By John C. Cranham, DDS 

Even today, after decades into family life, dental practice, and continuing dental education, I sit down every January to outline my BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals) for the year. I block out the first Monday after Christmas to do this, but for the previous month, I’ve been thinking about what new goals will excite me most. I commonly do this type of thinking while I am exercising and driving.  

It’s during these alone times that I can intentionally mull over the things I could do next. I pay close attention to which possibilities excite me most. Oftentimes, these are goals that I feel will benefit others. 

Successful people have the ability to create daily behaviors that direct themselves towards their goals and take them forward on steppingstones. One of the simplest, yet powerful things I witnessed Dr. Pete Dawson do is how he started each day. He would go to his desk and spend 15 to 20 minutes writing six things on a 3×5 card. These weren’t a To Do list. These were six things that would direct him toward his next BHAG. He would place the card in his breast pocket. He did this day in and day out. 

Two weeks before he passed, Pete came to my lake house on oxygen. When he arrived, I had to help him out of the car and into the house on his walker. I looked at his shirt pocket, and there it was, the 3×5 card.  

We don’t have to use 3×5 cards to make notes for ourselves. We can use our phones. But it is powerful to reflect daily on steps that will take us in the direction we want to go and record those steps to lock them in our memory.  

In dentistry, we need to carve out habitual time to think about our goals and steppingstones. We need to carve out time to take the identified steps. The point is to have a system in place where you are thinking about it every day, because there is so much coming at us all day long that we are at risk of drowning in the noise.  

When we get caught up in the mundane, life is less interesting and less fulfilling. At least that has been my experience. When you sense you are becoming bored, you might just need to identify the next big goal that excites you. The challenge of getting there will bring you back to full life. 

By Bill Davis, DDS 

During the first two years of the book project, the institute was still at the DuPont Plaza Hotel in Miami. My schedule was simple. I would fly down on the red eye from Detroit Monday night after my practice time and stay at one of the apartments used by the visiting faculty next to the hotel. Dr. Pankey and I would meet for breakfast at 8 a.m. Then, we would go over to a room in the Institute to talk and I would record everything. 

At our very first meeting, I realized why everyone was taken with Dr. Pankey and his philosophy. We sat down for breakfast and started with the usual small talk. Then L.D. looked me directly in the eyes and asked, “Bill, may I ask you a couple of questions?”  

I looked back at him, and I said, “Yes, of course”.  

He then asked, “Do you tell your wife you love her every day?”. 

I was a little taken aback by the question and said, “I think I do”. 

L.D. then said, “You should.”  

From that day forward, I made it a point to tell Pam I loved her every day. If I was out of town, I would always call long distance and now I text her. That question made me realize how important Dr. Pankey felt it was for us to stay closely connected to our loved ones. I am sure that gesture has helped me during my 57 years of marriage to my best friend Pamela.

L. D.’s second question was, “Do you save regularly for your retirement?”

I told him, “Yes, I do. At the end of the year, when all my bills and taxes are paid, I send most of the remaining money to my Merrill Lynch investment account”.  

Dr. Pankey told me that was okay, but not a good way to save real money. He recommended that when I got my paychecks, one from the university and one from my private practice, I immediately sit down and write a separate check for 10% of my total net income for the week and put it in the investment account.  

Then he said, “Live on the budgeted remaining 90%.”  

I realized he was following his philosophy and wanted me to be sure I could take care of my family. Over the years, his advice has been spot-on. These first two questions were my introduction to his philosophy. 

To be continued… 

By Bill Davis, DDS 

My academic goal in the early 1980’s was to be promoted to full professor at the Medical College of Ohio in Toledo. The Dean of the College of Medicine where I worked was my patient. We had been able to do a complete restoration for him using the Pankey Mann Schuyler technique, including the Functional Generated Path. Over the eight weeks it took to do his dentistry, he allowed me to take three hours a week out from his very busy schedule. During our time together, he developed a great deal of gratitude and appreciation for the complexities of restorative dentistry. At the end of his treatment, he told me he was about to retire as the Dean.  He said he wanted to get me promoted to full professor before he left. go beef up my CV for the promotions committee, he recommended I write ten more scientific articles or a book. 

I had no idea what it would take to write a book, but it seemed easier than writing ten more articles. So, off I went to find something to write a book about. The very next week I was at the Pankey Institute, as a visiting faculty member, helping in a C3 class. C3 was the heavy restorative week. The students would equilibrate their models, develop the anterior guidance, do onlay preparations on two opposing quadrants, do wax-ups, and finally cement gold castings.  

Once the student had completed posterior mandibular wax-ups, the visiting faculty would spend most of the night casting the wax-ups into gold in the in-house laboratory. The next day the student would seat the mandibular restorations, prepare the maxillary posterior teeth, do the FGP, and wax-up the maxillary preparations using the stone FGP. The nighttime castings were done by the visiting faculty, and I had volunteered to help with the castings. 

