Imagine a NASCAR race where the winning car ignores the checkered flag and continues to hurdle around the racetrack at 200 miles an hour, even though all the other competitors have packed up their cars and trailers, and helicoptered away from the track to their next destination. The pit crew members have gone away and the crowd in the stands has driven home. And yet, here’s this one lone race car, passing turn one, turn two, turn three, turn four, endlessly, until he finally smacks into the wall or runs out of gas.
He won, but he didn’t realize he won.
He didn’t think he won.
Because he didn’t think he deserved to win.
I see so many people in the dental industry who look as though they have it all. Great practice, celebrity like career, great income, the perfect car, a monster home in THE gated community and the seemingly perfect relationship. They won the game, but they don’t feel like they’re winning on a day-to-day level. They live in what I call obligation—they spend their entire day trying to justify their success. There’s no freedom with that mentality. They live, and I did too, in a realm of justification, decision, and obligation. If only they would raise their HDLs, they would be living in a world of peace, freedom, and choice. These talented overachievers are by and large not strangers to personal and professional development. They’ve done Tony Robbins. They’ve watched The Secret. They’ve read all the books. And yet, they feel plateaued in life (plateau is just a fancy word for stuck) and they feel like there’s got to be something more out there.
They’re right. And that’s what I call HDL. They have the toys…but they don’t have the time to play with them. They’ve got the partner…but don’t have the mental space to really be intimate with them. They’re so focused on winning the game that they don’t realize they’ve already won!
As a practice development specialist I’m always being challenged by our best clients to take them to the next level. After 15 years of doing this I often wonder when I will hit my plateau. Just when you think you’re done the next thing shows up!
After mastering the ability to have our clients get their time and money handled, I naively thought that’s all they needed to make the difference for them. If we got their business handled, their personal finances straightened out, their time management issues dealt with, and helped them hire and retain great teams so that the entire business was producing great results, the dentists wouldn’t have to do these things themselves. They’d be happier, and so would everyone around them—their team members, their spouses, their children. Everyone would be holding hands and singing Kumbaya, right?
Wrong.
So I thought, what’s really going on here? I’m really good at transforming businesses then doubling and tripling gross income. I’m really good at getting teams to be happy and getting clients to be happy. But there’s still something missing. Why can’t I take these hard-working, successful dentists and transform them into happy campers? Then I realized I was transforming their businesses and their teams, but I wasn’t transforming the dentists’ thinking. I came to realize that how you think dictates how you speak and what you do. I was all wrapped up in what the dentists were doing. I wasn’t paying attention to what they were saying, and as a result, I had no idea about what they were thinking. One day I had the breakthrough awareness that people’s actions—and therefore their results—always march in exact lockstep with their beliefs about what they deserved.
It’s not true that in life, you get what you deserve.
Instead, you get what you think you deserve.
Nothing more, nothing less.
If you truly think you deserve a high income and a large net worth, that’s what you will have. If you don’t think you deserve those things, you can work just as hard or even ten times harder than the next person, and you’ll still come up short. This is why I found the seemingly average dentist may have less technology and be clinically inferior than the dentist right next door but makes double and enjoys life more.
The same thing is true with having a healthy, attractive body. If you think you deserve it, you’ll have it. If you don’t think you deserve it, you won’t, no matter how many hours you labor in the gym, no matter how carefully you count your calories. Just ain’t gonna happen.
The same holds true with having a great relationship. Think you deserve one? Then you’ll have one. Think you don’t? Then you won’t. Having breakthroughs in this area has saved my clients millions in alimony.
The awareness in my thinking was simply this: We have in life exactly what we think we deserve.
So success doesn’t come from working harder, or working smarter, or working around the clock, or working just four hours a week. Success comes from thinking that you deserve success. And that’s when I came up with the concept of the Healthy Deserve Level, and that’s what my latest book is all about.
A Healthy Deserve Level is a state where you think you deserve a nice life, however you define a nice life. It could be living in a beautiful home in a great neighborhood. It could be having a great relationship with your spouse and children. It could be success in the workplace. It could be a big bank account. Or it could be all of these things. We coach dentists to establish a standard they want to create for their patients that we call a “healthy mouth baseline.” When you go to the doctor for a checkup, you want the doctor to tell you that your body is healthy and strong. When you go to your finance advisor, you want to hear that your portfolio is healthy!
But we never viewed our lives in terms of a Healthy Deserve Level…until now. Want a quick barometer of where your Deserve Level is? Look around your life. Whatever you have is what you think you’re entitled to. Nothing more, nothing less. One of the most exciting movies in recent years is, of course, The Secret. And the secret of The Secret is the law of attraction—whatever you talk about, you attract. But to go beyond the secret of The Secret…to the real secret of life…if you don’t allow yourself to deserve something, you’re not going to be able to think about it. If you don’t think about it, you won’t talk about it. And if you don’t talk about it, it’s never going to materialize in your life. That’s because you’ll never take the actions necessary to make it happen.
The law of attraction will not happen if you truly don’t believe you deserve it. If you truly don’t believe you deserve, then it just won’t work
Everybody’s focused on what they’re going to do next. I want to know what you’re going to think about next, because that tells me what’s going to happen next in your life.
