By John C. Cranham, DDS  

Sometimes you can see clearly where you want to go with your dental practice. I can vividly remember driving my car to St. Petersburg for my first class taught by Pete Dawson. It was 1989. When the class was over, I drove my little car all the way back to my 800-square-foot office in Portsmouth, Virginia, and arrived at four o’clock in the morning. I had just bought the office from a doctor who did mostly silver fillings—maybe only four crowns in the entire year. I remember I could visualize what I wanted to do with “my” practice but deciding the first steps was overwhelming.  

A dental office can be the loneliest place in the world. I had to figure out the attainable steppingstones. We didn’t have the internet back then. Finding mentors and connecting with supportive, sharing colleagues was more difficult. In dentistry today, it’s easier to find those steppingstones. One of the most rewarding things I do today is helping dentists develop. 

I caution dentists to not assume they will achieve their big goals fast. There is a temptation to give up when progress is slow. You’ve got to stay on the path to get to where you want to go. Think about your goals and steppingstones every day but be kind to yourself if it takes more time than you visualized.  

Remember that everyone is different. All your buddies are going to be in different cities, different socioeconomic areas, and different practices. They’re going to have different opportunities. Social media can be your enemy when it comes to self-confidence and determination. There will be certain people that develop faster.  

I can remember being very frustrated the first year or two in my little town of Portsmouth. There were dentists going through the same classes I was and were already doing the kinds of cases that I wanted to do but wasn’t doing yet. During the first two years in practice, I sometimes wondered if I would ever do the kind of dentistry I wanted. But I kept in conversation with my patients, eventually they began accepting treatments, and the floodgates finally opened.  

One of the greatest things about this profession is we can always strive to be great. I don’t think I’m there yet. It’s the striving part—the working at it and seeing things improve that makes it so fun and rewarding. I love it.  

People ask me, why are you setting BHAGs at this stage in your life? You’ve already accomplished so much. Why are you totally reinventing your practice systems? Why are you going fully digital after practicing on analog articulators for 35 years? 

What I’ve been able to do in dentistry is constantly reinvent myself, and I feel like I am growing in what I can do. So, I say it’s because reinvention is awesome. It’s fun. And my staff knows that if I get something working well, I’m going to find a way to make it even better tomorrow. 

By Paul A. Henny, DDS 

How are you doing in your quest for a “positive” life? 

Martin Seligman PhD spent most of his career at the University of Pennsylvania advancing the concept known today as “Positive Psychology.” He states that Positive Psychology is “the scientific study of what makes life most worth living.” Along the way, Martin identified five core elements highly associated with psychological well-being and happiness. He believes understanding these five elements helps us to create more fulfillment, happiness, and meaning in our life. 

In Part 2 of this two-part series, we’ll pick up where I left off with the third core element in Seligman’s model. 

R – Relationships 

Relationships and social connections are essential for the creation of meaningful lives. Human beings have been social animals since the earliest of times, hence we are hard-wired to bond and depend on each other. That worked particularly well when we functioned in small social units or “tribes.” The tribal unit allowed us to easily ascertain who was friend or foe. It also allowed us to know who to pay attention to, ignore, and with whom we should invest our time and energy. 

In our modern-day world, the historical notion of tribes has largely been broken and replaced by sub-sects of people who are clustered together around common interests, agendas, and values, brought together in new and different ways. Social media now connects people from around the world in ways we never could have imagined 20 years ago. So, this has created a situation where we don’t know our neighbors, but we do know intimate details about our friends in Australia, Tampa, and Kansas City. 

Since we are less tribal in the historical sense, we have lost our ability to easily trust those who are around us, as we can no longer assume they share our values and priorities. That is WHY the relationship-based practice model is so valuable today.  

The relationship-based practice model is a vehicle of connection that can be used to co-discover our similarities as well as areas of disagreement. Alignment of values, goals, perspectives, and efforts are key to successfully advancing health. Strong interpersonal relationships are the key to the door which opens up all of those possibilities. 

M – Meaning 

Some people work to live, while others live to work, with the latter meaning that a person has been successful at merging their life purpose with their daily work. And when work becomes meaningful on a deeply personal level, it evolves into becoming much more than just a “job.” 

