Ep #2: Knowing is Power with Jennifer Wacaser

Welcome to Practicing with the Masters for dentists with your host, Dr. Allison Watts. Allison believes that there are four pillars for a successful, fulfilling dental practice: clear leadership, sound business principles, well-developed communication skills, and clinical excellence. Allison enjoys helping dentists and teams excel in all of these areas. Each episode she brings you an inspiring conversation with another leading expert. If you desire to learn and grow and in the process take your practice to the next level, then this is the show for you. Now, here’s your host, Dr. Allison Watts.

Allison:       Welcome to Practicing with the Masters podcast. I’m your host, Allison Watts, and I’m dedicated to bringing you masters in the field of dentistry, leadership, and practice management to help you have more fulfillment and success in your practice and life.

For you guys who don’t know Jen, we’re in for a treat tonight. And for those of you who do know Jen, then you already know that but I’m excited to have you all here tonight. This has just been fun already just getting to be with a group of like-minded people. People who are interested in learning and getting new ideas and skills and sharing things. So thank you for spending your hour with us tonight.

I’m going to go ahead and introduce Jen. She is a professional and personal coach and consultant and has worked with hundreds of dentists and staff members, dental management executives and directors, as well as dental practice brokers for over a decade. She has a customized coaching program where she helps dentists reach optimal levels of success whether it relates to our professional or personal lives, even our health or financial goals, and this is because the key to meeting our own high expectations is linked to self-awareness or knowing ourselves objectively. When this is achieved we can make better decisions and begin to think and act in ways that align with who we really are from a more natural state instead of who we think that we’re supposed to be or who others have perceived us to be.

With our current staff or even for hiring, Jen can help us assess strengths and weaknesses and make recommendations on workflow, delegation, assigned duties and ultimately get the office functioning at its highest level by identifying the best way to utilize each employee. The way Jen and I have worked together is that we coached together for several months and she helped me a ton with my personal life and my professional life and we are using currently this tool for our hiring process.

As soon as one of our candidates we think is somebody that we are interested in working with Jen will help me by running this profile and then she can tell us … oh gosh, she can give us a lot of insight about what their strengths are and whether or not they would be a good fit for the position that we’re hiring for. So I know Jen has with her tonight … I’m going to let her introduce Greg Woods, he’s the person who helps her dentists. Does he help you with reading the profile, analyzing the profile?

Jen:            Well, many, many things but Greg Woods is on the line and he owns a company called Dynamics of Thinking and that’s a person I utilize. He’s an analyst and among other things an entrepreneur and has been a business consultant himself. But over the last decade he has really dedicated his life to studying the science of axiology, which is the basis of this profile. Greg and I have worked together for about that long or throughout my career as a coach and consultant in this industry. And again this is a value-based science called axiology.

I have a couple documents that I emailed over to Allison that I hope the group can get and take a look at, it gives a little bit of an overview of that as well. We will be going through it tonight. But I lean on Greg heavily for again the analysis, the looking at full teams and really doing some analytical comparisons and contrasts on the team on how that relates to the leader within the practice and so on.

He’s been a huge cornerstone for my business as it relates to these targeted profiles that I’m doing, these benchmarks. I’ve done so many profiles on dentists and office managers and folks, other positions within the practice, that we’ve been able to construct specific, targeted benchmarks for hiring. So when you’re looking at those positions or looking at bringing on maybe a partner or selling a practice or are looking at a practice to buy and so on, we can look at these dentists’ benchmarks and so on. That’s all a very complicated formula process that is not what I do and that is what Greg does.

So again, if you have any questions throughout this evening in regards to some of those things as it relates to how the results are derived, or anything along those lines I will refer over to Greg for that. So Greg, do you have anything to add?

Greg:          No, thank you, you did a great job there and I’m looking forward to answering any questions that people may have.

Jen:            Okay. Well, thank you again, and Allison did but I know everyone’s got busy lives and so on and I’m glad you’re taking the time for yourself. I know what Allison is trying to accomplish here with her series of Transformational Leadership and it’s something that I hope that you’re doing for yourself and for your business and so on.