At that time, Christian Sagar was the executive director of the institute. I told Chris I was looking for a topic to write a book about, maybe something for or about the Institute. He told me he had just hired a professional writer to help Dr. Pankey write his philosophy. I told him if there was anything I could do related to the book project, I would be happy to help. As it turned out, Dr. Pankey liked the writer very much, but he became frustrated because the writer knew nothing about dentistry. For example, the writer asked, “What is a facebow?”. This made communication difficult between them. 

It was about a month later when Chris called me and asked if I still wanted to work with Dr. Pankey on his book. I said, “Absolutely.” Again, I had no idea what I was signing myself up to do. The next week, I flew back to the institute for a quick meeting with Chris and Dr. Pankey. We all agreed that I would come down one Tuesday a month and interview Dr. Pankey. I planned to tape all our conversations and then have a local court reporter type them up. I would use the typed transcripts as working documents as we developed the book. 

To be continued… 

By Mary Osborne, RDH 

Dr. Rachel Naomi Remin says, “Doctor, you may know what’s best for the disease the patient has but that’s not the same as knowing what’s best for the patient.”  

It’s difficult to let go of our own assumptions about what we’re supposed to do, how healthy this person should be based on our criteria, and what is the best path forward in every situation. Our clinical training leads us to believe that we’re supposed to know what’s best for our patient. 

There is another quote, from Dr. Albert Schweitzer, which has challenged my thinking about patient care for a long time:  

“Patients carry their own doctor inside.”  

I believe that every one of us has opinions, ideas, and knowledge about our own health. That is the doctor inside. Dr. Schweitzer said patients come to us knowing we have expertise, but “we are at our best when we give the physician who resides within each patient a chance to go to work.” When we do that, we help people become healthier. 

There is a place for our solutions. There is a place for our expertise to show up. But if we slow ourselves down a half step, we are often amazed at the answers patients come up with. They can be downright creative and elegant. The reason they are elegant is because they are their solutions, and patients are more likely to follow through with solutions they conceive. I’m not saying we shouldn’t guide them to understanding the advantages and disadvantages of their solutions and other possibilities that you we know are out there, but we should be open to allowing them to think about solutions and not prejudge their choices. 

For example, if a patient says she or he doesn’t have time to floss, I was trained to say, “Well, don’t you watch the evening news? You can do it while you’re watching the news. Right?” That’s about me having the solution. But now I sit back and say to the patient, “Well, it sounds like you’re very busy. Is there any time at all during the day when you’re sitting, and you feel that you could floss easily?” When I ask the question, they usually have a better answer than the nightly news. It’s a better solution because it’s their solution. They have bought into it at some level.  

In many cases, we see the “treatment” for a problem as we’re seeing the problem. That’s something that we take a great deal of pride in. But when we come together with our patient, sitting eye to eye, we can often come to a much more elegant treatment plan, one that moves us more comprehensively toward our goal of improved health. In between what is and what is possible, we encourage the patient to discover the level of health to which they aspire. We come to mutual agreement about going forward in a certain way to accomplish some things that are bigger and better than just solving “a problem.” 

By Barry F. Polansky, DMD  

An excerpt from Spare the knives…save the dental souls! published in Dental Economics, March 1, 2002 

For many in our profession, the daily onslaught of difficult procedures, rejected treatment plans, assistants who just don’t get it, the end-of-the-month cash-flow crunch and other office “fires” can lead to a fate not unlike the victims of the Chinese torture. 

The ancient Chinese employed a form of slow execution called “The Death of a Thousand Cuts” in which the victim was sliced repeatedly with a knife. Each individual wound was superficial and nonlethal, but the accumulation of hundreds of cuts proved fatal and caused much more pain and suffering than one sure stroke. 

Henry David Thoreau said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” I’ve come to believe that, in dentistry, there are a higher proportion of people in that category than normal. We start our dental practices to give ourselves more life; yet, inevitably, our practices slowly suck up the lives we have. 

Ironically, it wasn’t the dentistry that caused my distress. It was the “business” of dentistry that devoured my soul. All things being equal, I love the clinical side of my profession. But all the problems that confronted me in my practice—social, financial, and physical, during the normal day-to-day routine were overwhelming. The business of dentistry is hard! Unfortunately, I didn’t quite recognize that at first. 

Like many people, I studied philosophy at college, enjoying the sense of order that a well-constructed framework of ideas could bring to an otherwise indecipherable argument or problem. So, when faced with such a myriad of problems in the early days of my practice, quite naturally, I began to search for a philosophy of dentistry that would help me make sense of the issues at play. 

I looked to successful dentists to find my mentors, and, at the time, there were some great ones—Pankey, Dawson, Reed, Becker, Barkley. What I learned was a real eye-opener! I thought the antidote to my woes would be advanced clinical skills; however, these dental gurus were talking just as much about staff management, financial control, and the philosophy of running a business as they were about how to cut a great crown prep! I was surprised, but it made sense. I put these ideas into effect, and my practice turned the corner from that time on. 

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.