Every endodontist practice owner has been through a journey that involves a lot of learning, trial-and-error, and decisions. After 5 or 10 years, many learned things get “baked in” to daily operations, including things that you know you do well.

When you want to grow, obviously you focus on aspects of the practice that can be improved. Tangentially, you also ramp up focus on the things you do well. These are the “sacred cows” of your current success, and it’s natural to want to protect them.

Protecting your sacred cows creates two limiting mindsets about what you need to create growth. The first mindset is cherry-picking, which is when you filter or dismiss possible options for growth because of a perceived risk that they could potentially disturb or disrupt your sacred cows. It’s a form of confirmation or experience bias that only lets you consider things that reinforce what you already believe.

The second mindset is paving the cow path, which is when you spend a lot of energy to reinforce and strengthen what you are already doing, but it’s not going to appreciably change the path you are already on. A good example is putting stronger collection procedures in place for overdue accounts without addressing why accounts end up overdue in the first place.

Unlearning and Relearning Is Essential

In school, many children learn a rule of thumb to never begin a sentence with the word “because.” It’s a useful rule to help young children avoid common mistakes as they begin to write. However, it’s an untrue rule. Eventually they need to unlearn and relearn the rule as “Do not write fragment sentences”, which recognizes there are ways to begin a sentence with “because” as writing skills mature.

There are many things in your practice that have been learned, internalized, and systematized to the point where they are fundamental to your current success. Even so, unlearning and relearning the core systems of your practice is one of the most powerful steps you can take to drive new success. And it is not just you; it’s your team too.

Everybody wants to move up to next-level success, but you can’t do that if you’re holding on to systems and beliefs that only work for lower-level success. The first step is letting go of your preconceptions and recognizing that what was right to get you to where you are isn’t going to get you to where you want to be. You have to let go of what you want to be true and find out what is actually true.

Opening Your Mind for Growth

Biases and preconceptions are very powerful. They are often at the heart of many of our habits, limitations and mindsets. To get past them takes effort, energy and inspiration, which means looking outward from your practice.

Endo Mastery’s upcoming June 2022 seminar “Mastering the Effortless Endodontic Practice” is a great place to start for you and your team. It’s one of our favorite experiences to work with doctors in this environment as they release themselves from limiting beliefs and discover a new vision for their practice. Please join us!

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