With the ever-expanding discovery of connections between oral health and whole health, dentistry now stands at the forefront of a huge new opportunity – the opportunity to help others to grow, develop, and maintain whole health over their entire life  

A – Accomplishments 

Living a values-driven, purposeful life, integrated with how we practice, aligns ourselves with the achievement of deeply meaningful accomplishments on a daily basis. Helping others in deeply meaningful ways, and then being rewarded with appreciation and appropriate compensation, establishes a self-sustaining cycle, and a successful model for living.  

That’s why you will commonly see relationship-based dentists practicing into their 70’s. Their sense of purpose as they continue to accomplish meaningful work is what motivates them to return to the office and continue striving to help patients, coach younger dentists, and create an-ever-happier positive environment. 

An Easy Acronym to Remember: PERMA 

A great to start your day might be to remember what each letter of PERMA stands for: 

• Positive Emotion 

• Engagement 

• Relationships 

• Meaning 

• Accomplishments 

How will these five elements of Seligman’s model fit into your quest for a sense of wellness and happiness today? How will these fit into your quest to serve and help others? 

By Paul A. Henny, DDS 

Martin Seligman PhD spent most of his career at the University of Pennsylvania advancing the concept known today as “Positive Psychology.” He states that Positive Psychology is “the scientific study of what makes life most worth living.” Along the way, Martin identified five core elements highly associated with psychological well-being and happiness. He believes understanding these five elements helps us to create more fulfillment, happiness, and meaning in our life. 

One of our Pankey colleagues, Barry F. Polansky, DDS, spent a lot of time and energy studying Seligman’s work. In his last decade in practice, Polansky turned his attention to writing books to help new dentists find wellness and happiness in dentistry. Polansky’s 2017 book The Complete Dentist: Positive Leadership and Communication Skills for Success is an excellent guide to starting and running an effective and meaningful dental practice. 

In this two-part series, we’ll take a look at Seligman’s positive psychology model in relation to how we feel about our work in dentistry. 

Seligman’s Five Core Elements: 

P – Positive Emotion 

This represents a “glass-is-half-full” perspective toward life, commonly called an “abundance” perspective. This positive world view is critical because it has a heavy influence on how the brain functions. Our brain is a memory-driven cybernetic solution-seeking organ, with a primary purpose of creating and supporting a successful life. When our mind is in a positive orientation towards our environment, we are typically in a very observant and creative mode of living. In this mode, we constantly scan our environment for relevant bits of information and experiences that are potentially useful in the advancement of our desires.  

When our desires are positive and life-affirming, we are co-creating our experience: We see and experience to a large degree what we expect to see and feel. That is why having a clarified positive vision and purpose for our life and practice is essential for well-being. 

E – Engagement 

L.D. Pankey famously said, “Know Yourself.” What interests us most? What worries us most? In what circumstances are we most comfortable? Under what conditions are we most productive? What are our personal strengths? What are our habits? What are our triggers? What do we aspire to do? What about ourselves would we like to change? 

We all direct most our attention toward the things that interest us or we fear. And it is what we pay the most attention to, whether at work or elsewhere, that we develop the most while engagement with things of lesser importance wither away. It’s healthy to go into ever deeper relationship with the things we value. Clarifying what we believe we are good at and what we will enjoy is a key first step to successful practice development. 

Defining our values is essential so we know when to keep “first things first,” as Stephen Covey likes to say. 

Mac McDonald is a Visiting Faculty member at Pankey, his 2017 book Unchanging Points of Light: Finding Your Way in the Dark is an example of the positive power of values clarification. 

My discussion of Seligman’s five core elements will be continued in Part 2. 

By John C. Cranham, DDS  

Having BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals) has been important to me for my whole life, whether it was the Ironman triathalon, getting the opportunity to teach with Dr. Peter Dawson, finishing my book, or setting big goals for my practice. The biggest things in my life that were important to me from a professional standpoint started with an idea that got me excited but seemed impossible. 

A BHAG has a way of motivating you when you think there’s a sliver of chance that you might be able to do it. You set it as a goal and proactively discover steps to work towards it; then you get out of bed each day intent on moving forward.  

People are “wired” differently, but I do think extremely successful people do this. Pete Dawson was like this. He died four years ago, and I remember being with him at my lake house two weeks before he passed away. He talked about a BHAG he was working on–a new book, and he showed me the layout he had in mind for it.  

