The Accountability Advantage: 🔓 How to Unlock the Implementation of Continuing Education

Have you ever taken a CE course that you found incredibly valuable, but struggled to implement what you learned?

It has always been a challenge for me, so I am striving to make some changes in hopes of staying connected to why I enrolled in the first place.

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My goal is to help dentists and their teams fight to retain their independence, increase top line revenue, surgically attack overhead, create the practice of their dreams, and keep patient care at the center of everything we do. One of the ways I hope to deliver on that mission is by sharing and publishing ideas and resources that I believe will have an impact. In 2005 my first printed newsletter went out to 150 dental practices and the only response I got back was a doctor informing me that I had misspelled his name on the address label. Clearly there was some room for improvement. I continued to write, and eventually migrated to an approach that was hybrid print, online and email. But I have always battled with maintaining consistency.

So, I finally sought help in the way of targeted and specific continuing education.

Last fall I completed the Great Founders Write course and cohort, led by Ben Putano and Grant Nissley. I enrolled again for the January session, but failed miserably because didn’t listen to my intuition about seasons in life and prioritization. But that’s a topic for another day. I also completed Matthew Ray Scott’s Medical SalesRX curriculum focused very specifically on connecting with busy dentists and teams in a way that honored their time and attention.

Both of these courses were incredibly informative, and provided some new tools that I know will have an impact on my ability to connect with the dental community. What I think you will find valuable, however, has nothing to do with the content of the CE, but in what I learned from each of them about implementation of new ideas and strategies.

Hope you find this useful in your own efforts as well.

Your friend the calendar

I have a love / hate relationship with to-do lists. The old gray matter isn’t quite as sticky as it once was, so I have to write everything down or it evaporates into the ether. In a vacuum, a to-do list could easily fall into the Parkinson’s Law trap, and expand to consume an infinite amount of time and energy. So, for me, it has become critical to be super intentional in blocking time on the calendar for specific types of tasks. Implementing a new skill requires the same diligence in blocking time in my schedule. So, in the case of writing and producing content, I have a recurring block for idea creation, a separate block for writing, one for editing, and a final for organizing and publishing. Without the plan and schedule, we’re left to own devices and rely on the hope that we could squeeze the time into our already busy schedules.

Cohort based learning

The Great Founders Write course baked in a cohort-based approach to learning. This was wildly beneficial, as you work with peers in the course who are learning right alongside you, and support each other with completing the project benchmarks and providing collaborative feedback and guidance. Over the years I have participated in a number of dental study clubs, and seen first-hand the impact of encouragement and sharing that can come from peer-supported learning.

If you are taking a course that doesn’t incorporate a cohort-based approach, are there ways to create your own with other participants? This leads me to the secondary benefit of cohort-based learning – accountability partners.

Accountability partners

Like having a buddy at the gym, knowing that someone was there with you working to accomplish the same feat made it a lot harder to skip out on a session (using a little healthy guilt in my favor) and made me want to be there to support my partner. To support my efforts through Medical SalesRX, a few of us have started a monthly group session to review the content of the course, check in on each other’s progress, and establish mutual objectives to continue leveling up.

The reality is that life gets busy, and it has been all too easy for me over the years to abandon a goal when the going got tough. Having an accountability partner has been a massive unlock. Who can you recruit as an accountability partner? Have a colleague hoping to incorporate a new procedure or treatment approach? Maybe even a business strategy to elevate some area of your dental practice? Find that fellow passionate learner, and the results for both of you are sure to be outsized compared to going it alone.