Hello, everyone. Looking forward to having you this evening. Thank you so much for joining us. We are gonna dive in tonight, and I have a question for you.

What's one small change, I want you to think about this, that if repeated consistently could completely transform your practice or your life?

One small change.

And, as you think about that during this webinar, we are going to have the guru here walk us through all kinds of ways to make small changes that are super impactful as well.

Most dentists and teams already know what to do. Right? The real challenge is doing it consistently, especially when it comes to what we always hear systems and habits and and pressures that we have every day that move us away from those systems and habits. Right?

In this webinar, one move habits, doctor Mendelson explores how meaningful transformation doesn't come from massive overhauls, comes from small intentional shifts repeated over time, and that's really exciting. He's gonna walk us through some really great content tonight, especially with the habit loop and habit stacking. We're gonna learn basic routines and improving accountability and really building systems that's that actually stick. And if you walk away from this webinar with just one system that sticks, that will be a a huge transformation in your practice.

Doctors and teams tonight are going to uncover real practical ways to close workflow gaps, strength and consistency. I think that's the key to success we all know because we do so many, you know, routine tasks in dentistry and create a lasting change both personally and professionally. So without further ado, let me introduce our wonderful speaker this evening, doctor Martin Mendelson, a leadership coach, speaker, founder of Metamorphosis Coaching, and known for helping dental teams build cultures of accountability, high performance, and huge success. Doctor Medelson combines mindset science with practice oh, sorry, with practical leadership, strategies that can immediately apply today to your practice and to your teams, creator of the team framework, thoughts, emotions, actions, manifestation, and former faculty member at Spear Education and Nova Southeastern University, and the author of one move makes all the difference.

So I still have my bookmark. I'm not completely finished. I love it. I'm hoping you're gonna talk about some of the classes you do as well, doctor Mendelson. Joining one of your classes was life changing for me. So I'm really excited about this topic, really thankful to have you here, and I will let you take it from here.

Awesome. Well, thank you very much, Sheila, and thank you everybody for joining us this evening. I mean, the truth of the matter is time is one of our most precious commodities there is. So it's not lost on me that people are calling in or or clicking in from all over the place to to spend some time with us.

And, of course, this will be available through Pearl later. And I wanna thank not only Sheila, but also Pearl itself. I have a deep connection to this company, which I'll talk about a little later. But, also, I I do wanna remind everybody, as you might imagine, I am gonna be using some of Pearl's technology as examples for habit science.

I think that is that should be obvious. However, here's the thing. There's so much they have to offer that I do strongly encourage you whether you're a current user or not because they just came out with some amazing things like perio charting and templated notes, and it's just mind blowing stuff. So whether you're a current user or not, I do recommend that you follow the demo links later, to find out more information.

So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and get started. Let me get myself, settled here, and, we're gonna get started in just a moment. I need to share the appropriate screen, and we'll get started. Well, let's go ahead and get started with this evening's discussion, shall we?

And so we're gonna be talking about creating lasting change. So in essence, we're gonna be talking about going on a journey. And by the time you leave here this evening on this hours or so journey, you're literally gonna have a road map of how to accomplish and facilitate habit change within your practice as well as within your life. And so my promise to you here this evening, ladies and gentlemen, is that this is gonna be all tips, tricks, and tools.

It's gonna be filled with all killer and no filler to allow you to help better understand habit change for your practice and your life. Now that's my promise to you, but I need you to make a commitment to me. And what I'm gonna ask you to do is leave your yeah buts at the door because, look, you all are engaged in successful practices. And so your success has been garnered up to this point by whatever it is you you have been doing.

And so some of the things that we may be presenting tonight may be different than what you were doing, but that doesn't necessarily make them wrong now, does it? And so what research shows is when we're in a negatively primed space and we're thinking, yeah, that's not gonna work. Yeah. But I do it differently.

Yeah. But yeah. But yeah. But we end up not being able to listen and literally learn the content of any speaker's information.

So I invite you to leave your yeah buts at the door. And as a thank you for being present and leaving your yeah buts at the door, I'm gonna give you several presents at the end of our time together. For example, these slides and some other handouts to help you in your self study that we'll be talking about as we go through our time together. And so the truth of the matter is is that we only have a limited amount of time here this evening, and skills are skills.

And skills take time to develop. And whether those are skills of the hand, skills of the thought, or skills of the lips, we have to give those thoughts credit because we're all on our own journeys. Now in order for you to better understand my journey and and why and or how I even have the wherewithal or even, I guess, would say the authority to be chatting with you here this evening, we kinda need to take a step back in time.

Twenty three years ago this next month, to June of two thousand three.

And when I started practicing in private practice, this was my life. And so, you're looking at a picture of the practice window, this is my nephew Steven looking out that practice window. So, if you do the math, he's in his mid-30s today.

And I never had an intention of having a life outside clinical dentistry, but the universe had different plans for me. And just shy of ten years into my clinical career, I started to have issues with my hand.

And within six months of those first symptoms, I was out of practice of dentistry for good. I had to figure out what was next for me and I had no idea where to go. And I talk in my in person lectures about a defining moment at the breakfast table with not being able to open up a Sweet'N Low packet that led to seventeen months of unemployment.

Go go try to find a job when you're in your mid thirties. Too young for this, too old for this, that, too inexperienced for this, too inexperienced for that.

And so I ended up with basically what was three to three and a half, if you will, positions that led us to spending time here this evening. The first was that I ended up being the liaison at a mid to large size commercial dental laboratory. And I ended up making over sixteen thousand, yes, I counted, calls on cases. You had questions, we had questions. Little did I know it was the beginnings of my journey into communication.

