Scott Leune: This podcast is sponsored by dentalmarketing.com and they have agreed to give the listeners of this podcast a free competitive marketing analysis. This analysis is going to show you very clearly how your practice is doing compared to your competitors. It's going to give you the health of your SEO, it's going to give you a website grade, and you'll also see what your competitors are up to. This helps you know what ad strategy you should have today, how clean and effective is your marketing right now? Find out by getting this free and detailed analysis. Text the word marketing to 4 8 6, 5 9, and you'll receive this competitive analysis from our sponsor dentalmarketing.com. Could you imagine having cancer as a child and losing a leg as a nine or 10-year-old and having to completely look at your life differently moving forward? Almost dying from that and coming out of that as a paralympic skier, of course, a cancer survivor, an author, a speaker, a producer and writer of an Emmy award-winning show, someone with 4 million followers and a billion views on social media. This is Josh Sunquist, so get ready. So many amazing life lessons. What an interesting story. You are not going to want to miss this.

All right, so like I said, thank you so much, Josh for joining us. You spending time and giving to our little community of dentistry is awesome, and I'd mentioned your intro, gosh, you've got so many followers. You've got so many a billion views. You've got this huge story that is epic in many ways, which is why I think it's one reason why so many people are interested in hearing about you. I would love if we could in this episode, to maybe start with giving us kind of a short version of your story, the story so many people ask you about, and then we'll take it from there. Does that sound all right?

Josh Sundquist: Yeah, sounds great. And first of all, yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate the opportunity to be on the guest and to speak to your dental community, but as for my background, I guess the place to start is when I was a child, I was really into soccer and I was born with two legs and I love playing soccer, but I'd never played on a team and I was actually going to try out for a team, like a local travel team. But the same week that I was going to try out is when it turns out I was diagnosed with bone cancer in my left leg, and it was this rare form of bone cancer. I had a 50% chance to live. I started chemotherapy a month before my 10th birthday. My leg was amputated. That was the best chance that I had to live.

It's a dramatic surgery, which you are certainly no stranger to yourself to have a serious surgery. But yeah, it was scary and sad in a sense that I knew and meant I was never going to play on that soccer team, but also freeing in a sense of like, well, this is the best chance that I have to live. And I think that was kind of always my perspective was like, okay, let's move forward. Let's keep doing, what can I do? I can't play soccer. What can I do? Turns out I could ski. I learned how to ski through a program at my rehab hospital, and I love skiing. And as I finished the chemo and after a year, so I was on treatment for a long time, for a whole year. I spent a hundred nights in the hospital, but finished the chemo, kept skiing, and then when I was a teenager, I started racing.

I started competing as a skier. And in some ways, I think because I still had this idea in my mind of getting on a sports team, I always wanted that soccer uniform and I couldn't get that one anymore, but I saw, oh, I can get a skiing uniform. So I had my sight set on the Paralympics and I started training and racing when I was 16, which I did then for the next five years, and I was fortunate enough to be named to the US Paralympic ski team competed in to Reno, Italy, which was awesome. My parents got to come watch me compete. It was just a really cool full circle moment as an athlete. And then even further full circle was then in my late twenties. There's a sport that wasn't really around at the time of my amputation called amputee soccer, and I now, I played for a number of years on the US amputee soccer team. So I got to play in a number of different countries and in a couple of World Cups, which means that in the end I did get to play on a travel soccer team, which is pretty cool. And today I am fortunate to be able to share that story as a motivational speaker to create internet content and videos, do some standup comedy, written a few books. You shared the stuff in the intro, so we can talk about whatever you want. But

Scott Leune: Yeah, what's pretty cool, what you just did is you describe your story. So many of us do sometimes at dinner parties or we meet someone new and we are expected to just explain our entire life in one minute. And in you doing so, only five or 10% of that was the negative moments of your life, and you spent almost all the rest of your time just now explaining all the good, all the positive, all the wonderful things that you got to experience and you got to build and accomplish. And what strikes me is that I know that when I've been in those negative moments, sometimes it can feel like 90% of our life is now going to be defined by negativity because of this conflict, this bad thing, this us falling down in our own way. I'm curious, I've got five kids, I'm now imagining this was one of my children. And I don't know what I would do as a parent. Do I explain to my child what this really is or not? How do I help them through the hardship? How do I become a leader or an example or how do I stay strong? What was that looking back now as an adult and looking back at your parents having to do the best they can with the situation that was handed to you, what was that like for them? Are there any moments that stand out to you and how they handled this?