When JFK said that America was going to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, he didn’t know how we were going to do it. The day Kennedy gave that speech, he didn’t know what actions were necessary to take or even if there was a space scientist in the entire United States who knew either. But JFK, speaking for America, believed that we as a society deserved to put a man on the moon. JFK believed that our capitalistic, free society was superior to that of the Communist society of the Soviet Union, and that we deserved to win.
And we did.
Roger Bannister was a medical student who ran during his lunch hour and set the goal of breaking the four-minute mile. Of course, back then, everybody said that a human being couldn’t run a mile in under four minutes. It was never going to happen. Bannister proved them wrong. Why? Because he took the actions necessary to run a sub-four-minute mile. Why did he take those actions? Because he thought that he was capable of running that quickly. In his mind, he deserved to run that quickly—and he did. Roger Bannister had a Healthy Deserve Level when it came to running the four-minute mile. When you look at the rest of his life, it appears he had that same high HDL across the board. He was a successful physician in London for decades, and had a successful family life, as well.
You get what you think you deserve, because what you think about dictates what you say and what you do. If you don’t believe you deserve something, it’s never going to happen. In fact, you’ll do everything in your power to sabotage the possibility of getting what you want. It’s perverse, but it’s human nature.
Because it’s been such a blind spot for people, I believe HDL is the critical piece in the discussion about how to get what you want,. We all want to have great relationships and strong, healthy, attractive bodies, with more money, more time, and more freedom. I’m no different from anyone else. But back in the day I had to learn this stuff the hard way, I didn’t think I was entitled to make a lot of money in a short amount of time. It just wasn’t in my realm of deserve. So I created my business in such a way that I would have to work hard to justify the income I was earning—until I finally thought I was just going to explode. Back then, I couldn’t get to where I wanted to go because my configuration and belief about what I deserved was so poor. I didn’t think I deserved free time, freedom to be with my family, a lot of money in a short amount of time. I’ve transformed my thinking, and I’ve transformed my Deserve Level to the point where I now have an HDL that allows me to have both money and time. And I don’t have to choose between work and financial success on the one hand and a successful marriage and family on the other. If you deserve it, you can have it. And that’s true whether you’re a dentist or a ditch digger. It’s that simple.
The key to HDL is that we all want to feel good. That’s ultimately what we want. We want to feel good about the money we make. We want to feel good about the career we build. We want to feel good about our relationships. It’s all ultimately about feeling good. That’s why HDL is critical. Because, if you feel good about yourself, if you feel that you deserve things, they’ll come to you. You’re probably thinking this sounds too simple. But that’s just your ego telling you that you don’t deserve the benefits of what I’m going to share with you!
So why doesn’t everyone have a high HDL?
Maybe you were raised by people who modeled a low HDL for you. But it’s all too simple to play the blame game. I’m going to share with you now what I’ve discovered to be the number one reason why people have a low HDL. And it’s got nothing to do with what happened when they were growing up, if their parents were alcoholics, abusive or Father Knows Best types. It all comes down to this: Your ability to make and keep agreements with yourself, others and to your values. If your ability to do this is high, your HDL will be high. If you act in a manner not in keeping with your agreements, like having sexual relationships outside of marriage, or cheating in your financial life, you’re going to pay a price for it. Maybe not in divorce court, and maybe not with the IRS. But you’ll pay for it in the corner of your mind where your HDL lives. The great part about this is that if you have broken agreements, you can step up and take responsibility for them and restore your agreements. If you keep breaking your agreements your word will lose all of its power and your deserve level will dramatically suffer.
Low integrity creates a downward spiral in your HDL. Or to put it more positively, your HDL is directly related to your ability to have impeccable integrity. Integrity is not about being right or wrong or good or bad. According to Webster, the definition of Integrity is (noun) the possession of firm principles, completeness and wholeness, the state of being sound and undamaged. We all have areas of our personal and professional lives according to this definition of integrity that need attention.
If you want the short course on HDL, just stop doing whatever that thing is that you know is not creating wholeness or completeness. Only you know for yourself. It is going to take some courage to confront these things but on the other side of it is pure freedom. Your HDL moves in lockstep with your integrity.
Do you owe someone on your team a review that you promised? Have you committed to yourself to go to the gym and have made a perpetual wrong turn into Cold Stone Creamery? Have you been doing wallet biopsies on your patients and not informing them of the disease and infection that resides in their mouth?
You can’t earn your way into a high HDL. You can’t love your way into a high HDL. You can’t diet and exercise your way into a high HDL. That’s like putting icing on cowpie.
The end game is what you do, because that’s what gets you what you want. But the beginning—the place to put your efforts—is on how you think about what you deserve, because again, that dictates what you declare to the world and what you actually do. It’s just radical common sense.
HDL is what I call Radical Common Sense. Life is so brutally simple that we actually have to work hard to make it simple. So I’m trying help you to cut the curve on this thing. You don’t have to go to a four-day seminar and party and clap your hands until two in the morning. You don’t have to do anything—just stay focused on your HDL, and you’ll get it in a second. Sometimes I ask people how long it took them to quit smoking. They might say something like, “It took me twenty-five years.” I say, “No, it only took you a moment to quit smoking, once you chose to do it.” So it’s all about what choices you’re making in terms of…altogether now…what you think you deserve.
Raise your HDL—you’ve already won, but you didn’t look up to see the checkered flag. And instead, your life may feel like you’re just spinning around that track and you don’t know what to do next. Rev your engine, enjoy the journey and acknowledge the wins you receive each day.
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