What a human dentist can teach veterinary professionals

For the first time on the Vet Blast Podcast presented by dvm360, host Adam Christman, DVM, MBA, welcomed a human doctor, Martin R. Mendelson, FIADFE, CPC, a former practicing dentist who spent more than 20 years building a second career in executive coaching, team facilitation, emotional intelligence, and happiness studies, to the show.

Throughout the episode, Christman and Mendelson discuss how they connected through conferences and networking, plus they trace how a misdiagnosis and a 17-month medical leave reshaped Mendelson's career, and why the challenges facing human dental teams, from customer service to private equity pressure to imposter syndrome, look strikingly familiar to anyone running a veterinary practice.

Below is a partial transcript, edited lightly for clarity.

Adam Christman, DVM, MBA: What are some things you now see that are similar between our professions, customer service, workflow, use of your teams? There's a lot of things we see similarly in our fields.

Martin R. Mendelson, FIADFE, CPC: When I go into work with a dental team, I've worked with teams of 2 up to about 30, and I'll give you one guess how many times we talk about dentistry: the answer is zero. It is all about customer service. It is all about systems. But systems are only as good as the people that use them. The challenges we see on the dental side, the human medical side, the veterinary side, guess what? They're all the same, with nuances specific to personalities and situations. But team cohesion is team cohesion. Leadership is leadership. Understanding what drives people as people is really what drives ultimate success in any team environment, regardless of what it is you're doing.

Christman: Why do you think our professions have such significant emphasis on mental health awareness?

Mendelson: Truthfully, it's multifactorial. Both our professions are challenging physically and mentally. In a veterinary practice with managerial oversight, if you're with one of your canine or feline friends, you can't be dealing with an HR issue at the same time, so you're constantly going back and forth. With dentists, interestingly enough, when we give local anesthetic, our blood pressure goes up. We're in this fight-or-flight situation all day long, physically challenged, mentally challenged. Nobody taught us this leadership stuff, and that creates a really stressful situation that many of us don't know how to manage because we were never given the tools. It's not a criticism, it's just a skill gap, and that ends up causing a lot of these mental health challenges that, at least on my side of the health aisle, were swept under the rug until COVID.

Christman: I was talking to one of the dentists at a conference, and she was telling me that private equity has also been a stressor for them. Share with the listeners a bit more about that, because we have it in the vet space too.

Mendelson: Not all private equity is the same, so pardon the captain-obvious comment. My business partner, Dr. Kyle Stanley, and I are about to give our first in-person mental wellness course for one of these dental service organizations, one of these VC-backed companies, because they feel this is a big deal. But they're kind of the outlier. The truth of the matter is that in many situations, whether real or perceived, and perception is reality, the clinical care is being pushed or influenced by the bottom line. There are comparisons made in reference to the bottom line: “Doctor X can do a crown prep in 22 minutes, and you take 42 minutes. You need to be faster, doctor.” So there are real pressures on the private equity side, but there are also perceived pressures that may or may not be outside our own brains, in terms of how we perceive them.

Christman: I want to talk about this wonderful book you have out. It's called One Move Makes All the Difference: How to Discover Your Power and Transform Your Life. Tell us a bit about it.

Mendelson: It really started on that morning I described earlier, with that little voice in my head. It was one move of thought, and the whole idea is that one move of thought, one move of action, can make all the difference. The core of my book is my TEAM framework: thoughts that drive emotions that create actions that manifest the results of our lives. The impetus for that framework is a quote from Dr. Viktor Frankl, who wrote Man's Search for Meaning. Frankl was a Holocaust survivor, interned at 37 years of age as a psychiatrist and neurologist. The quote goes something like this: “Between stimulus and response, there's a space. In that space lies our freedom to choose our response, and in our response lies our growth and our freedom.” All of my work rotates around the idea that everything that happens in our lives is neutral. It's the thought we give to a situation that drives an emotion, that creates the reality of action, and ultimately the manifestation of success or lack thereof. You could say it's a book about how to get out of your own way. It's not just about me. My story is in there in parts, but it's also the story of my friend Sean Swarner, who climbed Mount Everest with one functioning lung, and my friend Kimberly Locke, a runner-up on American Idol. Every single chapter has exercises that build on one another to help you get out of your own way, if you so choose to accept the assignment.

Christman: Everyone either has imposter syndrome, or is their own worst critic, their own worst enemy. There's a quote near the end of your book, in the chapter on mindset metamorphosis: “No more excuses for being stuck, no more limiting beliefs holding you back. You are the key. You have the power to create whatever future you want.” That is very powerful.

Want to hear the rest of the conversation? You can listen here or wherever you listen to podcasts.