Josh Sundquist: Yeah, it's interesting because I growing up and as a younger adult always thought, oh, if and when I'm lucky enough to become a father myself, then I'll understand what it was like for my parents because I always thought not being a parent, I'm not capable of putting myself in their shoes. I am lucky enough to be a dad now my wife and I have a 2-year-old son, but what I found is I am confident. I still don't understand what it was like for them. And I hope, and I pray that I never do have to understand. I maybe have a slight more inkling of what it's like to see, see your own child suffer and be powerless. But I've not seen him suffer on any level what my family had to go through. And I say my family had to go through because I think particularly any family that has a cancer diagnosis, but particularly if it's a child, it's like the whole family is going through it, not like a child is diagnosed with cancer so much as the whole family is diagnosed with cancer.

And in many ways, I think it was probably more difficult for my parents than for me because as adults, I think they had more existential questions and angst, whereas to me it was just the sort of pure physical, I got to get through this, I got to finish the chemotherapy, I got to learn how to do sports on one leg, and I didn't spend a lot of time looking back or wondering why me or what if it happened to me today. So yeah, I was really fortunate to have I think extraordinary parents who showed a tremendous amount of wisdom in this balance in a situation like that of, yeah. How much do you tell your child and how do you help them recover? I guess the best way I can describe the balance is I was after the amputation. There had been this summer camp that I went to when I was younger, when I had two legs and I didn't want to go to it after I'd finished the cancer because I had one leg.

I was like, oh, but we're going to swim in the lake and I'm going to feel so self-conscious having one leg. I was guess 11 at this point. And my parents though, they really wanted me to go because they correctly thought Josh needs to get out of the house, or not that I was hiding in the house, but it was sort of like this pushing me out of the nest, but in a pleasant way, which they were like, tell you what, if you go to the summer camp, we'll give you $25 to spend in the camp, like snack shop. And I was like, whoa, $25 worth of ice cream sold. So that was all it took really for me to overcome the self-consciousness of having one leg at summer camp. But yeah, I think that's an illustration of the wisdom that they showed of simultaneously helping me and motivating me and being there when I was crying, but also encouraging me to keep going and to develop the strength and skills I needed to move forward with my life.

Scott Leune: I am reminded of so many lessons we adults can learn when we look at how simply children respond and are resilient to things. So it sounds to me you had an amazing amount of resilience that pretty quickly after you kind of faced and understood the new kind of future for you, you were about, okay, I got to do this, I got to do that, I got to rehab, I want a new sport. You found a sport, you just got on this path, and not only did you get on the path, but man, you became passionate about it and the level of achievement you had was remarkable. I'm sure that these types of things have led you to some of the lessons you teach when you speak or some of the books you've written, the topics that you write about. What are maybe one or two go-to phrases or quotes or comments or ideas that you find yourself teaching people frequently or you find yourself saying from the stage frequently?

Josh Sundquist: Yeah, that's a great question, Scott. When I was skiing and when I was racing specifically, I had this motto that I adopted as sort of my training philosophy, and I had an abbreviation for it, which was six characters, one mt, one mt. And I wrote this one, mt one, mt on all my ski tips and all my training gear and stuff. So because I always just wanted to see it be reminded one more thing, one more time. That's what it stands for. One more thing, one more time. And that was just how I approached my training as a racer. To be honest, I wasn't that good and I didn't even think that I was going to make the Paralympic team as a motivational speaker. I know I generally supposed to probably tell people to be positive. I was very negative, I was confident I was not going to make the team, honestly.

But I was like, but I want to know that I did everything I could when and if I fail, I want to say I failed, but there was nothing else I could have done. I did every training run, every rep in the gym, I learned everything about my sport. So that was my philosophy, and eventually I was lucky. As I said, I did make the team verily by the way. It was like they took the top 20 guys. I was number 20. I was like, just made it. But I did. But I made it. It was amazing. And in the years since I retired from ski racing, what I realized is, oh, one more thing, one more time isn't just a ski racing motto. That's like a life philosophy motto. Everything. It's how you advanced in your career. It's how you face adversity. It's certainly what it's like to be a parent that's being a parent. It's like one more thing, one more time. So yeah, I think that's when I give a speech, that's the piece that people tend to walk away with and tell me years later that they've wrote it down somewhere. They see it every day or a lot of people have gotten one mt one mt tattoos. So it's wild how many people have been impacted by that idea.