If you don’t have a BHAG (the next big goal that’s exciting to you), it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day routine. I can think of times in my life when dentistry became mundane. 

One of the most amazing times in my life was right after I was invited to teach with Pete Dawson. I was on the faculty before I was the clinical director. After I was teaching there, there was a six-month period when I was a little depressed. I didn’t understand the feeling. One night at dinner with Pete, I told him I was struggling. We talked about it for a few minutes, and then he said, “It sounds like you need a new goal.” 

That hit me like a ton of bricks. Once I have attained a goal, I need a new aspiration to chase.  

BHAGs are our reasons to get out of bed every morning and be fulfilled by our efforts. Even if we don’t quite complete everything we visualize, we still end up in a completely different place. And in my experience, it’s always a better one. 

Paul A. Henny, DDS 

Oftentimes, perspective is everything. Our thoughts influence our emotions, and then our emotions influence our behavior. How we view our situation as challenging but surmountable, impossible and insurmountable, or somewhere in-between, influences the outcome itself. 

When challenged with a difficult situation, for example, chronic intra-staff turmoil, how we view the problem makes all the difference in the world. A conclusion of “That’s just the way people are and I can’t change it,” yields a very different outcome than “I’ve got to do something about this right now, because it is holding my practice back.” 

In 1960, Bennet Cerf made a $50 bet with Theo Geisel. Bennet, the founder of Random House Publishing, bet Geisel, already a well-known author, that he couldn’t author a successful book that only had fifty different words. 

Bennet lost the bet because Geisel saw the imposed limitation as a creative opportunity. The outcome was a book that would sell over 200 million copies. He titled it “Green Eggs and Ham.” 

It’s old news that dentistry is rapidly changing—and in some ways not for the better. But if we focus on the negatives, we automatically shut down the creative solution-oriented side of our brain. 

When we are locked into a glass-half-empty mindset, we think the glass will surely be even more empty soon. Einstein, Jobs, Edison, and Tesla avoided such thinking. That’s why they just kept on creating and overcoming seemingly impossible odds along the way.  

Thomas Edison said, “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”  

Putting on our overall and going to work is precisely how we should approach our challenges. We need to stop ruminating over what we think can’t be accomplished, because chances are quite good that they can be. Failing to do so will cause another day to be lost spinning our wheels instead of moving forward. 

Looking for inspiration and examples of creative opportunities in dentistry? My CoDiscovery book—available on Amazon and in the Pankey Institute’s online store, is full of them. 

Gary M. DeWood, DDS, MS 

Challenging what you think you know will pique your curiosity and lead to pursuing more information and interactions from which you learn. Challenging what you think you know leads to learning with the benefits of brain development, longer life, emotional wellbeing, and inspiration to share yourself in new ways with others. Simply said, challenging what you know prompts intentional learning to BE more expansive, to grow. 

My hope is that after reading this blog series, you will take time to reflect on the following statements from three of the many people who have influenced me over the years. 

Quotes from Daniel J. Boorstin, historian and Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Americans: 

Education is learning what you didn’t even know you didn’t know. 

The single largest obstacle to discovery is NOT ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge. 

Quote from Herbert E. Blumenthal, DDS: 

Don’t believe everything you think. 

Quotes from William J. Davis, DDS, co-author with L. D. Pankey of A Philosophy of the Practice of Dentistry: 

Learning best takes place when we “live” a philosophy, meaning living in a state of inquiry based on our values, knowledge, and goals. 

When the late Dr. L.D. Pankey decided to devote his life to saving teeth, he was forced to ask himself, “How can I help people keep all of their teeth all of their lives?” In 1925 L.D. didn’t know the answer or even if there was an answer. When he decided to never extract another good tooth, he was taking an enormous professional and economic risk. He was able to uncover and develop many principles that have proven instrumental in our understanding of restorative dentistry and patient communication.  

Philosophy, in its most valuable form, is more concerned with the right questions than the right answers. 

Now that I am back actively within the Pankey community of learning and inspiration, I have four wishes for you: 

• May you come face-to-face daily with something that you don’t even know you don’t know.  
• May you not be blinded by what you think you do know when it shows up and fail to see it because you believe everything you think.  
• May you ask questions and intentionally seek answers. 
• May intentional leisure learning be not just what you do but how you live. 

