Hey, this is Dr. John Meis and I'm here with another video on the mindset of the effective dental executive. Whether you think of yourself as an executive or not, you are. You're running a business that generates hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in revenue every year and you are an executive. What I want to talk about today is the mindset around money. This is a very interesting topic and a very interesting dynamic that I've seen many, many, many doctors stumble with and it has to do with our own internal programming, our own ideas and how we feel about money and wealth.
Now, for most of us, our ideas about money and wealth came programmed into us from our childhood. So what did you hear your parents talking about with regards to money? Did you ever hear your parents arguing about money? Did your parents have a mindset of scarcity about money? Did your parents tell you all the time, "We can't afford this. We can't afford that. We can't afford this." Are you looking for places in your life where you think you can't afford things? That may have been programmed into you.
So when we look at some of these ideas that we have about money, that's one of them, that we can't afford it. Another mindset that I see doctors get caught up in is scarcity, "If I do better, everybody else does worse." That zero sum mindset is... it could get a hold people back tremendously. In multi doctor practices, I've seen doctors where one of them is performing better. Their case acceptance goes up, now they're producing more, now they're collecting more, they're getting paid more and the other doctors thinks that they're being negatively affected by that because they're operating from a mindset of scarcity.
So we also have a whole bunch of value judgments about money, right? Everyone has heard, "Money is the root of all evil." Well, that's not what the verse says. The verse says, "The love of money is the root of all evil," right? But also along with that, the connection between evil and money. Many of us when we were young got the programming that rich people have done something wrong or unethical or illegal in order to get their money, right, or that rich people are bad in some way or that rich people are selfish in some way.
I was at a dinner party where a woman loudly proclaimed that rich people don't pay taxes and how awful that is, so you may have gotten these messages in your childhood and they're affecting how you think, but they may be affecting how you think negatively. I've seen doctors that have kind of a... I'm going to talk about it as though it's a thermostat and they feel comfortable if they're making up to this much money. They think that that's okay, but anything over that, they start to feel uncomfortable and so they self sabotage and their practice settles back to a lower level because they're uncomfortable with that additional income and that additional wealth.
And when we see practices go up and go back down and go up and go back down, we call that porpoising. There are two causes of porpoising, either you're out of capacity or going over your mental thermostat setting for how much income you deserve. So these mindsets are not helpful to you and it's time to start rethinking how you think about that. What are the messages that you got when you were young? What are the mindsets that you carried on, even though you may not believe that they're true, even though they may be unconsidered, even though you may be unconsciously having them play in the back of your head all the time?
It's time to bring those things to consciousness, it's time to bring those things to a decision. Does this belief about money serve me? The whole idea of that getting over a point of income that you deserve and then kind of self sabotaging, well, think of all the things that you can do with that increased income. Well, you can have a better lifestyle, that's one of the things that you can do, but think of the charities that you support. If you're uncomfortable with a higher lifestyle, think of the charities you can support, think of the people that you can help. And with that change in mindset that I can use whatever more for good is helpful for those of you who are stuck in that thermostat position.
Going back, reevaluating what are my kind of internal programming about money and thinking consciously, taking the things from an unconscious space to a conscious space, does that serve me now or is now a time to change my programming about that? I hope this was helpful and I hope you take the time to do some of this deep work on your background, the things that are programmed into you because I think you'll find it extremely valuable.
