Having Just A Vision Is Not Enough (BeFirst Course 122)

In this lecture I want to talk a little bit about having a vision and how critical it is that we do more than just have a vision. So let's dig in just a little bit to something that I commonly do and that's work through training and coaching and assisting with new dental assistants and also new team members of any type. You know I'm a practicing dentist obviously. I've been practicing for almost 20 years. If you count all four years of dental school it's 24 years. So I've got a little bit of experience working with the wide variety as many people do in many different fields of employ. We get a lot of experience working with different people. A lot of that's involving coaching. So I've worked through with a couple of different groups and a couple of different training protocols coming up with a vision statement or a mission statement. And I have my own which I'll show you here a little bit later in the course. But essentially what we're talking about when we're talking about a mission statement is talking about my vision and how I get there. So my vision and how I get there. I want to know how to get to my vision. That's that's the goal. So if I can come up with a way that allows me some clarity with regard to how I get to my vision and how I accomplish that vision then in the end it'll allow me to take concrete simple progressive steps toward improving. So one of the things I mentioned is training dental assistants. I'm just like training dentists and training other individuals in any field of employment any field that we work in. You know as a dentist we do a lot of you know turnover from time to time especially given the workforce and the challenges like during COVID half of our hygienists went home and never came back. And so we ended up with a bunch of people that we needed to train as we're bringing in new team members. But that being said one of the distinctions I have to make with any team member is the distinction between active growth and learning and passively observing. So so active versus passive. You know that's that's the key. Are we actively engaged in working and progressing? Is my activity if what I'm working on helping me to get to my vision or am I just observing and watching other people in dentistry you know as we apply for dental school and probably many fields are like this you're required to spend a certain amount of time in observation mode. And I think that's there's a lot of benefits there and I usually encourage and counsel whether it's you know family members or people that I'm working with. If you're thinking about a certain career field then you probably have to spend some time watching what that career field involves what that particular job description is. So I go and spend time watching dentists before dental school we observe. Now the challenge now becomes converting from an observation mode passive watching mode now to an active working through changing improving becoming a better better version of myself mode. And one issue that we sometimes see especially with dental assistants who are less than experienced or who have come from a home where or an environment not necessarily just a home an environment where they haven't been required to step outside of their comfort zone. A lot of times they just fall back into this observation mode where they're just kind of watching and observing like for instance during a root canal root canals get really boring for assistance oftentimes they're handing instruments very slowly as the dentist is working with a file over and over and over again and one tooth and then a rinse and then and once in a while and I have had this happen before a dental assistant will actually close their eyes and drift off a little bit. So that's a very passive form of dental assisting. If I've got to kick them under the chair or you know bump the handpiece onto their section or something to wake them up that's only happened a couple of times in 20 years. The point I'm trying to get to is we have to be actively engaged actively engaged in creating and developing and establishing and advancing this mission statement this vision statement and I'm going to draw a little distinction here between vision and mission. There's a little bit of a difference between vision and mission which we'll talk about a little bit in the future let me get out of the way there for a second so you can see that a vision is what we see in the future a mission is how we accomplish that in the simplest forms. So we have to be actively engaged in looking at what our ultimate vision is creating in a version of ourself and then having missions that accomplish the vision. So we'll talk more about that but let me just rephrase this whole little segment in one sentence. Having just a vision is not enough by itself. We have to do we have to do we must be we must be action active not passive but moving forward. There are things we have to do and we'll talk further in additional lectures about how we can do in little incremental bite sizes step step at a time line upon line baby steps etc etc to accomplish today's mission this year's mission this section of my life's which ultimately will lead us to fulfill magnify and embrace our vision of our future selves thanks we'll see in the next lecture.