Transcript
Speaker: Dental Fuel, the podcast that focuses on what no one else is talking about. Mistakes. The dental world is full of before and afters and no one is talking about the middle. Dental Fuel brings you the unspoken in -between. Dental Fuel is brought to you by Ignite DDS Coaching, empowering dentists to build self -determined futures.
Speaker: Together, we're shaping the next generation of leaders in dentistry. We're back with Lauren King. As a traveling hygienist, Lauren has been able to work with multiple professionals and personalities. Lauren talks about the pivotal role of teamwork and personal growth play in professional transitions. Navigating office politics can be challenging, but finding a network of supportive professionals can help along the way. Let's tune in.
Speaker: On the top of of being a travel professional and maybe working in a setting that's not consistent, working with a team can be interesting, I'm sure. And I'm sure you have seen how different teams work and what works and what doesn't work in different kind of personalities. I would love to know a team mistake that either you have made or have experienced from a team and how you maybe carry that to other jobs that you decide to take on.
Speaker: So I would say that it's been team mistakes that have pushed me to become independent. And I say that with a lot of love and a lot of self -awareness. And with self -awareness, usually self -awareness comes from a dark place, to be honest, because you've swam the moat to get to the castle in some sense.
Speaker: my moat, some of it was team related and I will say that it was usually in an office clinically and I would be kind of an outsider, you know, or they would tell me that I'm trying to do too much or I shouldn't be doing so many SRPs or I don't think it's that serious. It's just a little bleeding. You know, I think like let's watch it and let's see how it goes.
Speaker: And, you know, or like the background chatter that you hear, you know, walking around the office of she's probably going to do an SRP because they have a little bit of blood or something like that. And I'm like, yeah, I am. And yeah, I know I don't fit in with most of you. I know. But one of my really good friends and I, he's an entrepreneur as well. Him and I talk about this wall and it's the entrepreneur wall and it's going to get closer and closer and closer and closer to your face.
Speaker: until you're nose to nose with it and you're finally like, man, I have to go after this. And for me, one of them was in a team capacity. I kept having friction with people in clinical settings of wanting to tell me I couldn't go out of town to go to a conference and that they didn't want me to definitely go later in the month because it might be busy or they might not be able to find a tent or I was doing too many SRPs and I was being too aggressive with disease.
Speaker: And so what I had to learn throughout that process is if you are constantly getting friction from other people, not from what you're trying to do, but from other people about what you're trying to do, those are not your people. And that's okay. Go find your people. Can you tell me a little bit more about just the setup of what temping looks like from a hygienist standpoint?
Speaker: Yes, so I've been temping for five years and that's because of speaking and things like that. you How do I word this well? Temping is like the scenario of you possibly walking into a ticking time bomb, to be honest with you. You don't know what's going on with the team. You don't know what your setup is going to be like.
Speaker: you don't know if you're going to get paid at the end of the day. I've not gotten paid several times and had to go after people to be paid. So it is very volatile and it is something that it can be very, very rewarding. You work for no one, you work for yourself. If you really don't like the office, I tell hygienists all the time, if you walk in and you hate it, just try and keep in the back of your mind, I never have to come here again.
Speaker: And they've chosen to make this a bad experience. They're not thinking about how now you've got to find another temp when you need one. That's not on you. You're there to take care of your patients and that's it. So I i would say that.
Speaker: Knowing all of those things, it can be great, but there is a lot that comes with it. There's a lot of responsibility in making sure your schedule's full, that you're getting paid. Making sure that when you get there, that there's actual instruments to do your job, and just not a Montana Jack, a mirror, and a probe.
Speaker: So, you know, down to sterilizing the instruments. I've walked out of a few offices in my career. One of them was because I watched a man put his hands into cold sterile to pull something out and then put it in the patient's mouth. Oh, no, no, no. And I walked out. And then I got asked why I walked out.
Speaker: so I just, you know, of course in five years of me being a travel high tennis, it's like I have some stories, but I will still say it's always in my back pocket. And as bad as it can be sometimes, it's it's always there.
Speaker: And just keep the mindset, if anyone's considering it or if anyone's doing it in your life, screw this. Just keep in the back of your mind, make it through the day, take care of your patients, and you never have to go back. If they ask for feedback, that's on you if you want to give it to them or not. But just keep that mentality and you'll find some good offices. You'll find some like, I would say in most places where I'm licensed, I have like five to six good offices that, you know, I just rotate around.
Speaker: But it takes time. It takes time. I know that you probably see many repeat patients as you rotate through these offices, but do you ever miss you know being at one office just consistently to build that relationship over time with patients? I do.