Next, I joined Vida in North America. You know, the shade guy people? And I don't know about you, but they didn't teach me in dental school how to lead a team of twenty three sales and marketing people and have a budget oversight of a budget the size of over twenty million dollars. I wasn't taught that.

I had to learn real quick, and that's when I started to learn leadership. And then in two thousand eleven, I joined Spear Education, and I'm very proud of the tenure that I had at Spear. I helped grow the study clubs to what they are today, the faculty club to what it is today. And along the way, I realized that I was missing something.

Because what they were asking me to do around halfway through my tenure was to coach, and I'll put that in air quotes, doctors, study club leaders, faculty club members, and I really needed to better understand what that meant.

And so it started on this journey of executive coaching, team coaching, team facilitation, happiness studies. I'm currently engaged in a course with Wharton executive education to learn more about the neuroscience of leadership.

And so all of these experiences, decades of experiences, decades of certification, decades of conversation have led us here to this evening to spend time together.

Because tonight, my role is as your coach. And a coach is trained to help you go from a to b, whatever b is for you, through active listening and through asking a number of empowering questions.

So in other words, I I kinda hope to build a bridge. So the standing joke is that I've been trained to ask you questions twenty ways to Sunday to get you out of your own way to build that bridge.

So tonight, we're talking about building a bridge to better habits. And so when we think about habits, we need to kinda come to an understanding. Because if you're here, I've got to assume you're interested in instituting a new one, changing a habit, maybe optimizing a habit. Right? But what is a habit?

And so I think we need to go to the dictionary and understand the definition of a habit. A habit is, as you see on the screen, a routine or practice performed regularly, an automatic response to a specific situation.

In other words, it's something done repeatedly for the purpose of performing the action itself. So in other words, a habit is the activity, not a result.

So getting in shape, losing a couple pounds, reading more, taking more time with your family.

It's the habit that leads to those actual outcomes.

Because getting in shape isn't the action, is it? Going to the gym is the action. Eating less is the action.

The habit leads to the result.

So you're looking at an image of a gym. Right?

And so anybody who goes to a gym knows that on January first of every year, the gym is packed because everybody makes a New Year's resolution to be more fit. That's one of the top New Year's resolutions every year. But what percentage of people do you think abandon their New Year's resolutions?

According to Forbes Magazine, believe it or not, it's eighty percent.

But here's the kicker, by what month do they fail in their habit quest? Anybody have an idea?

The answer is by February.

So the question is why? We're gonna talk about that this evening. But what I wanna say to you is if you wanna be great, you need great habits. In other words, you need the actions to lead to the results, and that's a very different way of looking at it.

And so what I'm gonna propose you do is I want you to think about two habits that you would like to change. Now given what I just said, yes, I understand what I'm about to ask you is to think of an outcome, but we'll get there. So I want you to think of a personal habit and a practice habit. So maybe your personal habit is to drink more water.

Maybe you wanna start drinking water more regularly, change how much you're drinking, or maybe optimize your hydration.

What about a practice habit? Maybe hold daily huddles with your team, maybe you wanna start those.

If you're not doing them, maybe you wanna change them or maybe as I'm gonna talk about to you this evening through Pearl, maybe you can optimize them.

So as part of self study and the PDF, documents that I can send you at the end as one of my gifts, you're gonna be able to document, okay, what are these habits? Why did you select them? And what would it mean to you if you can engage in these habits regularly?

Okay. So this is the start of our journey. We gotta put a a peg in the sand to understand what it is we wanna change first. But how are we gonna change?

The truth is according to James Clear who wrote Atomic Habits, who's a book I highly recommend you read, there's three layers of behavior change. There's the outcome, the process to get to the outcome, and the identity that you feel based on those outcomes.

And what he says is, based on those layers, there's two types of habits. There's outcome based habits where you start with the outcome like getting in shape.

You then think of the process. I'm gonna go to the gym a couple times a week. And then you say to yourself, I'm a person that is fit or cares about my health. So it's an outside in representation.

Outcome process identity. What he talks about is the fact and the research that identity based habits are the things that are gonna get you going. So identity based habits would be something like, okay. I am a person that cares about my health.

Therefore, I'm going to go to the gym, which will result in becoming more fit or maybe losing a couple pounds. So this is an inside out approach.

And what mister Clear says is that the ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity.

So which is it for you, ladies and gentlemen?

I am the type of person who wants x y z, the outcome, or I'm the type of person who is x y z, a person who identifies with being fit, whose process is going to the gym, whose outcome is losing a few pounds.

So the ultimate question then, therefore, is it the number on the scale or the person getting on the scale?

And so what I'm saying though is so many times we keep focusing on the wrong thing.

Now we've just been talking about your own internal thoughts and your own internal habits. And so if you've been reading between the lines, we're talking just about you. But when it comes to a dental practice, however, it's not it's not just about you now, is it? It's about everybody else on your team. And the diversity of the people on your team, in all ways you can define that term, makes things magical. And so you've heard the term there is no I in team or shall I say the phrase, but you know what is in team? It's me.

And all the mes within your organization, which include you, bear responsibility for the thoughts that go on between their ears that ultimately guide as what we'll call later a lagging indicator of success in practice. And as Peter Drucker, the management expert says, culture eats strategy for breakfast.

So you can have all the strategy in the world, all the processes in the world, all the standard operating procedures in the world, but if you don't have the culture within your practice that this is the way we do things, I e the identity, yeah, good luck with that.

That's one of the reasons why I have such a joy going all over North America working with teams of all different sizes to help create an alliance, a culture around who are we as individuals that are going to engage within these processes to drive positive outcomes for us in the future.