Gary M. DeWood, DDS, MS 

We might define leisure learning as “Anything that is taught in an organized formal or informal plan of education to assist an adult in learning something about his or her occupation, occupational opportunities, personal happiness, or social enhancement and into which that adult engages him or herself for the purpose of learning about it.”  

I’d like to rename it “Intentional Learning” for the purpose of our discussion. My best guess is that your intent in coming to The Pankey Institute is to learn something about dentistry that will help you do what you do better. The incentive for that goal, being better, is why you come. You are choosing to use leisure time to learn dental stuff with intention. 

Any information you perceive as other than about being “better at clinical dentistry” you might be less interested in retaining and consequently likely to forget quickly. You will not really learn the stuff for which you have limited curiosity. Interestingly, that stuff that is not about the “dentistry” is the most important part of what The Pankey Institute sends you home with. At least I and countless others have found this to be true. 

Intentional learning is essential if you want to live a longer life. 

In the absence of Intentional Learning, defined as “actively seeking out new information that you WANT to integrate into your experience and understanding of the world,” certain parts of your brain will shrink. Your capacity for learning and your critical thinking/problem-solving skills will diminish. A reduction in neurons and neurotransmitters will affect your memory, your concentration, your mood, and your physical movement. Blood flow to parts of the brain can even be reduced–use it or lose it is a common thread in nature.  

So, Intentional Learning is GOOD for your brain and necessary if you wish to thrive. Synapses continue to form and re-form if you are acquiring new information, experiences, and knowledge with intent. Intentional Learning reduces stress levels. Stress reduction not only helps us perform better in our professional life, but our personal lives as well. 

Intentional learning opens social possibilities. 

Homo Sapiens are social creatures, we crave interaction, in fact we require it. Intentional learning encourages us to take risks, adjust, and adapt as we go. It sparks social engagement which leads to happiness in so many aspects of our lives. It enhances motivation, creativity, and innovation. It provides an opportunity to open our minds, challenge ourselves, and appreciate new opportunities. 

Intentional Learning fuels even more learning
as it stimulates curiosity, renews our purpose,
and moves us toward problem solving actions.
It has the potential to keep us young. 

My mother’s desire for Intentional Leisure Learning, never left her; she was and is a voracious reader, and to this day at the age of 90, she loves nothing more than sharing something she has read recently and is busy integrating into her view of the world and how it works. Her beliefs are open to what she experiences in her life, to what she learns.  

The day will come, sooner than I wish, when “dental” learning will not be as applicable to my daily life as it is today. I will still want to be part of a dental study club, still challenge what I think I know, and offer whatever wisdom I’ve been able to store to the conversation.  

Once found, intentional lifelong learning is something one does not easily lose the desire for. 

I will never forget Dr. Parker Mahan’s words, “I know I too can never live long enough.” Some might hear those words as limiting. I hear them as liberating. The well of knowledge will never be dry. It is and will remain an infinite source of things that I can still learn. 

I am so grateful to be back home at The Pankey Institute after spending my intentional learning (and teaching) time for the past fifteen years in a place that has made a choice to focus on “dental” learning. The behavioral aspects of dentistry and developing understanding of oneself and others have always had equal focus at Pankey. And since that “other stuff” is not something that can ever be checked off as “learned” no matter how many years I have left to be here, my intentional learning can and will always be young and new. It’s why The Pankey Institute is not a place you DO, it’s a place you learn to BE. 

The Institute is a place where learning never stops because, when you learn to BE, you have learned to act. Being is an ongoing and continuous process. It’s something that is lived. It is community. It is home. It is still The One Place.  

Gary M. DeWood, DDS, MS 

Adults have a wealth of experience to draw on and they like to do so as part of their learning. Adults are not used to taking direction in education; they choose what they want to learn. When my friend (in Part 1 of this series) lost his active interest in seeking out dental education, he had made a choice to learn other things he hoped to know.  

One of my heroes, Doctor Parker Mahan, told me once that one of the harshest lessons of mortality for him was the realization that he could never live long enough to learn everything he wanted to know. 