I appreciate the opportunity to talk a little bit more about what I do and how I could potentially give you some information here this evening to help you understand the angle that I come from in this regard. I have a PowerPoint there and I want to make sure everyone has access to that the first slide there should say “Thinking about Thinking.” And we can just go ahead and get started, Allison, do you have anything else before I get moving here with that?

Allison:       No, I’ll let you know if the slides are running properly.

Jen:            Okay.

Allison:       And if anybody has any problems or questions again it’s *2 or you can type your question into the box to the left of the slideshow. If you’re not seeing the slides, there’s a box above the question box it that says “slides.” If you click on that you should see the slides come up but if you need to get my attention you can just push *2 and I’ll see your hand raise on the call. So it looks good, Jen.

Jen:            Okay. So when it comes to leadership in a practice or leadership in your life, the way that I have worked, constructed my business, and the real mission and passion that I have is helping people understand themselves from a thinking perspective. How do you tend to look at things? How do you tend to process information and how well do know yourself? Because once you have that information, you can utilize it for not only professional reasons but personal decisions, and so on.

So it is about thinking, and it is about knowing, about self-awareness as well. The profile that I utilize measures that. Unlike some of the others that I know that are more popular, Myers-Briggs, DISC, more widely utilized. They look at personality and behavior. This looks at thinking patterns and since thinking drives behavior, we’re able to extract a lot more authentic information about ourselves and about the people that we’re looking to bring into our lives, either professionally and personally, utilizing this. So everything starts there.

Now I don’t know if any of you have ever seen a statistic along these lines but we on average have about seventy thousand thoughts a day. Because of our personal experiences and the results that we get in our lives on a day-to-day basis and the experiences that we have from day to day, about ninety percent or more of those are the same from day to day. So we have our thoughts. We act accordingly. We get results whether they are good or bad. And then we develop belief systems. Once those belief systems are established, we create the same experience day after day after day to support them. If you can look at the thought processes that are helping you get the right results and then also be aware of those that are keeping us from getting the results we want, then you can make some shifts in the thoughts, which will ultimately start shifting action and so on.

This is just another graphic in regards to the thought processes and if you can just tweak that thinking in small ways, I think a lot of times we look at this as overwhelming. I sit down with clients, we talk about what sort of leader do you want to be and where are the problems? Where are the issues? We sometimes think we have to be like someone down the street or someone that we’ve seen as successful or we perceive as successful. We think we might need to change who we are or be different than who we are.

But the fact of the matter is, there are small changes that we can make that can have very significant results. So how do we think naturally? And what do you tend to pay attention to in any given situation? Whether it be when you walk into your office, when you interact with your family, when you interact with your team. When you are trying to run your business, what do you tend to focus on in any given situation? And what do you naturally miss?

So the other point in regards to how you look at things and how you process information is that we generally think that other people think like we think. So when we’re working with our team, we just assume that people are going to understand the things that we understand in the timeframe that we understand them. And that our thinking is so unique that we can’t really measure it or diagram it. It’s just how it is. We sort of go through in a very unconscious way.

So the other point about taking this profile or understanding yourself from that perspective is that you can be more conscious about the way that you tend to look at the world and process information and understand that it’s different, so that you can make accommodations based on who you’re trying to motivate or who you are trying to inspire or who you are trying to get to produce at a different level.

The profile itself is called the Hartman Value Profile. It’s not about values, like do you have good values or family values. It’s really about the process of valuing. So what do you place a higher value on? What do you tend to see as having less value? There are two specific elements involved in this profile. One is a clarity score and one is a bias score. A clarity score is simply how well do you understand the big picture in a couple different areas that we measure. The other one, the structure of your thinking, is called the bias score and I will get into that in in a few minutes.

But your thinking is developed and for any of … Allison has heard this a number of times … but we aren’t just born with a thinking process and we hold onto it through our whole lives. It really is affected by a number of things. There are genetic components to the way that we tend to look at things. Some people are just born a little bit on the sunny side and some people are born a little more serious.

Our childhood, first three to five years of life, and young adult experiences certainly start to form the way that we look at things whether we’re trusting or whether we’re more structured or detailed in our thinking and that has to do with how we are parented and the environment we were raised in and in our most recent three to five years, our most recent experiences.