And in order to do that, we need to kind of take a quick step back, and I need to share with you some of my philosophies.

Now my philosophies are based on a book called Man's Search for Meaning that was written by a man by the name of doctor Viktor Frankl.

Doctor Frankl was a neurologist, a psychiatrist, and a holocaust survivor. He survived the horrors of Auschwitz for years to come out the other side to become an internationally known thought leader. And the quote that's attributed to him goes something like this.

Between stimulus and response, there's a space.

In this space lies our freedom to choose our response, and in our response lies our growth and our freedom.

So what doctor Frankl would tell you, a Holocaust survivor, is something very important when it comes to dental teams because every single thing that happens within your four walls is technically neutral.

Something happens, it's a stimulus.

But between the stimulus and your response or your team's response, there's a space.

And in that space lies our freedom to choose our response, I e, what we're gonna do. And in our response lies our growth and our freedom. My eyes have been opened in my executive course with Wharton talking about threshold theory and understanding why teams act the way they do versus you as doctors sitting there thinking, why would somebody not do that? Isn't that obvious? It's not to them.

And if we don't have what's called psychological safety, I e, the ability for us to put up our hand and say, Houston, we got a problem, following our standard operating procedures, we're never gonna get to where we want to go as a practice.

So as a tip, trick, and tool, I wanna introduce you to my team framework. My team framework is at the core of the book that I just wrote. One move makes all the difference. I wanna define what this acronym stands for, and then we're gonna take a step back and breathe life into this relative to you as a human being and as a member of the dental community.

So team stands for thoughts, drive emotions, that create actions that manifest results. This is where the there is no I n t team, but there is me comes from.

So what I invite you to do is stop, and I want you to pause.

Maybe even take a breath.

And I want you to think about your dearest friend that you don't live with, your dearest friend that you don't live with. I'm gonna share with you a picture of one of mine, and it's a bit ironic. So here's one of my best friends. His name is doctor Kyle Stanley.

If you happen to know about doctor Kyle Stanley, you will understand and know that he is the clinical cofounder of this company, Pearl.

He showed me this technology in twenty twenty before AI was ubiquitous in the lexicon of today's vernacular, and I was blown away. And it's such an honor to be able to kinda carry the torch for Pearl and in his honor moving forward. Because Kyle is more than just a friend. He's also a business partner. We actually run one of the only courses for mental health and dentistry in the world. And we're about to launch a nonprofit tomorrow called the Dental Mental Coalition to support the mental wellness of dental professionals.

So who is your Kyle?

So today is what? Tuesday? Right?

The day that we're meeting for this webinar. Now, let's pretend you texted your Kyle last Tuesday and you haven't heard back from him yet. Now, I asked you to think about your dearest friend you don't live with, so naturally, thoughts of care and concern will come to your mind. But let's take those thoughts of care and concern. Let's put them aside for just a moment.

What thoughts might you be having about your dearest friend Kyle's inability to text you back over the course of a week?

When I do this live, I hear things like, well, he doesn't like me, or I said something, or he's mad at me, or he's too busy. Right? I saw you go to dinner on Instagram with the Joneses. You had time to go to dinner with the Joneses. Didn't have time to text me back. Right?

What kind of emotions would that drive? Anger, frustration, resentment. What kind of actions would that drive? Well, it depends what kind of person you are.

Maybe you're gonna send your Kyle an angry text or a passive aggressive text Or if you're analytical because there's none of us in dentistry. Right? You're gonna count the exact number of days it took your Kyle to text you back, and when they finally do, you're gonna count the exact number of days to text them back. You'll show that.

But see, I tricked you.

How does that action manifest maintaining or elevating said dearest friendship with your Kyle? Doesn't work so well now, does it?

Now, let's change the story.

Given the thoughts you just had, now you find out that something bad happened to your Kyle, something not good.

Based on the thoughts you just had, now what are you thinking? Well, based on doing this live over and over and over again, the g word usually comes up or guilt.

What kind of emotions is gonna come out when you find out something bad happened to your your Kyle? Love, care, compassion. What kind of actions is that gonna drive? Well, it depends on the situation scenario. Maybe you're gonna go over and take care you know, help take care of the kids or the pets or bring them dinner, etcetera.

How does that manifest? Maintain or elevating said dearest friendship, you're Kyle. Well, that's a bit different now, isn't it? But see, here's what I wanna tell you.

This is universal.

This works in any situation, and it can also work in reverse or meet, if you will.

You come upon a situation that stresses you out. You come upon a situation where your team members is not following your standard operating procedure. They're not following the habit that we're gonna establish.

Well, what do you really wanna manifest right now? You wanna get that person to do the habit. Well, what action is gonna bring you forward?

What emotion is gonna support that action and what thought is gonna give that emotion hope?

This is the kind of work, excuse me, I do with teams all over North America.

And this is transformative when we understand that our thoughts always come first.

And in the words of James Clear, your outcome are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits, your knowledge of your learning habits, your weight of your eating habits.

But what I'm gonna really tell you, ladies and gentlemen, within the guise of dental practice, all outcomes are a lagging measure of your thoughts, and all habits are a lagging measure of your identity.

And so what I wanna challenge you to do in the next layer of your self study at the conclusion of our time together, I want you to create an identity statement.

I am the kind of person who is a, fill in the blank.

I want you to ask yourself, how committed are you to making these changes? Scale from one to ten. One meaning not at all, ten meaning I'm in. And why did you give it that number? Why is it so important to you and for you?

So let's now talk about habits themselves.

And what we're gonna do is we're gonna tell a story about habit science that has a dental origin. Did you know that?

And so let me ask you a question.