Scott Leune: Yeah, there's kind of philosophy in business that says the really successful people just went a little further than everyone else, just took a little more time at working at something than everyone else that everyone else was almost there, but in order to have that higher level of success, you did that one extra thing that no one else was going to do. I also think too, someone I know here locally life coach Steve Collins, he told me one time that when people try to do things and they start to get in this path of giving up, they say, I just feel like I've done everything I can. I've done everything I can. And then Steve says, have you done everything that could be done? And there's a difference there. Have you done everything that could be done? Could be that one more thing that you haven't done yet, even though you feel like, oh, I've done so much. Can we go that one extra step? It's almost like a personal trainer would have us do that right when working out. They'd have us do that one extra set, that one extra weight, and that is awesome. One thing I've read you say is when you're talking about skiing is it's not how fast you ski sometimes, but it's how fast you get back up. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Josh Sundquist: Yeah. My very first proper ski race, I was 16 years old. Like I said, I was not that great when I started, and so I just kept falling in this race. I fell like five times and obviously I got last place and it was not a glamorous start, but the math of it is really interesting because the guy who won the race finished the race in about 30 seconds and I finished the race in two minutes and 30 seconds. So I think we can kind of infer that I was only skiing for 30 seconds and I spent two minutes falling and getting back up, but that's really interesting because 30 seconds, that's like 20%. So 20% of the time I was skiing. So 20% of my actual result was based on how fast I skied, and in this case, in this race, 80% of the result was actually how fast I could get back up every time after I fell. And I think that that is very illustrative of what life feels like and what jobs feel like. And I would imagine what being a dentist often feels like, right? It's not a question of are you going to fall down? Are you getting an ice patch? Of course you are. That's just how life works. The question is how fast can you get back up? How fast can you recover? Can you learn something from the fall? Can you point your skis back toward the finish line, get back on track and start moving down the mountain again?

Scott Leune: Yeah. It sounds to me like you might be, correct me if I'm wrong, but you might be someone that kind of has this notion that failure is not really something that exists. It's really just falling down. And if we can get back up and point our skis the right way, we can keep going. So many people are scared to just go down the mountain because they're scared of falling and they don't quite know where to point their skis. It's so complicated the lines they got to take that they end up analyzing and talking about it and looking and years go by and they never do. And then you got some people that seem dumb and fearless and they're like, whatever. And they just go down. They don't quite know how they're going to make it, but they fall and they get back up and they say, that was fun. And they laugh about it and then they point to the left and they keep going until they fall again. Is that analogy, does that apply? Is that kind of how you look at falling down or failure?

Josh Sundquist: Yeah, that's a good question. And I think one way I think of it is, yeah, a lot of people, like you said, don't even want to do the race. I think there's also a person who after they fall the first time, rather than getting back up, they think, I guess this isn't the right sport for me, and they go try to do some other kind of race. I feel like sort of in the entrepreneurship world, you see that kind of the people who are like, ah, this got started to get a little hard. Go try this other thing. Or you see a lot in sales, right? It's like someone's trying to sell this product. Oh, it didn't work. Oh, they're going to sell. That's not a product. It's like, no, no, no, it, it's not that you're on the wrong course, it's that you just got started. You got to keep moving down the hill. And I think in terms of how we perceive failure to extend the metaphor when you're skiing and it's very icy as it was in this particular race and you fall, you certainly don't make negative progress. In fact, you slide, you fall and you continue to slide toward the finish line. So it's like if you keep falling, you'll cross the finish line eventually if you're willing to keep getting back up enough times.

Scott Leune: That's so interesting. So when I think about people in dentistry, people, they learn something new. Let's say they learn a new procedure. Let's say they learn how to do braces, right? Bracketed, braces, and they start and they run into a problem. They might think, oh my God, I can't do this. It's not for me, and they quit the race. Or maybe on the business side of dentistry, they want to implement something new on how we present the finances or how we deal with claims or how we answer the phone or how we do marketing. And their initial result isn't great because they're in the learning curve, they're falling down and so many people bail, just like you said, that happens so often in dentistry. One thing I've noticed though is if we do it with someone else, if we have a partner, if we have a coach or a consultant, if we're part of a group and we're trying to learn how to ski this course together, that kind of collaboration or that connection with someone else can kind of keep us going. I know that you've talked about how when you work with other people, there's advantages to that. What are some things that you've said or some strategies you have when it comes to that?