If you just had a bad break up or had a partner embezzle from you then it would be likely that you would have more of a guarded result in your area of people. And so if you knew that, then you would know that that’s either a good objective score for you and want to keep that way of thinking because you tended to be more open or too open in the past. Or you would want to possibly move that in a different direction to help you with a business situation or leading your team. Many traumatic experiences certainly have involvement here as well as gender.

Allison:       So you’re saying it changes over time basically, or I know you told me that too, you can take it at different times and it will be different.

Jen:            Well over time some of the basic ways will stay the same if you don’t have interaction or any sort of intervention. So if go through a coaching process or a self-awareness process you can certainly move those in significant ways but we do have general natural patterns that tend to, at least from the clarity perspective, tend to stay the same. Now what we tend to focus on and our consciousness around them can move quite a bit, the bias scores.

But absolutely, if you focus on something and start to put some different habits and routines in place, you can absolutely go from an unconscious incompetent stage, which is “I don’t know what I don’t know,” to an unconscious competent stage where you are being a different person and you’re not having to focus on your every move and your every thought. But that’s a process. But absolutely, that’s the goal of understanding yourself and the coaching process is to make changes that you want to make. Absolutely.

Allison:       That’s so cool. I’ve heard that conscious competence to unconscious competence and I’ve never heard anybody say really how to do that. Or, I know, coaching is a way I’ve found that helps but anyway, sorry, I just thought that was cool.

Jen:            Absolutely and that is the process but it starts with understanding what the problem is or understanding what you don’t know. So again, with this, the six thinking dimensions that are utilized in this profile include external thinking and internal thinking, so we measure both. We look at how you interact with the world around you and we look at how you think and feel inside of self. So we look at all of those and I can speak to that in more detail in a few minutes as well.

Again, there are three external dimensions and the empathetic thinking is the people area, how you relate, interact with people. There’s a practical thinking area. There is a structured thinking area, that the practical thinking is along the lines of action. Do we tend to move forward and see the positive in taking immediate action or do we tend to hold back and overanalyze? And then there’s the structure thinking which of course is do we think in black and white terms, and so on.

Allison:       And are you going to a little bit, I’m sorry, are you going to talk just a little bit about like how those things apply to, and I don’t know if that would maybe be a question for Greg, and we can get to it later, that maybe something you’re going to get to later, but how you use these things to discover things about people? Like what would it mean if somebody was black and white versus, you know, how you would …

Jen:            Okay, perfect. How we utilize … and Greg, you can speak to that. When someone tends to be a black and white thinker it can be a real strength. I mean, it depends on what they do inside the office, it can be very relative to their position, their role and that can be highly valued or it can be a problem that wants to be addressed or needs to be addressed or handled through coaching or managing. So, it really just depends on if it’s perceived as a problem or if it’s seen in the work setting as a positive. Greg, do you have anything to add to that?

Greg:          Well, I think another way of saying that is that there are no wrong or right scores in this. It’s more of, okay, does the way I am thinking, you know, how is it serving me? Does it work for me or is it working against me? Now in my … perfect, Jen … it’s probably a little difficult to understand without maybe some of the graphics potentially, but just to kind of catch up, you’re thinking it’s broken down into these three dimensions that she was talking about.

What the question really was if one of these is dominant, when they talked about black and white thinking, that’s what we call systemic thinking, and that may serve somebody really well if their job has to do a lot with paying attention to details and doing analytics, all those type of creating rules and policies, doing research and all that type of stuff, would all fit well in that dimension. Now if your job doesn’t require that and that’s where your strength is, then you’ve got to ask yourself, “Do I need to kind of reorientate the way that I do things?”

Allison:       So, again, it sounds like it could actually be depending on what your job is. If you want somebody to be creative or thinking outside of the box or something like that, it might actually be seen as not a strength. I mean in this particular job, in this particular office, at this particular time.

Greg:          Right.

Jen:            And that’s why the profile itself, at first glance, if you take it or if you’re asking your team to take it, I think everyone wants to know if they scored well or if they passed. The truth of the matter is there is nothing about it that is judgmental. It’s simply information. It’s information for that person and it’s information for you as the owner of the practice to understand the team that you have. To see if there are any gaps or to see if you want to take a team member and move a real systemic, analytical thinker away from the front desk and have them doing insurance verifications and something that would be more relative to their natural strengths.