When you get up in the morning, other than maybe using the restroom or maybe checking your phone, what's the first thing you do when you get up in the morning, other than those two maybe?

If you're like most people and not because you're a dental professional, what are you gonna do? You're gonna brush your teeth.

Why?

Well, there's a whole story connected to that, and I'm excited to share that with you now.

Because there is a connection to habits, habit science, and marketing to dentistry.

And so I wanna introduce you to this man. Do you happen to know who he is?

You actually should because he, in some ways, helps to support our profession each and every day.

His name is Claude c Hopkins, and I came upon a story when I read another book on habits called The Power of Habits by Duhigg.

And before I tell you what he did, let me share with you the state of dental health in the United States in the early part of last century. So around World War one, young men in the United States, age eighteen to thirty five, needed a minimum of twelve teeth to serve in World War one, according to the draft. Yet, twenty four out of every one thousand recruits were rejected for not having enough teeth. Can you imagine?

Now in Britain, on the part of our allies, seventy percent of British recruits and the men at home of that same age were in need of dental treatment. If that isn't crazy and let me tell you something else.

US dental officers performed, you ready for this, up to three hundred and eighty five thousand extractions during World War one.

And when the US entered World War one in April of nineteen seventeen, the US army only had eighty six dental officers, and that exploded to forty six hundred by the end of the war.

Now why do you think this was the case? Why was everybody having terrible teeth? You know why?

Because nobody brushed their teeth. It was just accepted that your teeth would fall out of your head and nobody had the habit of brushing their teeth when they got up in the morning.

So enter in mister Hopkins.

So before Claude c Hopkins, only seven percent of Americans owned a tube of toothpaste. Now if you've ever gone to Walgreens, CVS, Rite Aid, Walmart, you know that just because you buy something in the pharmacy aisle or area doesn't mean you use it.

So I really wonder what percentage of Americans actually used toothpaste versus had it in their medicine cabinet.

So a decade later, sixty five percent of Americans had a tube of toothpaste in their medicine cabinet. And by the time World War two came around, the US military downgraded their concerns about the recruit's teeth because why? So many soldiers were brushing their teeth every day. How the heck did that happen?

Well, mister Hopkins made it happen.

And so he got people to brush their teeth. We take this for granted today. Can you imagine? Only seven percent had a tube of toothpaste in their in their in their bathrooms.

There wasn't an Internet back there. Back then, there was no modern communications. So what the heck did he do?

I'm gonna make a bold statement. If you understand what mister Hopkins did, you can change any habit.

And so there's some additional modern research based nuances that we're gonna talk about, but the concepts are still the same. You know what he did?

He created a reward for brushing your teeth.

Does your tongue do your teeth pass the tongue test?

Would you like a clean mouth taste for hours?

These are real marketing campaigns, magazine and newspaper ads that within a decade caused Americans to go from seven percent utilization of toothpaste in their bathrooms to sixty five percent. So what he's quoted as saying is I've made a million dollars for myself on Pepcidin because, quote, I learned the right human psychology.

This is World War one, World War two time frame. Do you know what a million dollars is today versus back then? It's multiple millions of dollars.

So what did he do?

So as Charles Duhigg talks about in the power of habit, the psychology was grounded in two basic rules. Number one, he found a simple and obvious cue.

And number two, he clearly identified the rewards.

And once again, cue mister Hopkins, if you get those elements right, it was like magic.

So Hopkins had a conception of the habit loop based on selling Pepsin and toothpaste. The cue was getting up in the morning, the routine was brushing your teeth, and the reward was removing the film so that your teeth could pass the tongue test.

And hear me out. The rewards are incredibly important because rewards cause chemical changes in your brain, as Duhigg calls them neurological cravings. And the anticipation of the reward is what pushes you forward when you're faced or presented with a specific cue. So the more modern incarnation of the habit loop is cue, come upon a time frame, craving, you desire that reward, you therefore respond in that action, and then you reap the reward.

So oftentimes I talk about this, you know, I don't happen to drink anymore, but you get home from a difficult day, you wanna unwind, your cue is walking through the door, your craving is a glass of wine, your response is having one, and your reward is your buzz.

And so although it's a habit loop, I want you to understand something.

It's a linear progression. We hit the cue. We create the craving. We have a response.

We create the reward. So, yes, it's a loop, but it's a linear timeline.

So if you think toothpaste was wild enough, let me introduce you to the second guest this evening.

Do you know who this guy is?

No? Well, he invented this stuff. Does that help?

Well, let me tell you a story about a product I know you've heard of before. So in nineteen ninety six, almost thirty years ago, there was this little company called Procter and Gamble that was looking to make this stuff that you see on the screen. It was a really cool chemical that literally eliminated odors and made things odorless.

Good idea. But they ended up having a big problem because of how they marketed it because it just simply neutralized things. It didn't replace it with anything.

So have you ever been to somebody's house that maybe has two dozen cats or a bunch of gerbils? No disrespect to cat owners. I'm a pet owner. I have a dog.

So you can smell it because it's not your house, but often the people in the home are nose blind to these scents.

So this company was marketing this by telling people gets bad smells out of fabrics.

But the problem was, how do you even know that you had a bad smell to begin with, and then what was the reward? Like, that it didn't really smell anymore? Well, that's kind of a neutral thing. Is that really a reward?

And so what they ended up doing was they flipped their marketing to cleans life's smells.

So I bet you figured out by now what product I'm talking about. It's this stuff, Febreze.

So the cue was wanting to get bad smells out of fabrics or shall we say cleaning, and the reward was that things were clean.

Well, that still didn't help them, and their sales were tanking. What they discovered was people were buying it and then not buying it again. So they had this big spike and then bam. It went back down.