Josh Sundquist: It's interesting, Scott, because ski racing is, it's an individual sport and I feel like I've spent much of my life in individual sports, both literally and figuratively. But I had the opportunity during the pandemic actually to be a writer and executive producer on a TV show for Apple TV plus inspired by my childhood. So basically it's like a sitcom about me when I was 12 and having always worked for myself as a speaker or writer, an internet video maker, these are all things that I do in this office at this desk by myself. And all of a sudden on the show, the scope of it was massive compared to anything I'd ever done. I was an executive producer, but I was one of four executive producers and we had a cast and crew of over 200 people. Many hundreds of people ended up touching the project.

We spent an unbelievable amount of money. It was like the amount of people at Apple required to disseminate it worldwide because it's like not only is it in English, it's in 30 languages, it's in 105 countries, but all of that, I can't do any of that. I don't know how to do any of that stuff. All I knew was just my life stories. I don't know how to make a TV show, but because so many other people were involved, it's a medium that has a much wider reach than anything else I've ever done. And that was a really interesting experience because it was very hard because they're so different than what I'm used to doing to work with so many different people. But I found that it was, I guess there's two ways I would think of it is one is I was talking to my brother who is a director of a large nonprofit during this time in my life, and I was like, man, it's so hard.

There's so many meetings and you got to talk to all these people before you make any decision. I can't just do whatever I want normal. And he was like, yeah, I feel like that's sometimes in my life two, and when I do, I think of this African proverb that if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go with others. And I was like, oh, yeah, totally. And what I've realized in the last couple of years since the show has come out is, wow, I spent so much of my life thinking that working with other people would slow me down, but now I see that trying to do it by myself was holding me back is the opposite of what I thought. Yeah, maybe it's a little slower, but it was like that. No, that was putting this low limit on my potential of just thinking, oh, I got to do everything myself. I got a white knuckle. And now it's like every project I enter into I'm like, who's smarter than me? Who knows way more about this, who I can bring into the fold or pay or whatever I have to do to bring them onto my team so that I'm not holding myself back with my finite and limited skillset. So yeah, that's probably the lesson that most comes to mind for me in that respect for my life recently.

Scott Leune: Yeah, that's an amazing lesson that's so applicable. It's so interesting that with just a little bit of information, it can completely change the entire strategy of something we do and with just a little bit of accountability or support from other people, it can be the big difference between accomplishing something and not. So it's really because when we're alone, we may not have all that knowledge and we may not have all that accountability, but we can move faster, like you said. That's so interesting. Thank you for saying that. I'd like to kind of shift gears a little bit because right now in dentistry, at least we're in a phase of change and with this change comes new struggles and the old struggles haven't been fixed either. So dentists right now are feeling kind of pain points and stresses from multiple angles, and of course in comparison to something as dramatic as losing a leg as a child and having to learn how to have that normal life, it is not nearly at that scale. But I would imagine the lessons that are learned from going through these immense stressful moments and coming out positive would offer a lot of teaching moments. For someone like an entrepreneur that's feeling a lot of stresses right now or a lot of negativity and a lot of change, what might you say were some of the tools or the strategies that you use today maybe, and when you feel pressure, when you feel stress, how does that not tear you down? How do you get through that and still be positive about everything?

Josh Sundquist: Certainly I think that all of us face, it's the reality of being a human, although we for some reason think it should be otherwise that things are always in flux and always changing. Yeah, because interesting. My main job is I give motivational speeches. I like all kinds of corporations quite often to dental groups too, and no one at these groups, when I talked to maybe the media planners before, why did you hire me speak? No one's ever like, you know what? Things are changing around here and it's awesome. Everybody's stoked about all the changes. That's never the case. Even when things are changing for the better, it's like, but it's still so hard. It's like, yeah, maybe it's an improvement, but just the change itself is so hard. So how do we think about that? I'm a storyteller. I like to think of metaphors. So the way I try to remind myself and other people of it is, so when I look at photos of, well back up one more step.

