do you want to? A lot of times it’s because people don’t want to. They don’t want to see it, they don’t want to work on their flaws or critique of it. They’re kind of happy where they are until they start tanking financially or physically or mentally, and then they realize … We don’t like to change until we have a lot of pain, and that usually is the impetus to change. So that’s where I tend to see more business and things where there’s more pain.
Anyway, I like a preventative model, as with any healthcare professional, is that let’s work on these things before you have pain. And let’s keep working on you, and the team and things so you don’t have to get to financial problems or health problems or mental, you’re drinking your problems away. Let’s not get that far.

Reese Harper: That’s great. Well this has been super, that’s a super insightful list. Is that the fifth one that you-

Lisa Knowles: Yeah.

Reese Harper: Do you have a sixth?

Lisa Knowles: Yeah, someone you can … And it might be a spouse too. For me my spouse doesn’t. Bless those spouses that tell you, why are you doing that? That’s helpful.

Reese Harper: I love that advice. The way I like to talk about this is that I don’t like to see people have one accountability reference. I like to see people have accountability. I had a big podcast grouping on this, the nine people dentists need to know. And I kind of want all of these nine people to be independent accountability coaches over their subject matter. It’s kind of like, if you have someone you’ve outsourced something to, like say you have a bookkeeper who you’ve had do your books. But that bookkeeper doesn’t hold you accountable at all to making sure you don’t dump all these personal expenses on the business credit card all the time and that you’re not keeping your books clean. If they’re just kind of like an order taker, they just do whatever you tell them to do, that’s not really the type of service provider that you want.
If you have a coach who’s just like the yes man, yes ma’am all the time, that’s not the kind of coach you want. If you have a financial advisor that’s always just patting you on the back saying, “Doc, you’re doing so great. You’re making so much money. You’re saving so great.” But there’s no quantifying of what good is, or whether good is what you think or whether you’re actually not doing what you should for your income and for your level of success. Because financial success if all relative.
I think that it’s important to have more than one person and it’s important to have people that are really holding you accountable over areas that they’re experts in. And I think sometimes people just have one person. They really will have one person. It’ll be the spouse or the accountant. Or it’ll be the coach. And that’ll be kind of their reference point. That’s better than nothing. That’s definitely better than nothing. Everyone’s got their own opinion and perspective, and the more accountability sources you can bring into your life that you interact with, the better. And it doesn’t have to be every month or every day. It could just be once a year even or once every six months, but I love hearing you say that because I feel like that’s what dentists probably don’t do most often that’s the most pragmatic thing they can do. Is get those voices of accountability into their life soon because without that, it’s all up to them to read and to self-diagnose and do all this stuff on their own and I think it’s hard to self assess. It’s hard to see through your own blind spots.

Lisa Knowles: Yeah. We can’t. We can’t see them. As much as I just want to, and I just want to be good and perfect and do everything correctly and think I know things, I just can’t. I just can’t.

Reese Harper: Well these are great. We’re excited that we were able to have you on the show. I just feel like you’ve been able to give people a lot of great perspectives, so thank you so much. I don’t know if there’s anything else that you’d like to part with, but we’ll put all your information in the show notes. I’ll let you have the final word if you have anything that you’d like to wrap up with.

Lisa Knowles: I just really appreciate the opportunity, Reese, to chat with you. I feel energized now. I feel like I need to go meditate and calm down a little bit because I get excited when I talk about these topics. And it’s been really fun to chat with you about it.

Reese Harper: Thank you.

Lisa Knowles: Thank you.

Reese Harper: All right. Well thank you so much for all the energy you bring. You’re an excellent resource. And beyond32teeth.com has a lot of your blog posts I love. You have videos all over the internet and you’re a prolific writer. We’ll be excited to have you back again. Thanks so much, Lisa.

Lisa Knowles: Okay. Thank you, Reese. Bye bye.

Practice Management, Work Life Balance