So it can actually take someone who might be a mediocre performer and make them a stellar performer by just giving them the opportunity to work through their strengths. But you can also manage the weakness, if you have that ability within the office to do that because everyone’s got a unique blueprint on this result. So there isn’t a score that we’re looking for in particular.

However with the benchmarks that we have, we have so many profiles from so many people in this industry, we have some good solid information around what tends to be most successful in specific positions. So because we have so many, Greg has been able to crunch all of those numbers into appropriate benchmarks. That does give us a good understanding of what tends to work better. What tends to be a best-fit thinking pattern for specific positions.

Allison:       Cool.

Jen:            So again, the clarity levels measures your level of understanding in three specific dimensions externally and then three specific dimensions internally. You can be very strong in one and a little less clear in another. You can have bias scores, which again is what do you pay attention to in that dimension. So you can be very, very clear around people, you can really understand how you’re being perceived, what that person needs, how do I make that person feel comfortable. And you can disregard that in your thinking.

So you can understand it if I were to sit and ask you, “Do you understand how to make people … how to connect with people? Do you get how that works?” And you would, but in some cases, for whatever reason, some of those things that I mentioned earlier about your life experiences, we might have decided that putting people at arm’s length and we’re going to focus on systems and structure and action. So that is just something to know, if there are issues or if that’s working. So we can be real strong and focused in our intrinsic, or our people area, and we can be disregarding and less clear in our systemic area or vice versa. And this just explains again around the thinking biases.

Now here’s just a graphic that shows some typical patterns or some possible patterns among clarity levels. So you can be very balanced where you see all three areas: the action, the people, and the systems. Very, very similarly, that sort of a high level can be a good score for a C-level person, for someone who’s overseeing the big picture. The next one here obviously shows where this person is very strong in the action and the systems, the systemic area of thinking and a little less clear in the people. Then the third, again, just shows the different structure. And there’s no right or wrong it’s just information.

Allison:       So intrinsic is your inside, like in yourself, inside yourself?

Jen:            Well these three dimensions occur in your external thinking as well as your internal thinking.

Allison:       Oh, okay.

Jen:            So the “I” is just another term around people. It’s just a term utilized in this profile to describe that area of thinking, whether it’s internal or external.

Allison:       Okay.

Greg:          That’s also something that’s actually unique about this profile, that we clearly delineate between your external world, and that’s about, “How do I interact with the people around me based on my thinking?” And my internal world, which is, “How do I interact with myself?”

Because we can look at the way you operate in both worlds, it gives us a much greater dynamic to understand where are there maybe detachments or compensations that happen, whether that means you rely on internal strengths from certain things to compensate for an external weakness or vice versa. So it is something to give us a whole lot more insight into behaviors, breaking it into these two separate worlds. And you do deal with yourself differently, treat yourself differently, than you treat people externally, most often.

Jen:            And here are the two slides, the three external dimensions. They have the I, the E and the S which is people, practical thinking which is the action and the S, which is the systemic or structured thinking and then we have those same three in the internal.

Jen:            So what do we do this with all of this information? So that’s a lot of detail, a lot of description. None of you have taken the profile. It’s good background information for you to have but, okay, so what do I do with all this, this I and this E and this S? That’s all sort of interesting but what do we do with it? What’s the purpose?

It simply is when you understand your strengths, then you can move forward. I mean, that’s not anything new to any of you, I’m sure you all are successful business owners, or for the most part, I think you either own or working successfully in your career. You learn to recognize your weaknesses. So why do we want to know that? I think maybe I was raised this way, many of us, that we can do anything we want to do. We can be anything we want to be. But the truth of the matter is if we go in that direction, it’s possible, but we might work five times harder than the person next to us and be miserable doing it if you’re working through a weakness.

If you have a tendency in one area and you’re really just fighting, you’re just fighting upstream against that, it’s just difficult. If you know what those weaknesses are then you can make arrangements, make plans, delegate, get support, get an accountant, get a tax person, get a practice manager, whatever is needed so that you can work through your strengths because when you’re clicking on all eight cylinders you’ll know it. It’s when time passes and you don’t notice and the thing that you do that’s easy that everyone else seems to think is so hard. That’s when you know you’re in your sweet spot, that’s when you know that you’re working through your strengths.

