Dr. Barr On Enjoying The Journey Not Just The Destination
Dr. Barr is a seeker. Whether gardening, placing a crown, or being mom, she always wants to know more and gain knowledge by exploring the world around her. She is passionate about people, her patients, her colleagues, and her family. Making them feel seen and heard is one of her utmost priorities. In this blog post, she looks back at how her dentistry practice has evolved over time.
My kids teach me a lot about life. It’s funny, like, I sometimes use life coaches, therapists, mentors, or colleagues, but my kids probably teach me the most about life. They are very simple. Adara, for example, my eight year old, is very much into nature, and very grounded. She makes me do things like walk on the beach in Cobourg with my feet in the sand while everyone else is walking on the sidewalk. And, I don’t know, she just makes me feel really alive. Instead of work, work, work, all the time, she makes me smell the roses.
She just makes me feel really alive.
I’m trying to go back to what life was like back in the day. My mom used to just sit and look at people walk. I don’t think we do that ever. We don’t have time. Now, there’s no time. But she used to just sit and people watch, and read and relax and enjoy life. She had time to do things like that. Whereas, we’re so much on our technology and we’re just overwhelmed and stressed and everyone is grinding and everyone needs night guards from the stress. We need to rewind and reverse what we’ve done as a society. I think Covid has done that for me. It’s given me a break to look at things.
So, yeah, I guess it’s a personal journey of almost 39 years now. The last ten years have been my dental journey, I guess, practicing for fourteen years. The first few years were nice because there were a lot of mentors and colleagues. Not until I started working alone did the real learning begin. You had to figure it all out. There was no one to ask. You just kinda feel a bit alone, but you figure it out along the way. You make mistakes, but you figure it out. And we made a lot of them, but we learned a lot. Because you can’t learn without making mistakes.
I remember my dad saying, “Maybe you know, do a little bit at a time.” No, no, no, no, we like to just go in headfirst and do it all at once. House, baby, dental clinic, but we figured it out. There’s no good time to have a kid or start a practice so we just figured it out on the way.
“I didn’t want work being the majority of my life. I just wanted to be present with my kids.”
Our practice was growing. One by one, we had more employees. We were an actual thing. We lasted past the one, two year mark so we were possibly a successful business. So, around that time, we met a few more people and more hygienists and we worked really well as a team. We hired an associate when I had my second baby and he stayed on until my third child, which was really nice. I really appreciated the help. It’s a lifestyle thing. I could work myself to the bone, and work every day of the week, but my back just couldn’t handle it and I wanted to be with my kids. I wanted part-time work and part-time life. I didn’t want work being the majority of my life. I just wanted to be present with my kids.
I actually started off wanting an office that was a great office. I wanted an office where patients and people loved to come to work. A home kind of feeling. It definitely had some rough days in the beginning. Four or five years in, I found some rocky issues because I let go of the ownership, I wasn’t there, I wasn’t present. I wasn’t clear what I needed or wanted. I didn’t want to stress people out. Because of that, I lost them. They found my associate, who was clear, was a better direction for them. That made it hard. They were used to another guy and who am I to come in? They looked at me as an outsider. That is not what I wanted. I didn’t know how to overcome this without letting my whole staff go. I didn’t think I even had the ability to fire somebody or tell somebody they couldn’t make a livelihood at my office. I didn’t think I had the right. But little did I know, some people did need to be let go. We gave everyone lots of time, but they resisted. We wanted to create a space of our own and we fought for what we wanted. We didn't let people go; they let themselves go and we just had to show them the door. It was the right decision.
“We wanted to create a space of our own and we fought for what we wanted. ”
Now, there is more alignment in our clinic. There is more respect. There is good culture and good culture just easily weeds out the bad culture. It stands out now when there is something wrong. When you see a little tiny fire, now, it’s easily managed. We have a lot of good team players.
If you treat your team well, they will treat your clients well and if the clients are treated well, they will just keep coming back. Something is there that they liked, that they enjoyed. People feel tension, they feel the lack of alignment and consistency. They hear it. If the team members are happy, patients can feel it.
Ultimately, I feel like with the patient, I put everything aside. I’m there, I’m doing dentistry and there’s nothing else. I need to take care of the patient. There’s a person under that mouth and inside that body for you to acknowledge, and that comes with experience, but it seems effortless now. It’s funny, you don’t realize how far you’ve come sometimes until you reflect. We’re so focused on the destination; we have the headlights on, but really, we should use the floodlights and look around us. The journey is the reward.
