Limiting beliefs

Author

Kevin Ng
May 01, 2024

Kevin’s Journey Weekly Breakdown

Limiting beliefs

Hello friends!

I am writing to you on the plane on my way to Vegas to take part in a workshop by Alex and Leila Hormozi, business YouTubers that I’ve been following for over a year now.

I’ve decided to pursue an approach that is not standard in the dental industry, and that is to seek advice outside of our profession. It seems we as dentists view the dental business as a unique circumstance, and that the normal rules of business do not apply in dentistry.

As such, I believe we are limiting ourselves in the amount of growth we can have, and also we might be installing some limiting beliefs on ourselves, without even knowing.

Some of the limiting beliefs that I hear are:

  • “That will never work in dentistry, because insurance companies sets our fees”

  • “Selling is evil, we are health care providers, not used car salesmen, my job is to educate and not to close a sale, if I educate them well enough, the patient will choose to go forward with treatment”.

My dental colleagues, have you heard of these before? I have heard of these before, and I definitely believed in them in the past. It took a lot of effort, research, and courage to break out of that mindset. To my dental colleagues, my hope with this newsletter is to challenge these two limiting beliefs of our profession.

Limiting Belief #1: "That will never work in dentistry because insurance companies set our fees"

I think we all know innately that this is not true, because we as a profession have allowed the insurance near total control over our industry, even though we voluntarily ceded control over to them. If we wanted to grow our business, increase our profitability, there is usually two sides to approach. We can approach growing revenue, or we can approach minimizing overhead. Most businesses favor growing the revenue side, rather than reducing the overhead side.

Approach 1: Growing Revenue

In dentistry, by accepting insurances, the main way to grow the revenue side would be to increase efficiency, meaning seeing more patients in less time. We try to remove as much value as possible from the patient experience, all the “fluff” that does not directly contribute to patient care, as that gets in the way of efficiency.

When we follow this train of thought to the logical extreme, we reach the conclusion that we are forced to spend as little time as possible with the patient. That we need to maximize our time spent doing treatment and minimize our time doing anything other than treatment, such as educating patients, managing their anxiety, and building relationships.

A dental office where I’m trying to do as much treatment as possible as quick as possible, and where I consider any patient interaction as detrimental to the business, is not a business I want to be involved in.

Approach 2: Minimizing Overhead

While we definitely need to keep a good eye on our overhead, there is a natural limit to how much we can cut on our overhead, before we run into serious quality control problems.

Some categories of overhead such as payroll and supplies, we see a huge drop in the direct quality of our care when we cut them past a certain number. If we cut our team members and are always running around with a skeleton crew, team morale will be affected as everyone will be stressed and overworked. Also, the best team members usually are paid near the top range.

If we cut supplies cost, the materials that go into our dentistry will be adversely affected, potentially affecting patient outcomes if we use inferior materials in their restoration. This business of using bargain bin parts to do my dentistry is not the kind of care I want to be giving my patients, and not the kind of career that I envisioned for myself.

 

Overcoming the Limiting Belief

So how do we get over this limiting belief of allowing the insurance companies to set our fees?

My answer to that is to go out of network. There is a certain amount of fear and hesitation to going out of network because we are rowing against the current now. The insurance companies will no longer send us patients. In fact, they will actively discourage their customers from seeing us as patients.

A lot of patients are still insurance-minded and do not understand the difference between an Out of Network (OON) provider and an In-Network (INN) provider. Most dentists, me included, are afraid of cutting down our potential pool of patients by going OON, as most patients who are insurance-driven will be removed from our potential pool of patients.

As such, it will be very important to identify our avatar, our ideal patient, and to cater our experience and marketing towards this avatar. It is time to get focused. It is time to start saying no to things that will hurt us. I believe in focusing our efforts into calibrating an experience for our ideal patient, we will in turn manifest them, and in turn, create the ideal practice that we enjoy serving.

Limiting Belief #2: "Selling is evil, we are health care providers, not used car salesmen"

The second limiting belief is centered around not trying to sell healthcare. This is based on the belief that as healthcare providers, somehow trying to sell is beneath us, and that if we educate the patient enough, then they will somehow automatically want to proceed with treatment.

In my opinion, this is too simplistic of a view for the situation. We fail to take into account human psychology, and we also unintentionally reduce the value of the product in which we are selling - health. If you ask many people what is the most important thing in their life, the number one thing is health, followed by family, love, purpose, and time.

Sometimes, we as healthcare providers lose sight of what we are actually selling - we are selling the patient’s health back to them. We should be as successful as possible; our patients are counting on us. Even if we manage to educate our patients about the importance of the dental treatment, we often fail to consider the massive inertia of doing nothing. Doing nothing is a choice, although it may seem like the default choice for most.


Overcoming the Limiting Belief

One reframe that has gotten me thinking differently about our responsibilities as healthcare providers is the following.

Imagine you had an uncle with cancer, and the pharmaceutical company that you work for just discovered the cure to cancer. You know that your uncle wants to live - wouldn’t you try your best to convince him to try your treatment? How often do you see people unable to act, even though you know it’s in their best interest to? Who do you know says “I’ll go to the gym next month,” or “I’ll start saving 10% next year,” or “I know this job is toxic, but I just can’t leave yet.” People act against their own best self-interests all the time, especially if the activation energy of acting is high, and the perceived reward is distant.

As healthcare providers, we’ve all seen the patients who have let their health go, how difficult and painful their lives are, and how much they are filled with regret for not acting sooner. We have the ability and responsibility to guide our patients to the outcomes that they themselves want.

As we land the plane on this newsletter, what sort of limiting beliefs do you hold about our profession? Respond to this email with the ones that you’ve heard or believe in. Looking forward to chatting with you all next time!

Kevin