Then understand your biases. What do you tend to really focus on when you’re looking at a situation, an issue, a problem? Do you tend to go straight to, “What’s the rules? We’re not following these rules. We must follow these rules.” Or do I tend to go to, “Yeah, but she’s so nice. I mean, she has a child and she’s so sweet and we really need to give her another opportunity.”

What you tend to look at in any given decision and what do you tend to disregard? And when you know that, you can make a list, make a bullet point to your presentation to yourself before you walk into a meeting so that you don’t make decisions based on your natural thinking patterns, if you think it won’t help you reach your outcome in that moment. So knowing is power. So you can train and improve your weaknesses. I think that is worthy so that you can get to a point of understanding and a point of knowing. But I also believe that trying to take a weakness, improve on a weakness, will probably get you, unless you dedicate your life to it, will get you to a middle ground there so that you are competent. But I don’t know that it’s necessarily the effort you want to put forth to be the best if you’re working through a weakness.

Greg:          Jen, there’s a favorite quote I have from Peter Drucker, which it says, “It takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.”

Jen:            Absolutely.

Greg:          That is also scientifically proven from the aspect of, as you may all know, that you have synapses in your brain, which is basically your neuro-network. And it’s easier for your brain to build more connections and synapses in areas where it’s already strong versus areas that it doesn’t have that infrastructure, then it’s got to work harder and takes longer to build that out, and that’s exactly why that happens.

Allison:       Is that that neural pathway thing?

Jen:            Like learning Spanish when you’re forty-five instead of five. Then in regards to your team, to ensure that you’ve got all the bases covered. To really know … I just had a client today and he’s got a high level of frustration with his team and he’s very analytical and he’s very particular and he is very systemic and I profiled his team and he’s got all intrinsic “people” people on staff because he likes being around them.

But of course, they’re not paying attention to the details. They are … the patients love them. The hygienist has lifelong friends. But she’s got three rooms that aren’t ready on time and she’s running late. So those are the frustrations he’s having. Now if he could have utilized the information prior he could have made maybe more of an objective decision on who he wanted to bring onto this team.

So essentially we behave and interact in ways that are very consistent with how we think, our thinking biases, and our thinking clarity. If you want to make changes in that regard, you will then make different … you will have different behaviors and make different decisions and take different actions. So if you keep doing what you’re doing right now, you will stay where you are. If you do something different, of course, you’ll have a different result.

This is a graphic here in regards to hiring that is a purpose for the tool as well. So it’s a self-awareness tool for you as an owner, as a manager, as a leader, for your own purposes, whether it be just self-development or it can also be utilized in the hiring process for any position within your business.

This is just a quick snapshot of a dental benchmark which is a best-fit benchmark that Greg has created for me based on all of the profiles that I’ve taken for dentists in different environments. So if you can see at the very top there is an overall rating score and this is something that could be generated for you if you were looking to start a business with someone else or hire on an associate or something. Or if you own multiple practices, this would be a way of seeing how that person scores relative to doctors that tend to be most successful in specific dental environments.

The next one is the team leader benchmark, very similar, has different attributes. Listed here it also has attached to it and it’s a very easy snapshot, very user-friendly result for you if you’re looking to hire in that role.

Now, a big part of what I do is also coaching. Once you bring people on, there is a matter of creating and maintaining momentum in regards to the information that that they’ve received, via their profile, so we utilize that as well. In line with the purpose of this call is really about leadership and, I mentioned earlier, we tend to look at examples of leaders and sort of wonder what the magic is that someone else has and it truly is about being authentic and knowing what you do best and really utilizing that as a platform. I’m sure you’ve done that in a number of ways already, but just really recognizing that it is truly being authentic and being in line with what really inspires you and motivates you, and what’s fun for you and what makes the day go fast. And really continue to move down that path in your leadership role is what will make you better in that position. Purposefulness, the ability to maintain boundaries.

I looked at a lot of the information that a number of you sent back in regards to Allison’s note on Facebook about staying out of the drama. A lot of that has to do with your natural ability, probably the best and worst of all of you in your role in the health care industry as a service provider. I mean, you don’t go into what you go into to just for the money. You could have gone into business or finance. I mean, you went into a business where you’re working with people. So a lot of you are very oriented that way and it shows up in profiles across the board.