So they didn't create a reward that spoke to people in their initial product launch.

So let's talk about reward within dentistry.

And so what's the reason that you come to the office every day?

What was the reason?

You know, when I work with teams, I do a facilitated exercise called the why.

And so have you asked your team, why are we here as a practice?

Why are you here in your role?

And in your role, what do you do to put the why into action?

And what one word or phrase sums up your role? So we do that exercise, and the why exercise helps to reveal whether team members are operating from outcome based habits or identity based habits.

So from less than two weeks ago, let me share with you some examples. Outcome based thinking states, quote, I answer phones. Quote, I schedule patients. Quote, I sterilize rooms.

Identity based thinking or statements say, I quote, I create trust.

I reduce patient anxiety.

I help people move toward health.

So this distinction matters because people consistently act in alignment with the identity they believe they hold. So this exercise exposes whether someone sees themselves as a task doer or a meaningful contributor to the patient experience. And when that identity shifts, behavior naturally begins to shift with it. In other words, the why exercise is not just about uncovering people what people do.

It's uncovering who they believe they are inside that organization that we call the practice. So it's very important to facilitate change.

So why are you here, doctors? Is it to provide great dentistry?

Well, let me tell you something.

Until our patients say yes, there isn't any dentistry that we're gonna be able to do.

And so when patients actually understand what you see, they're more engaged.

And so with Pearl and the visualization of radiographs, with the ability to show the patients bone loss, to show them incipient lesions, to show them the things that we see, we end up not only saving time, but guess what, we build trust and we help patients make better decisions sooner.

And so when we get up there and we talk dental speak to patients who are not dental professionals and we show them x rays, that means nothing to them. What would it be like if we could create this educational and objective methodology or display if you will through Pearl to help them influence them to say yes for the treatment that we know is needed and warranted.

Because the data is very clear.

When people see what it is we see in a way they can understand, their acceptance of endo goes up, their acceptance of restorative goes up, Their acceptance of scaling and root planning goes up. Restorative treatments, implants, crowns, the data doesn't lie.

The data clearly shows that this technology helps to build trust. Now, when Kyle showed this to me in twenty twenty, nobody was talking about AI, but today, that's all anybody talks about.

So, this to your advantage. But you know what I'm gonna tell you?

Change doesn't happen overnight.

And so we need to be mindful of just what we're looking to reward, particularly within a clinical setting.

Because here's another dose of reality. As you see on the screen, change does not happen overnight, particularly within the confines of a dental practice.

And I'm a huge fan of this man's work, as you've seen before.

And the author discusses that the reason why it's called Atomic Habits is because small changes lead to big results.

The author asserts that mathematically, if we can just improve anything by one percent per day, per year, we're thirty seven percent more effective by the time we're done with that year. Another way to put it, the way I like to say it is one will always be greater than zero.

So even small efforts will yield huge results.

So in the next layer of your self study, I want you to ask yourself based on the personal and practice habit you selected, What's the cue? I e, when are you gonna do it? What's the craving? Why do you wanna do it?

What's the response? What are you gonna do? And what's the reward? How are you gonna know that you got the job well done?

So everybody knows that when it comes to things like dieting or physical fitness, nobody expects to go to the gym once and become fit. Nobody expects to go on a diet for a day and lose twenty pounds even with g l b one.

Nobody expects to save a hundred dollars one time and become a millionaire. Life doesn't work that way.

And so what mister Clear says, I love this, is that good habits make time your ally, and bad habits make time your enemy.

So I wanna show you one of his concepts that's incredibly important, and this is called the plateau of latent potential.

And this describes change within any organization, including a thing we call dental practice.

So this is a graph that you see that's results versus time.

And so the straight line is what people think should happen. We've made this change, things should happen.

The curved line is what actually happens.

We make some changes, we talk about it, not much happens, not much happens, but when we stick with it, zoom, we end up getting to a better and and bigger place than we ever could have imagined if we stuck with it.

However, most people get lost in the valley of disappointment.

And the valley of disappointment is your failure of New Year's resolutions by eighty percent of the people by February. They all get lost in the valley of disappointment because they don't stick with it, because they don't understand the science of habit change.

So we need to focus on the systems and the rewards, not the result, or else we're gonna get caught in the valley of disappointment because the result may be in the future as a lagging indicator. So it's the systems, it's the processes, it's the cues that make most of the difference.

So now we're gonna take a step deeper, and we're gonna talk about the four laws of behavior change.

The first is making it obvious. When are we gonna engage with the cue?

The second is make it attractive. Make it attractive enough that people want it. They crave it.

The third is making it easy so that there's a response, an action that isn't some mountain of effort.

And last but not least, make it satisfying so that we are rewarding the response because what's rewarded is repeated.

And so to put this another way, when are we gonna do it?

Why should we do it? How should we do it? And what the hell difference would it make? So the example I'm gonna use utilizing Pearl technology is practice intelligence.

So this is the very first AI powered clinical performance platform, and it's amazing.

Because what we're doing is we're combining data from practice management systems, imaging systems, and AI powered X-ray analysis from the past eighteen months of your data to deliver clear and actionable insights. We're gonna talk about enhancing your schedule by identifying clinical needs. We're gonna talk about insights that support everybody from management to hygiene to docs, systems.

And we're gonna talk about daily printouts with unscheduled treatment, with predicted undiagnosed treatment, with patients due for radiographs, patients due for perinatal probings, patients overdue for unscheduled hygiene visits.

This is your data that turns into daily opportunities.

But when we think about the laws of habit change, in the past, we would get stuck in in law three, make it easy. It wasn't easy.