Adults need to create specific opportunities to self-reflect and internalize what they are learning in order to integrate it with what they already know. Adults have preconceived notions about education, learning style, and subject matter that interfere with their learning. Adults are often afraid to fail so they frequently guard their learning process by telling themselves why what they are hearing is wrong. 

Where children are sponges when it comes to learning, as adults our brains adapt to experiences and interactions that occur “on purpose.” We acknowledge a reason to remember that experience…to have that new knowledge. 

Here’s an example. 

Our eldest child, Patricia, entered a world in which those charged with her immediate care had barely learned to care for themselves–a world to which she adapted very quickly. In no time she had taken control of the lives of two sentient beings who proudly professed their independence and right to make decisions about their own lives but nonetheless jumped through the hoops of her creation as soon as they were offered. 

After the grandmothers had departed and Cheryl and I were now totally responsible for this baby FOR REAL, her training of us began in earnest. Turns out Cheryl and I CAN be taught, proven by our immediate response to Patricia’s guidance in managing her universe. A visit by Uncle Toby and Aunt Patsy presented us with an opportunity to learn from another source. 

Following a hearty meal, a very sleepy baby was laid in her crib for some sleep. Almost immediately upon our return to the living room Patricia realized she was no longer being held, and realized she was no longer where the “party” was happening. Being WITH the party is very high on Patricia’s list. When she “called out” in response to that situation, two very well-trained parents immediately stood to head for the emergency that was happening for the helpless baby. Uncle Toby looked at us as we simultaneously rose and said, “What are you thinking?” 

That might sound like a question, but it was really a statement that meant “stop.” So, when Uncle Toby asked his “question,” Cheryl and I stopped as we were instructed. Uncle Toby then asked, “What are you teaching that baby if you go in there and pick her up every time she cries?” 

As brand-new, first-time parents, this thought was alien to us. Being so well trained, we thought our only mission in life was to keep the baby from crying. With some angst in our stomachs that tightened each time Patricia’s wailing reached a new crescendo, we sat in the living room and pretended to ignore what we were hearing.  

Suffice it to say that when our second child Dale came along, he learned, and reasonably quickly, that we were not necessarily coming every time he rang the bell.  

Every day, we hear and see a lot of information that never makes the transition to “learning” because it does not produce change.
Change can only occur for adults when we enter into an agreement with ourselves that there is something we want to learn in what is being said or shown to us. We ACT on it. 

The truth is EVERY interaction we have with any other person or situation is a potential learning experience if we reflect upon it and internalize its meaning for us and act on it. It’s impossible not to learn. We do it all the time. Lifelong learning is thus a forgone conclusion.  

One of the greatest joys in dental practice is creating learning moments for patients by providing intentional opportunities for them to experience their oral health and interact with us in a way that provokes their curiosity, internal reflection, and acknowledgement of needs. Just as we are lifelong learners, we can trust that they are lifelong learners, too. 

Gary M. DeWood, DDS, MS 

Learning begins from our first moment of awareness as our eyes open and we have a response to something external to us that is brand new. That experience and all the ones that follow until the moment awareness leaves us to shape our reactions to and our actions in the world. 

Experiential Learning 

The brain is a dynamic and ever-changing organ, constantly adapting to new experiences and knowledge. 

When our youngest daughter Katie was a child, I was cooking dinner one night–my turn–and Katie was sitting at the island where the stove was. I turned around to get something from the cupboard and heard a loud inhale followed by a whimper. Upon turning quickly, I saw her move her hand rapidly behind her back. No more sounds came forth, but I saw a tear and I asked her what was wrong. She said in a wavering voice, “Nothing,” and then looking at the stove burners, “Mom told me those were HOT and never to touch them.”  

I gently took her hand from behind her and saw the blisters rapidly forming on her fingers. She started crying and said to me, “Please don’t tell mom.” I’m certain she never felt the need to verify the information her mother had given her again. THAT is learning. 

All of us have experiences like that every day. Some are memorable and become part of us, embedded in a manner as yet not fully understood inside our brains for almost instant access. Some “learning” seems to fade quickly or never even get recorded. I “touched” a lot of biochemistry information over the years without burning much of anything into my brain. Maybe I should have been touching the stove at the same time. Learning is not simply having an experience of something and then being able to view the recording later.  