But sometimes what comes along with that focus on other people and just wanting to please at all costs is a boundary-less thinker, a boundary-less leader. That may work extremely well with patients but it doesn’t work with staff. When it comes to how to hold people accountable and so on. So the follow-through and accountability was something that came up as a big pain point and that takes a real systemic focus. So knowing how you score in that area can be very helpful in creating your plan so that if you do get a practice manager on board that you can utilize that person’s time and your money in a different way.

Interest in the good of the whole, compassion and empathy, that’s not sympathy. So empathy is different, very, very different as you know, than sympathy and that is putting yourself in their shoes. But not enabling or making excuses or throwing out nets or doing jobs that other people are capable of doing. Two very, very, very different things.

A deep knowledge of self, we’ve talked about that for the last thirty minutes and of course directness, which can be a tough one, and uncomfortable. It can cause a little bit of an increased heart rate and a little sweaty and, “Am I going to hurt that person’s feelings?” Or, “Am I going to come across in a certain way?” That is a gift to the people that work for you, it’s a gift to anyone that we’re leading, for them to know who we are, what our boundaries are, what our expectations are of them, and what the consequences and rewards are for meeting them, or not meeting them.

Allison:       Jen, that slide that you had on just a second ago, the seven power bases?

Jen:            Yes.

Allison:       Where does that come from?

Jen:            That is in the article that I sent called “Power.”

Allison:       Okay.

Jen:            I am not remembering the name of the author but it’s in the article that I forwarded to be dispersed among the team, so it should be there, as well as the author.

Allison:       Okay. I was trying to get those articles in the email that I sent out just before the call just re-verifying the webcast link and all of that and I didn’t get it in there so I’ll send it after with the replay.

Jen:            No problem, absolutely.

Allison:       Okay.

Jen:            Then this is just again a snapshot. I showed you the benchmarks. This is a typical profile that is gone over by a trained, experienced coach, not something that we would just throw at you and say, “Here’s information,” because it’s an eighteen page report, which is a result of the testing. It’s very detailed and it’s got the three dimensions here, these are the three external dimensions. There’s the second page that’s not showing there but then has about sixteen, seventeen pages of description behind it as well. So I just wanted to put that out there for you to be able to at least have a little preview of. And then again, the team dynamics element that we have discussed in regards to utilizing this information and utilizing your knowledge of self.

And I think that is where I will end at this point and open it up to questions or comments or discussion that would be of help to the group.

Allison:       Okay, I’m going to try to open it and see if it’s not too loud and if we have some questions. Nobody has raised their hand yet or written anything on the webcast. Okay, let me see if I unmute it, if there’s any … Does anybody want to ask a question or … ? Sounds pretty quiet.

Jen:            Has anyone ever gone through a process like this where you’ve had testing done along these lines or gone through any sort of coaching or self-awareness exercises or profiling?

Allison:       I have and I know we use … Mindy may be muted. I don’t have her muted but she may have muted herself. I know Mindy works in my office and we’ve done the DISC profiles and the Myers-Briggs. We’ve also done Kolbe. All of us haven’t done this profile. I know you know I’ve done it. Then, I think Lisa took one and then we’ve used it for our new hires that we’re thinking about.

I found this one really interesting but I do, when I get one of the printouts back, it’s a little overwhelming. I just think, “Okay, Jen, explain it to me because I don’t have any idea what this means really still even.” Tonight that helped, the way you explained it with the internal and external and the intrinsic. But I still think there’s just a level of clarity that you and Greg have that… It’s a cool tool, though.

Jen:            Yeah, I went through training, I mean, it is a coach’s tool. The benchmark, however, the scoring isn’t necessary, it’s not a complicated result and can be utilized as well. But in cases when you’re hiring one or two people and you’re so close to it you’re not, you don’t want to just see a score you really want to know the specifics on this person, it really does take an analysis of that result.

Allison:       Does anybody else want to comment on any of the… Adam, do you have anything you want to add or ask or are you guys using any tool in your offices?

Adam:        Just kind of taking it in, I’m still an associate, so it doesn’t really apply to me yet.