And so, you know, industry standard was people were spending thirty minutes to two hours a day.

One hour on average per day, five hours per week, twenty hours per month.

And this is a significant burden. Nobody wants to do this.

But what would it be like if we could overcome number three, make it easy, where we get a printout every day that we can bring into our huddle that talks about unscheduled treatment, talks about undiagnosed treatment, talks about who's due for x rays, who's due for periodontal probings. The predicted area that you see, the right hand column, that is predicted by AI based on the imaging with nothing noted by any member of the team in the treatment plan. You could even consider these your watches, if you will.

And so this enables you to look at your schedule at a glance and hover over any one of these people to figure out who needs x rays, who needs periodontal charting, who needs a cleaning, what are the treatment opportunities.

Because if you get a sudden cancellation in your schedule or let's say you're in the doctor's column and something changes and now the patient leaves and you got all this time available to you, you can literally look within seconds and know who's in hygiene, what do they need, what do they do for next, and even what they have remaining as insurance reimbursement, which we'll get to later if it's if that's applicable to your practice.

So, let's use this as an example to talk about behavior change. So, the first law is make it obvious. So, this is about habit integration versus habit change.

And so listen, when we think about instituting change in the dental practice, please don't assume that you're going to need to throw everything out you've been doing and weave in some new and different series of behaviors.

If you take away anything from today, I want you to remember this.

It's not about change. It's about integration. You are already treatment planning patients. You are already seeing patients. You are already preparing for the day. Whether you're doing a huddle or not, you're still looking at the schedule, are you not?

So it's a concept mister Clear calls habit stacking, and the idea is this.

If you're looking to institute change within dental practice, it's gonna need to be part of an existing system. In other words, where are we gonna stack an additional behavior into an existing process so that when we come upon a specific cue, we have a craving for it and we do it.

So whether you're conducting huddles today or not, you're starting your day somehow.

So why not stack this behavior into the practice morning routine to reap the benefits that we've already discussed?

So when we talk about making it obvious from a queue perspective, when will we huddle?

Some practices actually do it at the end of the day because of split schedules.

When would we prep for Huddl? What's the cue to Huddl or prep the information? Is it getting ready for the end of the day on the part of the front office team? Is it as we're leaving to review our schedule for the next day? What's the cue? It's gonna be slightly different for each practice, and that's okay.

So it's both for the prep and the huddle itself. So I'm gonna give you a formula.

So here it is. I will do x behavior at y time in z location.

There you go.

And you can use this for anything. I will do x behavior at y time in z location.

But that's the first step. The second is to make it attractive.

So this is about why the heck are we doing this?

And so this is all about case acceptance.

And listen, I love case acceptance. Why? Because that is the only indicator that we're gonna be able to provide dental care for people, human beings. Because without case acceptance, how do we expect to serve our patients, meet our daily practice goals?

And in fact, given today's reality, how could we even use AI as a practice builder? You've already seen the statistics. How cool is it that your office is using AI? Oh, is it like check GPT?

Kinda. But for dental x-ray.

And so when we talk about making it easy, you know, the printout that we get for the huddle as we talked about before is incredibly important.

What I didn't mention earlier is that not only would we see who has what needs, what the AI has predicted based on imaging that's not in the chart, based on a treatment plan. But what about the remaining insurance reimbursement available? See that next to the time slots immediately on the right? Holy smokes.

And that's updated in real time.

So how can it be any easier? I don't know. But what I want you to understand is there's a whole science behind making things easier. In the book, The Happiness Advantage, which is one of my favorite books of all time, Sean Accord talks about the twenty second rule.

So lowering the barrier to change by just twenty seconds was all it took to help form a new life habit. And so what he talks about is the idea that he wanted to start running every morning.

So what he did, this is not his picture, this is one I purchased, he would sleep in his gym clothes. I don't think he slept in his shoes. He would sleep in his gym clothes. Why? Because the alarm would go off, he'd slip his feet into his shoes, out the door he went. I don't if he brushed his teeth or not. I didn't ask him.

So reducing the barrier by making these things easier is incredibly important.

Now I'll use an example of my own self.

I love to read, but I don't read in hour chunks or multiple hour chunks at a time. No. No. No.

I read in fifth ten to fifteen minute chunks every single day. Do you know where my book is? Right next to my coffee maker. What's the cue when I make the coffee?

What's the craving? Wanting to finish the chapter. What's the routine? Read for ten to fifteen minutes.

What's the reward? For me, it's the knowledge. Or if it's fiction, a fun fiction story.

So when you're thinking about things, we gotta think about how are we gonna make things easy.

The next is making it satisfying, and this brings us to our final rule.

Because as I told you before, what is rewarded is repeated. And this is important and it's gonna require a little bit of thought. But let's go back to Febreze for a minute. Shall we?

So what was being marketed had the wrong reward.

It wasn't about odor elimination for people. It turned out it was by making things smell clean because that was the indicator that we did a job well done. So in people's minds, making things clean was synonymous with scent. How did they figure this out?

They actually observed a woman, ironically enough, in Scottsdale, Arizona. I live in Phoenix. And what she did was that she used Febreze because at that point in their marketing, they had already added a little bit of scent.

She used Febreze at the end of her cleaning of her teenage boy's room as a signal that she was done and that the room or house smelled clean.

They ended up tweaking their marketing, adding a greater concentration of scent, and a famous product, a multibillion dollar product was born.

But how is it being satisfied for you?

So when we talked about this data earlier, there's no question that this can increase case acceptance. But what about for the patient?

Here's what's really wild to me is this data.

Sixty four percent of patients say they don't understand their x-ray during a consultation with their dentist. Why would they?