The Definition of Learning 

In nearly all of the definitions I have located in my research I see that CHANGE and PROCESS are prominent parts of learning. For example: 

• A change in disposition or capability that persists over time and is not simply ascribable to processes of natural growth. 
• Relatively permanent change in a person’s knowledge or behavior due to experience. 
• A transformative process of taking in information that, when internalized and mixed with what we’ve experienced previously, changes what we know and what we do. 

Choice & Focus 

My personal experiences have shown me that a big part of lifelong learning is what you believe about it and how you embrace it. It’s driven by some measure of choice and focus. 

Cheryl and I have sought out new ideas in dentistry wherever they took us. One of my friends in dental school, a wonderful man whom Cheryl and I still hold close, took a different path. Sometime around the 10th anniversary of our graduation we were visiting, and he told us that he had been able to get all the continuing education he needed without traveling.  

I discovered that his feelings around need and learning as it pertained to dentistry meant satisfying the requirements to stay current with licensure. He is NOT a bad dentist, but like many of the dentists I have come to know in the last 48 years, a hunger for dental learning changed once school was finished.  

A Drive for Learning 

I am reminded of one of the most original and influential thinkers on the creativity process, Robert Fritz, who believed you can create your life in the same way an artist develops a work of art. He said, “If you limit yourself only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want and all that is left is a compromise.” 

As a philosopher and scientist-physician, Dr. L. D. Pankey intentionally observed processes and their results (change) with the goal of becoming better at helping others. The embodiment of compassion, he was highly curious and actively sought ways to alleviate the sufferings and misfortunes of patients and colleagues. He traveled long distances to learn from others’ experiences. He inspired others to know themselves, their patients, and their work on a continuous road of mastery. As a lifelong “leisure” learner, he was interested in a wide range of subjects outside of dentistry as well. Through reflection, he often discovered he could apply this outside learning to his work. 

Paul A. Henny, DDS 

Dentistry can be an isolating profession, wherein there are few people around who fully understand the pressure we’re under and the extreme level of responsibility and personal accountability we face on a daily basis. As a result, the isolation and pressure can easily cause us to feel like we’re in a lonely battle against a cold world that simply doesn’t care about what we are trying to accomplish. 

When we get into that mindset, it’s easy to think that competition is outside of us, that ultimately life is a battle of “us” against “them” and zero-sum. But few things in life are truly zero-sum, because very few things in life are that black and white. In truth, life is more about possibilities than probabilities, which means life is largely what we make of it instead of what happens to us. We are only in competition with others and the world at-large when we try to be like others, and we try to play the game by other people’s rules by aping of their behavior and adopting their mindset and values. 

The belief that we are in a constant state of competition is just an illusion because we can never become someone else, nor can we replicate their path to success, much-the-less become a mirror image of how other people think. 

Our true and authentic self has no competition. There is nobody else on this planet who can do exactly what we do, the way we can do it – that is, if we have the courage to try and fail until we master it. Hence, our authentic self has no competition because there’s nobody quite like us, and the sooner we accept who we are with grace, the sooner we can stop fighting our identity by attempting to become something that we cannot become. 

When we are clear about who we are, what we believe in, and what we are willing to fully get behind and make sacrifices to achieve, the more we’ll come to the realization that our feelings of competitiveness are a self-created illusion. Achieving this deeper level of self-understanding allows us to see ourselves from a perspective from which we are no longer envious of what others have accomplished, and we no longer desire what others have created, because we understand that we cannot build a life that’s not our own and we need to proceed forward and do the work necessary to create something for ourselves and others. 

The fastest way up the ladder of success is through the lifting up of our true selves. Sometimes that process can take a while, because in the beginning we don’t fully understand who we are, and we therefore can’t be clear about what we’d like to accomplish with our life. 

We can only rise up when we care enough about ourselves to invest in our future self – today. We can rise up by developing ourselves into the best person we can be today instead of spending our energy chasing after other people’s ideas of what “good,” “optimal,” and “admirable” mean. 

The simple fact is that we’ll never become our best self until we stop trying to be something that we can’t be.  

To quote a line from one of the songs of my childhood, “If you’ve found your place at last, then you need not use the looking glass.“