Allison:       Oh yeah, that’s right, Mary told me that last time. Jen, before we started doing this with you we did something called a 16PF. Are you familiar with that?

Jen:            Greg, do you know that? I don’t know that one.

Greg:          No, I am not familiar with it.

Allison:       There was a, I think he’s a psychologist or psychiatrist, named Clifford Catz that did the analysis but it had a lot of different … It wasn’t really, I don’t think it was about your thinking. But it had a piece to it that was about intelligence and then there was kind of the black and white, or rule following. It’s been a long time since we used it but it was really helpful and I used it when we brought our associate in and I remember them going over that and telling us where we might have conflicts.

Jen:            Okay.

Allison:       And where we might really get along well and the things that we needed to talk about as we set our business up. I mean, I know that you’ve done that with me, Jen. You’ve told me if you want to hire this person, or even with some of my employees, you might say, “This particular area might be a problem but you can overcome it by doing such and such.”

Jen:            Right. And it is a matter of complementing, sometimes duplicating. Sometimes we want a mirror of ourselves in regards to adding a little more weight in that area in the office or sometimes we want the contrast, which is filling the gap on a different level or in a different area.

So it certainly is, it’s a bit like a marriage when we’re spending more time with the people we’re working with than the people that we actually live with. So it’s a similar assessment, or a similar analysis, when we’re looking at who we want to have on the team, to cover all of those bases. It can work both ways, which is why it doesn’t mean that you have to have someone who looks different than you come on. Or it doesn’t mean that you can’t have someone that thinks like you come on board either.

Allison:       Right. Greg, do you have anything you’d like to, I know we’ve got just a few minutes here. Anything in summary that you want to talk about in regards to the …?

Greg:          Not necessarily, the thing I guess I would really add is it’s much easier especially since we didn’t have the slides at the beginning of this to understand when you experience it to see exactly, when you have this kind of mirror, I guess, held up for you. And you can kind of look at it objectively, and say, “Aha, okay, so I can see that I do that. I never really thought about how that affects other things.” I think you’re going to offer an opportunity for them to experience it, I think.

Jen:            Absolutely. Absolutely. So if anyone, I don’t know who’s on the call who has an interest in that, but I’m certainly happy to have whoever is interested to go through the process of taking the profile. There is some information up here on a slide to go through that process. You can either call me and email me and we can talk a little bit about your needs, which is here. Or I know Allison can send out some specifics on that as well, in regards to the actual access to go through the process of taking the test.

The test itself is two separate lists of eighteen statements to rank. So it’s about a twenty to thirty minute process versus, I know some of the others can be hours. But it yields just very, very significant, detailed information.

Allison:       Yeah, it seemed really simple when I was taking it and then when I got back the results I was just like, “Whoa, how did you get all that out of those questions? That’s pretty amazing.” It has to do with the way the questions are worded and the order you put them in.

Jen:            There’s a numerical formula behind each. And those are questions that Greg can speak to but I do hear that all the time. Greg chuckled because he knows how much science is behind it and I do have so much information that I can send because I certainly do deal with a lot of dentists who are very analytical thinkers and I respect and appreciate it and I have information to send that speaks directly to the science, how it’s calculated, the validation studies from other industries, and other companies who have utilized the tool. Some statistics relative to retention and production and so on.

Greg:          One of the things I’d throw out here. One of the things you’d notice that it’s a lot different than when you take a DISC or whatever. This isn’t a self-evaluation. In other words, we’re not asking questions like, “When you’re in a room with a group of people do you feel you are very social or not very social or whatever.”

We approach this by giving you certain statements for you to assess and evaluate and think about. We actually then measure and track what you’re doing actually during the process. The difference would be instead of me asking you if you’re a great piano player and you just saying, “Well, sure I am.” I come to you instead and say, “Well great. Here’s a piece of music. Play the piano for me.” And I can observe it for myself now versus taking your, somebody’s self-assessment of themselves. Does that makes sense?

Allison:       So are you saying you take the end results of the tests or can you see what were like the process of us actually taking the test?

Greg:          Now that’s a good question. No, just the end result.

Jen:            Okay.  So it’s just how we put everything together.

Greg:          We’re taking a look at how did you place, how did you value each one of these statements.