Should we really expect them to?

And so because they don't understand it, they end up switching dentists because they get confused after a diagnosis because they don't understand what they're seeing.

Yet fifty five percent say trust in the diagnosis slash dentist is the most important factor for treatment acceptance.

Yet forty percent say they distrust dentists. Why would we not use a tool that's ubiquitous in our verbiage today, because AI is everywhere, to encourage people to accept treatment that we know they need that would benefit them?

So how are we going to make it satisfying? And I want to ask you, what is satisfying to you and your practice about satisfying patient needs? What are you rewarding? How are you rewarding it? How are you celebrating it?

So when we think about your behavior change, now it's time to come together.

So we need to make it obvious, what's the cue? We need to make it attractive, what's the craving? We need to make it easy, what's the response, and how are we gonna make it easy to respond? And we need to make it satisfying, what's the reward?

So as part of your self study, now that we've described all of these things, I want you to take the time to think about the cue, the craving, the response, and the reward.

And so what I'd like to do is kinda summarize what we learned today and then finish with my favorite study of all time and my favorite story of all time. So what did we learn today? Well, all outcomes are a lagging measure of your thoughts.

That people during World War one, in particular, had really bad breath. The science of habits has a dental origin, that there is a habit loop with a cue, craving, response, and reward. There are four laws of habit change, and it will take time.

It's about habit integration, not habit addition. Small changes matter, and all habits are a lagging measure of your identity.

And so what I wanna share with you is a study by doctor Amy Rusneski.

And so if I were to ask you what you do for a living, what would you tell me?

I actually kinda know this answer because I've surveyed over a thousand dental professionals. When I asked them what they did for a living, they gave me a title, dentist, hygienist, assistant, you get the idea.

If you were to meet me in an airport and ask me what do I do for a living, you know what I would tell you?

I hope people get out of their own way on stages with their teams and one on one.

And so what doctor Wisniewski was interested in is how people viewed their profession, if you will. So she went into a hospital, and she interviewed neurosurgeons and janitors. And she asked them the same questions to bucket their responses into three categories.

Job. Hey, man. I'm just here for a paycheck. TGIF, hand me a margarita. Number two, career. Hey. I'm here for positional or financial advancement.

And number three, calling.

I'm here for the betterment of man and woman kind, human kind.

Interestingly enough, this study has been validated by other researchers, got the same results. You know what the results were?

Despite the fact that there was a larger number of neurosurgeons that answered what they did for a living fell in the calling category, there was a relatively even split, a third, third, a third between janitors and neurosurgeons about what it is they did for a living. So let's get real folks. You know what that means? That means that you had janitors on this side mopping up butt, blood, bodily fluids, and vomit that were in it primarily for a calling. And over here, you had neurosurgeons excising tumors removing cancers that for some of whom were in it primarily for the financial compensation.

How do you view what it is you lit you do for a living?

Now in twenty eighteen, I decided to go on an Alaskan cruise because I was turning fifty in twenty nineteen and I decided I wanted to hit all fifty states by the time I was fifty. The only two left were Alaska and Maine. Don't ask me why. So on this day, we got on our ship. We went through security. We went to our stateroom on deck ten, and we got a little hungry around noon, and so we walked up two flights of stairs.

As we rounded the top flight, we started to hear a lot of laughter, boisterous talking.

And as we rounded the corner, we witnessed this group of passengers with a woman in the center.

And this woman was holding a spray bottle full of clear liquid, spraying hand sanitizer into people's hands.

Except this is how she was doing what she was doing.

Hi.

How are you? Lunchy, lunchy, washy, washy. My name is Miley rhymes with smiley.

What is this woman on? I thought.

Hi, she says. Oh, you're so cute. Oh, you're so handsome.

So I figured, social construct and all, I had to go through the gauntlet to get to the crab legs. Right? So I extended my hands. She looks me square in the eye. She says, thank you for being here, sir. Lunchy, lunchy, washy washy. Squirt.

I'm embarrassed to tell you, I rubbed my hands together and I looked at my spouse and I said, well, that was weird.

So here's the thing.

She was there the first day. She was there the second day. This was her job.

So let me ask you a question out of curiosity, not out of judgment.

How do you would you wanna stand on your feet for eight hours a day and spray hand sanitizer in people's hands?

Around the second or third day, I started to notice little boys and little girls running up the stairs. What do you think they were singing? Lunchy, lunchy, washy, washy. I noticed two women and one man, so there had to be more, with tears in their eyes, walking up to her, thanking her for the perspective she gave them just by simply doing what she did, how she did it.

So on day five, I was literally twenty feet away from the entrance to the buffet, and I came upon doctor Rizniewski's research for the third time in my studies about job career calling, I thought, there's a poster child right around the corner.

So what did I do?

I went and talked to her.

I said, miss Williams? Her name was Miley.

I said, My name is Martin. This is what I do. This is what I talk about a little bit about job career calling. And I said, If I met you on land, like at a restaurant or something, what would you tell me you did for a living?

She picks up the name badge that you see on the screen. She physically waves it at me and she says, I'm a waitress, but I make people happy. I make people smile.

She wasn't done with me yet. She says, sir, my colleagues, my coworkers, asked me, Elena, what do you take? What do you do? How do you work out? Why are you so happy?

She leans in. She looks into my soul, and she says, I don't do anything. It's all up here.

It is all up here, isn't it?

Because our thoughts lead to emotions that drive actions that manifest results. And as mister Clear has told us, the ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity.

Now there's a lot of stuff with Pearl that I didn't even have time to go into.

For example, voice entered perio charting that just launched, templated chart notes that almost write themselves. I strongly recommend that you sit for a demo to see what AI technology can do for you today.