I assume you Scott and listeners or viewers would have the common experience of when you grow up, when you're a little kid, your mom or dad or whomever buys you clothes and the clothes are always two or three sizes too big so that you can grow into it, right? It's like every mom says this, oh, I got to grow into it. So when I had cancer, and when I look at photos today of me, at the time I had cancer, I was frail, I was very skinny, I was pale, didn't have hair, but I noticed my clothes were still two or three sizes too big.

Now, I think that probably speaks more to my mom's sense of frugality than her sense of optimism, which I think she would probably even agree with. But I think it's interesting that she was betting on my future, even in that time, she was like, no, I'm going to still get Josh to close that he's going to grow into even though I had a 50% chance to live, right? It's like we're still growing into these clothes now. How does that relate? I think it's that when we have whatever changes, whatever changes are happening in the industry or new technology or new ways of doing business or whatever, we always look at it and we're like, no, no, no, that doesn't fit me. I'm this size and I prefer that. I prefer, even though maybe I've even outgrown the old thing, but I like it. It's what I'm used to.

It's all soft and broken in and this other thing, this other piece of clothing or uniform, I like to say as an athlete, this other uniform is too big for me. It doesn't fit. And the reality is if you're feeling that way, you're probably right. It's probably too big. But the lesson our moms all had for us, it's like this is your chance to grow into it. Yes, that uniform, this changed, this new thing. It might feel too big and it might be too big, but that means not that it's not the right uniform for you or the right path for you, it means well now you got to step up your game. You got to find new partners like you said, or new accountability or community or learn new skills or whatever it takes to grow into it. Because the reality is that, like I said, as human beings, we don't want to change.

We don't like change. Change is generally put upon us and thus that is how we grow because we are forced to change. Not so often because we go out and we're like, I want to change. Things change. And then we look back and we're like, oh, you know what? I grew a lot as a result of that change. But while we're in it, it's hard. And I think then you just have to have the mindset change is my chance to grow. And that doesn't necessarily make you feel all the way better, but it's like that's what I'm always telling myself. That's what my wife is always saying. That's what we're always saying. It's like when something changes, we're like, well, that change is our chance to grow.

Scott Leune: So it's really cool analogy because when we think about a team of people working in a dental office and with all of this change happening, we're constantly trying to implement something new and the team's like, no, what we're doing works. It works great, but what we might say now as a result of your analogy is what we're doing right now works for the size we are, but it's not the right thing to do for the bigger version of ourselves. It's not the system or it's not the team or it's not the way that the better, the bigger version, the newer version of ourselves needs to be. So we've got to implement the bigger thing to allow us to grow into it. And that is always of course, uncomfortable, but the change is our chance to grow is an awesome takeaway from that. I failed to mention so far how people could learn about you and your just incredible story and your hilarious content. By the way, we haven't talked about that, but you've got just hilarious content. How would someone find you online? How would someone find you on social media?

Josh Sundquist: That's just my name, Josh Sundquist. I'm the at Josh Sundquist on all social media and my website's josh sundquist.com and yeah, I can put it out new videos probably almost every day. So yeah, people can follow me on whatever social platform they happen to prefer

Scott Leune: Then that show, it was an Emmy award-winning show that you were produc and write of about your life. What's the name of that show and where could we find that show?

Josh Sundquist: Yeah, thanks for asking. It's called Best Foot Forward and it's on Apple TV. Plus you can get yourself a free trial. Watch our episodes. If you want to stay a member, that's great. You can cancel. Doesn't matter to me. I just want you to watch the show and yeah, I'm very proud of it and yeah, we were lucky enough to win an Emmy for it too.

Scott Leune: Am I correct in saying that you seem just a really positive person and you use humor to kind of help you go down this journey of life, even when there's bumps in the road? Are you the kind of person say, well, that was interesting, and you get up and you laugh about it and you point your skis now somewhere else and you keep going. Would that be kind of a safe thing for me to say? Is that correct?

