The CE Century Club: The first of three steps in a stress-resistant dental practice

A plain and simple call to action: 100 hours of CE per year, every year, no exceptions. It is time to get back in the game.

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Take a moment and step back from this call to action. Read the description below. Does it resonate with you?

You don’t feel old — not today at least. Just yesterday you could run full speed. Yet, dental school is quickly becoming a distant memory — your stories from that era are becoming fewer and either more glorious or more horrific. At this point you have managed to make it through one or two unrecoverable bouts of team turnover. You have achieved results on some tough patient cases that you never thought you could resolve. You have survived updating or relocating your facility. And you are beginning to understand that QuickBooks may matter as much as Dentrix. You have survived in a down economy (maybe a few times), you know when to refer, and you know now that you didn’t know much then.

But you still find yourself working in your business and less on your business. Some days it takes all you can muster to drive home and literally hurl yourself onto the couch before dinner in 30 minutes. You entered dentistry to help other people, while simultaneously making ground toward that lofty, yet seemingly and increasingly unattainable, goal of freedom. Freedom — not just financial freedom, but the freedom to practice the way you want on your terms. You yearn to regain the optimism and joy you had years ago when you entered the profession. Freedom … to practice into your 70s not because you have to but because you want to. Freedom … to serve your patients and your profession, instead of being a servant of your payroll or the catch-up provision on your 401(k). Lately, is it more about making money than making a difference? Sound familiar?

So what can we do to stop this madness? How do we relieve this stress and redirect ourselves to a path that resembles the one we choose when we selected dentistry?

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Consider three steps to resolving this challenge. We will dive deeper into each of these in this three-article series. The three steps are:

1. Reigniting yourself
2. Reprioritizing yourself
3. Reminding yourself

Reignite yourself ...

Let’s return to our original charge: 100 hours of CE per year, every year, no exceptions.

The best clinicians and happiest practitioners are the ones who never stop reinventing themselves. The first years in practice are often spent learning the how and when in dental procedures. We learn how to produce quality dentistry in a time-appropriate manner. We learn when to move forward with procedures in-house and when to refer the difficult cases out to the specialist. Our next five to 10 years are usually spent deciding the where. We start to lay roots in a practice; equity is often equally or more important than income. Location and community become a priority. By the time we are in practice for 10 years, we need to start dialing into the what. This is when the commitment to 100 hours of CE comes into play. When considering your options for CE this year, ask yourself the following four questions:

1. What procedures are you best at compared to other dentists in your community?
2. What procedures make you light up when you see them on your schedule?
3. Are you preblocking these procedures and charging appropriately for them?
4. What kind of training do you need in the next three months to be the best?

It is estimated that more 3 million CE credits are provided every year in the United States. Currently there are more than 500 AGD PACE providers and ADA CERP providers. In addition to in-person CE programs, webinars are growing rapidly and many are offered at no charge.

And for those of you DISC “C” types — we didn’t forget the why. The why is always the most important question to ask oneself. The dentists who are the happiest are the ones who do not wait until the end of their careers to focus on why they are in dentistry. We didn’t enter the profession to get rich. Rich is money. We entered to become wealthy. Wealth is the freedom to choose the type of dentistry we want to provide, the ability to serve others, and the ability to give back on our terms without compromise.