And I also strongly encourage you to connect with me. This is my QR code. We're gonna put the link in the chat.

Just go ahead, fill out the contact form. The only way I can get it to you is through your email address. By the end of the week, you will have your handouts, your PDFs in order to guide you on your journey wherever that may lead you. So with that, what I think I'm gonna do is I'm gonna stop my share and turn it back over to Sheila to see what kind of questions we may Alright.

So I hope everybody enjoyed that presentation today. I hope it kinda put things into perspective relative to the science of habits, how Pearl could be part of that habit change within your practice. And, as you saw, I kinda have a deep connection on a personal note to this company. So it's my honor to to be here and be of service this evening, and and thank you to to Sheila and the entire Pearl team.

So Well, doctor Mendelson, that was so great.

I feel like we need to go back to your your two day seminar just so that I can refresh. I was reading in one of the pages here in your books that talked about how we have was it over six thousand thoughts Yeah.

During our waking hours.

Right?

Yeah.

And you're starting to learn about neuroscience and habits and behavior changes. And I'm curious, like, what have you heard feedback wise? You know, we hear about, oh, just think positive. And that works from in the morning in the dental practice from about seven forty five when you arrive till you check messages at, like, eight zero five.

Right? And then the positivity goes out the door. Yeah. But when you're working with teams, what do you feel like has really been, something that's consistently sticking for those teams when you walk away?

So it's it's the t it's something that the teams are doing, and it's also something leadership does because we can't shy away from the responsibility we have as leaders. And so one of the things that I do with teams is I create this alliance, and it's all about why what kind of place do we wanna show up to every day? How are we gonna show up when there are challenges? Because lord knows we're gonna have those.

And how are we gonna keep each other accountable? And so their words and phrases that they provide around the kind of place and space they wanna live in on a daily basis. And so it's a reminder of that alliance by all parties to remind ourselves why we're here, how we're gonna show up in their challenges because as doctor Frankl said, between stimulus and response, there's a space. We're always gonna have challenges.

But then the then the question becomes, okay. How are we gonna deal with it? And here's the thing. For those that, have heard me lecture on optimism and the science of positivity, I have a certification in happiness studies that today is a certified master's degree.

Took me a year to get that one.

Toxic positivity is walking around with a smile on your face. La la la. Good vibes only. That's not what true optimism as a strategic tool is. True optimism is looking things through a lens of understanding. And so mister and missus Jones may have been your first patient, and they were, you know, spitting nails metaphorically and were really, really nasty.

But how lucky are we that our next patient was missus Smith? And I'm gonna focus on missus Smith rather than mister and miss Jones that came in first. So it's a matter of a it's a mindset shift. It's a mental shift.

And I want to implore and tell people that, listen. It's also a skill. And so we've gotten where we've gotten with our own skills that we've developed today. And if we're finding that we're having trouble with these more positive, optimistic thoughts, that's okay because that's a journey as well. And if we put time into it, we're going to end up being successful. And the last thing I'll say to that is just think about your own history as a dental professional. If you're a dentist, how long did it take you to prep your first crown?

And how long does it take you now? What's the difference? Repetition and experience. So skills of the hands are the same as skills of the thoughts, just with a different body part. That's all it is.

So No.

I love that.

I am going to, share my screen and offer the team, the team members that are here today also a QR code for Pearl. And, you know, one of the things that we all have to deal with on a daily basis is that change. And as we move into the technological advances that we've seen in dentistry over the last, well, I wanna say five years, Really, AI is the next stage. And the reason I really fell in love with the company and moving into the AI space was I felt like, finally, if a patient could see an image like you were discussing earlier, could they actually just accept the dentistry the doctor was recommended earlier?

Right? And I the saddest thing for me seeing patients was, Sheila, you told me the tooth was gonna break off, and I just never got back in. And I thought, dang. Now we have to do an implant.

Right?

And so we don't want that as providers. And so I I would encourage you to find some time to evaluate Pearl with your team. And as as far as change goes, you know, it's a scary thought. Right?

But we all moved from, you know, those goopy, lovely impressions to our digital scanners, and I'll date myself by saying the dark rooms to the digital X rays. And it is time to move into technology. I also would say thinking about, you know, staffing this day and age. We could do a whole webinar on the fact that there's no more staff for dental in in the world, really, and how we're trying to still carry that wonderful patient experience throughout the journey by using different technologies that a lot of you probably have already, integrated into your practice to buy back some time.

And voice charting is really kind of that next level where you have one that will actually record yourself and the patient.

It'll condense the note and write them back into the chart. And teams are leaving on time, which is a huge win for, to your point, doctor Mendelson, quality of life, happiness, and such.

So I And, also, if I if I may interject too, folks, our medical colleagues are doing this.

So this is not something unique to dentistry. This is something that we need to be doing that I I guarantee you patients who have been in the physician recently have likely also already seen. So keep that in mind.

Very true. And I wanna thank you for spending time with us and putting together such a wonderful presentation.

And, also, for those of you that have not purchased your one move book, plea please make sure to purchase this book and also encourage you to spend some time with doctor Mendelson.

Really, the the Light Side Academy that I visit with doctor Mendelson and doctor Kyle Stanley was life changing for me, and I was really moved by that. So encourage you to reach out, work with doctor Mendelson with your teams, and we're all here just to make all of our lives easier. So thank you, doctor Mendelson, for spending time with us this evening, and we look forward to seeing all of you on future webinars at, hello pearl dot com. Be sure to check out our webinars, and, we look forward to seeing you all soon. Thank you again.

Bye bye.

Bye bye.

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