Josh Sundquist: Yeah, I think I'm average maybe on the positive to negative spectrum, but high on the spectrum of thinking we should make the best of it. I don't know. I am not necessarily Pollyanna smiling all the time person, but I am like, well, this thing happened. I don't know, this is what happened. I have one leg, it's not coming back. I don't love it. I would prefer to have two legs, but it's reality, so let's figure out what can I do? I can ski race, I can do these weird Halloween costumes, whatever that is. And yes, I think I'm far into the spectrum of trying to find comedy and humor within that just because to me it's like, I don't know, I'd rather laugh about something than cry about it. And sometimes we have that choice and for me, yeah, definitely if there's any way I can spin some annoying conversation or everyday stressful situation into comedy, great. Now I feel better about it and now I can share that comedy with other people and they'll feel better too, and it can turn around what might otherwise be an annoying situation into like, oh, that was funny. And now all of a sudden it's like you have, you've gained power over the situation, I think by fonde comedy in

Scott Leune: It. So my family, when something goes wrong, everyone has of course their own reactions to it. I'm the one that kind of just says, okay, well let's move on and do this. And I try to solve something and move on and almost acting in a way or I seem in a way something bad didn't necessarily happen. Are you that in your own family, your own family dynamic? Are you kind of that person as well?

Josh Sundquist: Yeah, that's probably a question for my therapist.

Scott Leune: I think for your wife, maybe

Josh Sundquist: Probably more for my wife, she would probably be able to give you a more accurate answer. Yeah, I think that there could be, there's a balance right in life, right? It's like you want to be positive and react in a useful way and make the best of things, but it is not healthy to deny what's going on or just shove it away into some dark corner of your mind that's not going to work out great either. So yeah, I think you ideally want to have a little of both and sort of acknowledge and accept what's happened. I think that's just sort of the two sides of the coin. It's almost a paradox, but I think it's two sides of the same coin. One number one is surrender and acceptance to whatever's happened and you might not like it, but it's happened. And so it's a giving up to circumstances and then flipping the same coin over to the other side. Okay, cool. Now that I've surrendered and accepted and given up to the way things are, what can I do? How could things still be or how can I make the best of it or how can I just experience whatever this is? And I think that seems sort of both a negative and a positive reaction, but I think it is the best reaction in that sense, the most positive, healthy reaction you can have to a situation. Yeah.

Scott Leune: Awesome. So listen, I've been taking notes this whole time you've been talking, I've got so many things that I want to talk about and relate back to dentistry, but we are out of time. I really want to thank you so much for carving out this time for us and our little piece of the world in dentistry was such just a cool session here, so many takeaway messages that you've given us and just really, really valuable. And I know you don't have to be so open and giving, but you are, and I just really appreciate you doing that for us. So we will list your contact information, everything on our site, and hopefully you'll get a whole lot of people reaching out to you and watching your stuff, especially the hilarious videos on social media. Everyone's got to go see him, right? Everyone, literally after you listen to this, you've got to go log in, find his stuff and look at it. Josh Quist. Alright Josh, and do you have any last kind of thing you'd like to impart on us or last words before we go here?

Josh Sundquist: The words to remember are what I learned in that ski race, which is like keep getting back up. It's just like keep getting back up. You do it again and again and again and you get up as many times as you fell and eventually you cross the finish line.

Scott Leune: Awesome. That was awesome. Alright, Joshua, again, thank you so much for your time and for being so open with us and I hope we can maybe do another, I would love to do another one and dive deeper into some of these things. Maybe we'll have our people reach out to your people and we'll see if we can make that happen.

Josh Sundquist: Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. Let's talk more. Well, thanks a bunch Scott. I really appreciate the opportunity to be on here and to share with your community.

Scott Leune: Awesome. Alright, until next time everyone. Thank you. So now time for the dental download. What did we learn from Josh and how might that relate to our dental career or our dental practice? Man, what an amazing story. We only get a little bit of time with Josh in this format, but could you imagine sitting down with Josh for a day for a couple days or knowing him and really looking at how he has become who he is and the positivity he has and the accomplishments he's had considering what he had to struggle with at such a young age and for his whole life he's had to kind of come to terms and struggle with that. One thing that he had said when I asked him, what's something you find yourself teaching a lot of people? He said specifically one more thing, one more time. And we talked about how so many successful people will say things like that. They'll say, well, I was willing to do the extra step, the extra thing I was willing to put in the extra hours. I was willing to take on the extra risk that other people wouldn't take on so many of us, when we start feeling the pressure, feeling the negativity or feeling the exhaustion that can happen, we kind of stop and the most successful people almost know instinctively that we're almost there. We just need to do one more thing. We just need to do it one more time and we can accomplish that. It's also an exercise into bringing out the best in ourselves when we tell each other or when we tell ourselves, do one more thing, do it one more time. That kind of leads us into not quitting so early but going the distance that we need to go. And he talked about in his story of skiing and his racing and he said, it's not necessarily about how fast you ski, but the real difference in improving your time is how fast you get back up.