Speaker: so To me, a human connection is one of the biggest things in my life. It's what I search for, it's what I enjoy, it's what I fight for. I attach myself to people. I don't touch attach myself to things. But I think the reason for me that it's I don't have as strong of a pull to do it is because since I've been a hygienist, I've been almost a travel hygienist the entire time. Or I've been in an office but for like six months and then I moved or something like that. so
Speaker: I haven't had, I would say, probably one office where I was there for a year. And so I got to see you know that at least second round of seeing patients. And I will say, you matter more than you think as a clinician. You are making an impact more than you think into more humans than you realize.
Speaker: so when you have a patient come in, what I learned from that and what I do miss from that, when you have a patient come in and they're rude or they're not talking to you or they're silent mute, some of those patients I learned when they came back were literally fighting for their lives. And they told me that me just asking them how they were made them feel like they could keep going.
Speaker: So that aspect of it, that human connection of it and getting a patient to look at me and say, I trust you, whatever you say, whatever you think I need. that's That's the most rewarding part about what we do in my opinion. So that's something that I 100 % miss. I do. And now it just comes in different forms in terms of I get that when I speak about human trafficking or I get that when I educate a clinician on
Speaker: screening for airway and now they feel like they have more purpose in what they do. They're coming to work and they're getting to save a life. They're not just cleaning teeth. They're just assisting a doctor. While those things are important, our profession is hard mentally. It really is.
Speaker: it it's a very Human trafficking is a very important topic. I'm just very curious as to how you ended up in that area speaking about it, if you're comfortable sharing. Yes, of course. i So when I started speaking ah five or so years ago, i if you don't know who Elijah Desmond is, he has at the Dental Festival, he has Smiles at Sea, he has Dentistry's Got Talent. So Dentistry's Got Talent is where he picks 50 speakers and they each get 10 minutes Ted Talk style on a stage and they're judged and it's a competition. And at the end of the competition, whoever wins gets a signed contract for the next year.
Speaker: So Elijah was like, you should try out or you know like submit an application or whatever. And I was starting to get really active on Facebook, commenting on things and all of this stuff. And I was like, okay, I wasn't expecting to be chosen by any means. And I was, I was one of the 50. And so I had 10 minutes and I wrote a speech, but I ripped it up 24 hours before I got on stage. Don't ever do that, please.
Speaker: Please don't. Distrust me, please don't. I ripped up my speech 24 hours before I got on stage and I talked about AIDS in Africa and how they can't afford testing and that's why it's spreading so badly and how there's human trafficking and women enslavement. And I talked about how we can only see like 5 % of our sky. I quoted Matthew McConaughey, I quoted Tupac, all in 10 minutes.
Speaker: So I get off stage and one of my now mentors and someone I really look up to as a speaker, she came up to me and she told me, I will teach you everything that I know, but I need you to pick a topic. And I said, okay. She said, think about what is the most you could relate to or the the one that you could speak from personal experience. That's typically the one that you're going to speak about the easiest, that's going to be the most authentic, which means you're going to connect to more people.
Speaker: And for whatever reason, something shifted. And I think my like journey and my mentality and everything, that's the first time the veil came off of my face and telling my own story and being willing to do it. I looked at her and I said, well, I said, most of my family doesn't even know this and definitely people like like friends don't know this, but I would choose human trafficking. And she said, why? And I said, because I was sexually assaulted for the first time when I was seven. And the second time when I was 21, both bikes and their family members.
Speaker: And she said, that's it. And she said, if you can be vulnerable and share that on stage, your audience will trust you more. They will see that you're standing right in front of them. And while you might look polished and put together and you're standing on a big stage and all of these things.
Speaker: There's things that have happened to the people in your life that are standing right in front of you that you have no idea you know nothing thing about. And so that prompted me to start doing research and to start studying it in depth and what I learned.
Speaker: is that 30 % of human trafficking victims visit their dentist every year. And we're missing them because no one teaches us what to look for. We don't even know what it looks like. 50 % of the injuries and abuse, which happens in trafficking and sexual assault and abuse is usually how it starts, which is why I tell my part of my story. Because my story stopped there, but in most cases it doesn't, it keeps going. So 50 % of the injuries are to the head and neck.
Speaker: We're specialists of the head and neck, with a lot of it being intraoral, with it being in the mouth. And we're missing it all the time because we have no idea what to look for. We have this mentality, especially in America, if it's not happening to me, it's not happening. And I tell people all the time, that sentence is incomplete. The rest of that sentence is until it does. Then you care. Then you want to start advocating. So I'm trying to get our industry to realize that we need to get in front of it, like yesterday.
Speaker: Lauren, thank you so much for for being vulnerable and and sharing your message with me and with others, with our listeners. It's very important and it's strong. It's a heavy topic, but it's an important one for us as professionals to be on the lookout for that. Yeah, 100%. Ready to take the next step in your journey? Book an intro call with Ignite DDS coaching today and level up your future in dentistry. Lauren has provided some excellent information. Tune in next week where she shares some expert advice.
