Advertise on podcast: Wellness In Dentistry

If you keep losing your assistants, your hygienists, or your front office staff, this episode is for you. And the answer probably isn't what you think. In this episode, Dr. Kyle Stanley and Dr. Martin Mendelson tackle staff burnout and retention in dental practices head on. Kyle is candid about it: when he was burning out, he blamed his team for everything. Lazy. Ungrateful. Just in it for the money. Then he started looking inward and realized the leader sets the ceiling for everything that happens underneath them. Martin draws from Shawn Achor's new book, The Power of Beliefs, and a striking LinkedIn case study: a structured appreciation system between team members, just written notes of genuine praise, moved retention from 80% to 94% over six to twelve months. Fourteen percentage points. At LinkedIn. From notes. The science behind it isn't complicated. Maslow's hierarchy isn't just a poster in a college classroom. When your team feels psychologically safe, appreciated, and like they belong, they perform better, stay longer, and care more. And the data shows that optimistic workplaces don't just have better morale: patient outcomes actually improve too. Kyle puts it simply: you can only blame your team once you've done everything possible on your end first. Self-awareness is step one. Controlling your emotions is step two. Most dentists are still on step zero. And the best part? Most of this costs nothing. For more info or to join their live CE course, go to www.wellnessindentistry.com Join Carabelli Club here and save $600 on your yearly membership: https://hubs.la/Q03QQGmD0 If you'd like to chat with Martin about disability insurance, you can click here to find a time on his calendar. He's a licensed agent and happy to connect with you. Get Kyle's founder's discount for Pearl AI by scheduling a demo here: https://discover.hellopearl.com/referral/kyle-stanley/

Teams are teams. Doesn't matter if it's a dental practice, a veterinary clinic, or a Fortune 500 company. The human problems are the same. In this episode, Dr. Martin Mendelson and Dr. Kyle Stanley unpack what that actually means and why dentistry's tendency to treat itself as uniquely complicated has kept a lot of practice owners from borrowing solutions that have been working in other industries for decades. Martin was just interviewed on a major veterinary podcast, and the entire conversation had nothing to do with teeth. It was about people. Kyle makes it concrete with a story: a dentist he met with had a team breakdown over birthday lunches. Two were ordered on the same day because nobody had clear ownership of the process. When Kyle started asking questions, is there a list of approved restaurants, a cost ceiling, a deadline, a backup if the owner's out? the dentist realized there wasn't actually an SOP at all. Within 10 minutes, they had one. And a recurring problem was permanently solved. That's the throughline of the episode: you can have all the systems in the world, but if your people aren't following them, the systems are worthless. And more often than not, when the team isn't following through, it's not because they don't care, it's because nobody ever wrote it down, assigned it, or made it undeniable. Communication. Expectation. Boundaries. The light side triad applies to every relationship in the practice. For more info or to join their live CE course, go to www.wellnessindentistry.com Join Carabelli Club here and save $600 on your yearly membership: https://hubs.la/Q03QQGmD0 If you'd like to chat with Martin about disability insurance, you can click here to find a time on his calendar. He's a licensed agent and happy to connect with you. Get Kyle's founder's discount for Pearl AI by scheduling a demo here: https://discover.hellopearl.com/referral/kyle-stanley/

Your team isn't trying to ruin your day. So why does it feel that way? In this episode, Dr. Kyle Stanley and Dr. Martin Mendelson dig into the frustration that comes with leading a dental practice — and why most of it has more to do with how we're wired than how bad our team is. Martin took a Wharton course on the neuroscience of leadership to answer one central question: why does the team think the sky's green when you think it's blue? The answer isn't that your team is incompetent. It's that you're operating with far more blue circles around your red circle — more responsibilities, more stakes, more context — and what feels obvious to you genuinely isn't to them. That gap isn't fixed by frustration. It's fixed by documentation, workflows, and communication that actually closes it. Kyle gets personal: his daughter was mid-tantrum, hitting and trying to get past him, and he had one clear thought — my job right now is to stay calm. The same skill that makes you a better parent makes you a better leader. You can choose your response in the gap between stimulus and reaction. That's not soft psychology — it's a trainable skill with neuroscience behind it. The shift isn't from judgment to tolerance. It's from judgment to curiosity. I wonder why this is happening opens a door that damn it, here we go again slams shut. For more info or to join their live CE course, go to www.wellnessindentistry.com Join Carabelli Club here and save $600 on your yearly membership: https://hubs.la/Q03QQGmD0 If you'd like to chat with Martin about disability insurance, you can click here to find a time on his calendar. He's a licensed agent and happy to connect with you. Get Kyle's founder's discount for Pearl AI by scheduling a demo here: https://discover.hellopearl.com/referral/kyle-stanley/