So often I see the people I coach and of course even myself, when we're faced with a crisis or a conflict or a struggle, we can be slow to get back up and we're slow because we're reacting to it. We're either traumatized or victimized by it or we're upset with it, we're angry, we're annoyed. And it can be difficult sometimes to just accept, get back up and go. We don't want to accept, we want to cook over it. Sometimes in dentistry we can have a really bad patient experience and that could ruin the day. If we let it, it could ruin the day. What if we just brush it off, get back up and go, we could have a negative experience with an employee and what if we just accept that and move on, get back up and go, us moving on, us getting back up quicker is going to give us the result we want in life, not us getting depressed or angry or distracted by these negative things and just kind of sticking with them.

I found that very interesting, this life philosophy that says it's about how fast you get back up. And we started using that analogy of skiing as almost as being an entrepreneur. Some entrepreneurs, well, when people think about being an entrepreneur, a lot of people get analysis paralysis. They think about all the times they might fall down, they don't know quite where to go, and it looks so steep and so difficult. And then you've got these kind of people ignorant to all those things that like, let's go and they ski down and then they fall and then they laugh and they get back up and they scheme some more and then they fall again and they kind of accept it, laugh at it, brush off the snow and they point their skis left and they keep going. And by the time the people at the top, the thinkers, the people that were having paralysis by analysis, by the time they decide maybe they want to start skiing, the other people have already figured it out and gone way down the slope and now they can ski well and they can accomplish a lot As an entrepreneur, they have gotten up and gone and they've achieved it in a very short amount of time while all the rest of us have just been worried about starting.

I look at starting a dental practice this way. So many people that have started dental practices and kind of endured the learning curve of it are doing so well and they're proud of what they've built and they're proud of the dentistry they're doing. They've picked the team they have, they've picked the technology, they've got the beautiful facility and they are now living at that finish line where everyone else is complaining about where they're at and they refuse to even start the race sometimes being successful, well shoot, I shouldn't even say sometimes. So often being successful is not quite knowing where we're going to go or how we're going to finish the race. It's about starting, it's about going and it's about getting up when you fall down. I just took a lot out of that conversation with Josh and applied in my mind to dentistry and to the struggles that dentists have about becoming an entrepreneur, about the worry about falling down, what that's like.

He also said something really cool. He said that change is our chance to grow. Change is our chance to grow. And he used a story where his mom would buy him clothes several sizes too big so he could grow into 'em several sizes too big means it didn't fit well right now today, right? The old clothes fit right today, the old clothes we know and we like how we look in 'em and they're easy, they feel right, they're the right size for today, but they're not the right size for us to grow into. That's the analogy he used changed so often is us wanting to get ready to be bigger or be better, be the future version of ourselves. The future version of ourselves requires a different way, a different process, a different system. Sometimes a different team, a different size close, the future version of ourselves.

Change is not meant to feel like it's a perfect fit today. Change is meant to feel like we're getting ready for who we're going to become. And so I love that. I love that story and I love that analogy that he gave. Sometimes in dentistry, we have the right team for who we are today, but maybe there's someone on our team that's not the right team member for the practice of tomorrow or sometimes our practice system, how we present finances, how we schedule might be working today, sometimes barely working today, but it's working today, but that's not going to be the way to schedule. If we intend on having the practice of tomorrow, we've got to learn how to wear that bigger size, how to have that better way so that we can become who we want to be tomorrow. He said a few other things.

He said he had to kind of move forward with a plan of recovery. So when he first as a child was told he's got a 50% chance of dying, that's a coin flip. And then he had to go through treatment, he had to lose a leg and he had to go through a year of chemo and lose his hair and be frail. And when he was describing that, he kind of moved on quickly. He was like, well, it was about he needed a plan of recovery, okay, he's going to lose a lot. He's going to do the chemo and then he's going to get out and he's going to learn how to do this, learn how to do it. He's going to compete and ski. And it was all about being on a path forward, being on a plan that almost pulled him out of getting stuck in the negativity of a situation.