Allison:       Yeah, okay. I was going to ask, Jen, you said you have all that information for the analytical mind and for us non-analyticals [laughs]. If you want to, can you say in a nutshell like why you think this is the tool that you want to use in your coaching practice?

Jen:            Yes.

Allison:       Yeah like what is it about it you just think, bottom line, is the coolest thing or the best thing about it?

Jen:            Well, I started my coaching business without it and I ran blind with people for weeks to try to figure out what I can now find out and work on immediately. Because it is such an authentic result because it speaks to, the result is oriented to, a thinking process, not, “This is what I do. This is how I act, this is what I think that I do well. Yes, I’m really good with people.” What I can see on the profile then, is you are really a pleaser, so does that mean that you’re really good with people? It looks like, at all costs, you please, and focus on other people. Well, I don’t think you’re being very good with your staff. Because that’s not what a leader does, that’s not inspiring, that’s not going to help them grow.

So for me it’s been, I could go on about how much it helps people understand themselves in a very short period of time. I mean, it change, just the result itself, I can just speak personally and I’m not trying to sell it.  When I took it twelve years ago, I will never forget looking at that thing because I had some information that I thought I was very clear on about myself and I saw a few things on there that were absolutely different than what I thought that I was presenting or how I thought I looked at things and it was mind-blowing for me, personally.

Allison:       You found them to be absolutely accurate.

Jen:            No, at first I argued [laughs]. And I said, “That can’t be it.” Anyway, but then absolutely, as I noticed what I was enjoying in my life and what I wasn’t, and why I wasn’t, it became incredibly clear and true and really pushed me in the direction of doing what I do now. That and being brought up by someone who was really good at what he did but hated it and had to live with that person for a lifetime. And realizing that if that person understood themselves a little better, they would have probably chosen something that they enjoyed more and wouldn’t have been stuck in that situation feeling trapped in that for so long.

I’ve seen that as well, I meet people who are in sales who belong in analytics and people in analytics who belong in sales and don’t know it. Because you can be very successful doing something that you despise. So it’s very confusing. To be good at something and be successful at it but you’re working so hard and you’re wonder why you’re going home with a headache and having two beers and wondering why you’re miserable.

So, that’s another thing, because it shows up and then you can start to formulate a plan for your life that is in line with your core values.

Allison:       Well that’s interesting you say that because I found for myself that I literally just at forty-three years old just kind of started realizing how much of my life I have forced myself to be a certain way because that was what I was taught I should be. Or because I learned some … I don’t know if I thought it was the right way to be and I thought the way that I was wrong. I think of myself as a very authentic person but I haven’t been being my natural self.

Jen:            Because maybe you thought it was supposed to be, look a different way…?

Allison:       Yeah. And I think I’m a very intuitive person but I let my mind overrule my intuition. Yeah, just a lot of little things like that, and I know when we work together that we use that tool you said, like “What would you like to work on?” and we picked out some particular areas and you had some actual tools. You were very good about giving me …

Jen:            Homework.

Allison:       Yeah, homework that was really practical and really doable and I thought that was really neat that you can work on these things.

Jen:            I guess the last comment I want to make is it doesn’t mean that this is three to six months of intense therapy and I have to change who I am and I have to completely jump out of my actual life and look at everything positively. There are some very specific, five, ten minute exercises that you can do on a daily basis. A few different accountabilities you can hold yourself to on a weekly basis that can make significant changes if you do it over a six-week period of time.

Allison:       Cool.  Anybody have anything they want to say? You guys can unmute yourselves if you have yourself muted, because we’re going to close up. It’s almost 8:30 dead on, so.

Jen:            Well I appreciate it very much, Allison, being able to share the information and if anyone has anything they want to talk to at some point down the road I can obviously be reached through Allison.

Allison:       Your slide about how to get the profile, how to do the profile.

Jen:            Yep, absolutely.

Allison:       Okay and then I’ll send it out to everybody. That would be great. All right, thank you everybody, so much for being here.

Thanks for listening to Practicing with the Masters for dentists, with your host, Dr. Allison Watts. For more about how Allison Watts and Transformational Practices can help you create a successful and fulfilling practice and life, visit transformationalpractices.com.