I think about the people I coach one-on-one and some of them are in a real bind when they start working with me and it's almost like that plan, that plan gives them enough kind of vision and positivity and drive that they get unstuck really quick. They get unstuck really quick from the negativity or from the pressure from the stresses they have today. I think if we can create a plan for ourselves, whether it's a plan in our practice, how are we going to get more new patients in the next year? Or how are we going to recruit more employees? How are we going to expand hygiene? How are we going to add an associate? Let's plan it. Let's plan it. The plan alone will probably give us energy to move forward faster and better than where we are at today. Just the plan of getting through the thing might be enough for us to have enough positivity and energy to accomplish what we want to accomplish.

He also said trying to do it by yourself is holding me back. That's what he said. Trying to do something by myself is holding me back. He said, well, if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go with others because trying to do it by myself is holding me back. Those are the notes I wrote. What a profound set of words right there. If you want to go fast, go alone. That's so true. But when we go alone, we don't know what we don't know. There could be so much bigger or better that we could do and we might go fast, but be reckless. We might do something but it may not stick. Think of the times we've tried to implement something in the practice and we go fast, but we don't take our time to properly train, to properly audit, to micromanage the implementation, to audit long enough to make it stick, to really understand did it work?

Did we measure it? Did we prove that it worked? No. So often we just go fast and we're reckless and we do it halfway and we upset people, we break things and we're no better off six or 12 months later. So do it with others and you will go far. He said, others bring us perspective. They help us learn what we didn't know. So just the smallest little tweak from an idea we get from others, from their perspective could mean the world to us in achieving something. Others also bring us accountability so we are held accountable to doing it the right way or just staying on path when we work with others, others not just give us accountability, but they could also give us boundaries so others will help us understand if we are going too far one way or the other, if we are breaking things or becoming reckless, others can give us resources.

And so this is a back, and I apologize, I keep going back to people I coach, but there's so many kind of connections there. When I coach people, they've spent years, years trying to be successful. They've tried to implement things for years and it is pretty amazing that when they start working with me or anyone really, but when they start working with someone so quickly, they fix what they took years to try to fix on their own. They struggled with and so quickly they see things that are kind of easy to see once you see it, but if you didn't have the other person with you, you would've never seen it. We find a hundred thousand dollars or more all the time in money to save people when they start working with us, and that is not because we're so intelligent and it's not because the dentist isn't intelligent, it's because of perspective.

When you work with other people, you get to now benefit from their life perspective, their lessons, their experiences, their pains, their knowledge. He also talked about when something goes wrong, accept the facts of it, move on, use humor if we need to. He'd rather laugh about it than cry about it. Don't deny or ignore that the problems are there that they happen. Just accept that they have occurred, that they are there and now let's move on and how do we move on? If I combine some of his lessons here, I'd say move on with humor. Move on with humor. Yeah, I mean, can you believe that happened? It's crazy. Move on with humor, but then say, now we're going to have a plan. Here's what we're going to do next, right? We got to get back up and we got to get up fast, so let's move on quickly and that plan is going to give us direction.

It's going to give us energy to keep kind of skiing down this windy path on this slope so that we ultimately make it to the finish line. What a cool story. What a cool set of lessons. I don't know if any of this is speaking to any of you right now. I bet it is speaking to someone. Maybe it's not speaking to you. Maybe you are not faced with challenges right now or you're not struggling with people or with disappointments. At some point you have and you will at some point. We are going to hit a wall and how will we respond? I hope we'll admit there's a wall there. I hope we'll get back up really fast. We'll have a plan to get around the wall, we'll laugh about it, we'll lean on other people to help us get around it and ultimately we'll ski right past it and it's not going to define us.

It's just going to be part of skiing down the slope. We'll hit the finish line. That's what I hope. I hope this was a great episode for you guys. I felt like I personally got a lot out of it. Josh Sundquist, look him up. He's got just a ton of videos, a ton of content online. He's got that show. Put that on your list of stuff to watch. Hearing and watching stories like this has to give us all inspiration, so put that on your list. I'm going to close this episode up of the dental CEO podcast. My name's Scott Leune. I really appreciate you listening to this. We've got future episodes of chorus dropping every week. We've got another one. Some of these future episodes coming up are dental specific and so you don't want to miss those dental, really big dental lessons and cool stories that apply directly to you. I hope that you've subscribed to our podcast to help support us and help keep this thing going and make this a part of your daily or weekly habit when you drive, when you work out, when you just need a break or go walking around the neighborhood, put in some headphones, listen to these episodes, put us on the list if you can. We'd really appreciate the support and I hope that this becomes a really cool part of your week. Until next time on the Dental CEO Podcast.