The Atlantic just ran a headline calling children's orthodontic expansion "wrenching bones apart." Kyle and Martin have some thoughts. In this episode, Dr. Kyle Stanley and Dr. Martin Mendelson dig into one of dentistry's most polarizing debates: is early palatal expansion in children actually justified? The American Academy of Orthodontics says the research isn't there. Kyle says the absence of a 40-year longitudinal study doesn't mean the treatment doesn't make sense — and he's done the treatment himself, on his own kids. Here's Kyle's framing: even if expansion does nothing beyond preventing crowding and creating a broad, functional smile, you haven't hurt anyone. The worst-case scenario is a better-looking bite. That's a very different calculus than the Atlantic's headline implies. Martin draws the comparison to oral-systemic health — a field that spent years being dismissed for lacking definitive research before becoming a standard of care. Paradigm shifts in dentistry move slowly. That doesn't mean early movers are wrong. Both hosts agree on one thing: informed consent is everything. The research is still developing, the conversation is evolving, and patients deserve to know that — not a polished sales pitch. Kyle also makes a case for something often overlooked: getting kids into the dental chair early builds the kind of familiarity that prevents dental phobia for a lifetime. This isn't a simple debate. But "no research yet" has never meant "no." For more info or to join their live CE course, go to www.wellnessindentistry.com Join Carabelli Club here and save $600 on your yearly membership: https://hubs.la/Q03QQGmD0 If you'd like to chat with Martin about disability insurance, you can click here to find a time on his calendar. He's a licensed agent and happy to connect with you. Get Kyle's founder's discount for Pearl AI by scheduling a demo here: https://discover.hellopearl.com/referral/kyle-stanley/

If a friend built a million-dollar business, you'd say "good for them." If a dentist does it, suddenly someone's getting ripped off. In this episode, Dr. Kyle Stanley and Dr. Martin Mendelson take on money shame in dentistry the guilt, discomfort, and defensiveness that shows up when dentists have to talk about fees, accept high incomes, or watch patients push back on treatment costs. It comes from everywhere: patients, family, team members, other dentists, and often from inside the dentist's own head. Kyle didn't feel money shame early in his career he had no money. He was $2 million in debt between his house, his practice, and his school loans. But he was deeply uncomfortable talking about fees, especially with friends and family. It took him 8 or 9 years to get there. The fix, as Martin frames it, isn't toughening up it's communication. A doctor at an urgent care laid out the fees and the alternatives matter-of-factly before treating Martin for an allergic reaction. No guilt, no apology. Just clarity. That's the model. You're not withholding care when you present the cost. You're actually doing the patient a disservice when you don't. Selling isn't sleazy when it's about helping someone get what they actually need. Set the expectation. Own your fees. Be ready for a no and be okay with it. For more info or to join their live CE course, go to www.wellnessindentistry.com Join Carabelli Club here and save $600 on your yearly membership: https://hubs.la/Q03QQGmD0 If you'd like to chat with Martin about disability insurance, you can click here to find a time on his calendar. He's a licensed agent and happy to connect with you. Get Kyle's founder's discount for Pearl AI by scheduling a demo here: https://discover.hellopearl.com/referral/kyle-stanley/

Do dentists hate each other? Kyle and Martin have thoughts. In this episode, Dr. Kyle Stanley and Dr. Martin Mendelson dig into one of dentistry's more uncomfortable realities — the way dental professionals treat each other online, and why it's making everyone's job harder. Zirconia vs. biomimetic. Graft or don't graft. Hazmat suit for amalgam removal. The clinical debates are real, but the comment sections have become something else entirely. Kyle is clear: most dentists he's met — across 48 states and 50 countries — are good people trying to do their best with the tools and training they have. The bad actors are a fraction of a percent. But that fraction is loud, visible, and giving the whole profession a reputation problem. And when your patients walk in already convinced you're going to upsell them, you feel that every single day. Martin's push is on how dentists disagree, not whether they should. There's a difference between a nasty comment and a principled rebuttal. And if you genuinely believe a colleague is harming patients, keyboard bravery isn't the answer — the state board is. Public pile-ons don't change minds. They just give skeptical patients more ammunition. The antidote to all of it? Study clubs. Mastermind groups. WhatsApp threads full of dentists from around the world actually helping each other. That version of dentistry exists too. Go find it. For more info or to join their live CE course, go to www.wellnessindentistry.com Join Carabelli Club here and save $600 on your yearly membership: https://hubs.la/Q03QQGmD0 If you'd like to chat with Martin about disability insurance, you can click here to find a time on his calendar. He's a licensed agent and happy to connect with you. Get Kyle's founder's discount for Pearl AI by scheduling a demo here: https://discover.hellopearl.com/referral/kyle-stanley/

The hosts of a wellness podcast are here to tell you: you might be doing wellness wrong. In this episode, Dr. Kyle Stanley and Dr. Martin Mendelson turn the lens on themselves and on the overachiever personality type that dentistry selects for to ask a genuinely uncomfortable question: when does healthy become obsessive? Kyle doesn't drink, has never had a sip, tapes his mouth at night, won't bring his phone into the bedroom, and deliberately avoids tracking his sleep because he's watched friends develop anxiety over bad sleep scores that then caused the bad sleep scores. His sister-in-law used to get out of bed at 10pm to walk around the block just to close her Apple Watch ring. That's not wellness. That's a new form of perfectionism wearing wellness clothes. The dentist brain measures success in tenths of millimeters. That same brain, applied to protein intake and step counts, can turn self-care into self-torture. Martin introduces the AimSmart framework to counter it: set a maximum, a middle ground, and a minimum for every wellness habit. Because one will always be greater than zero and giving yourself permission to hit the floor without shame is what keeps the habit alive long-term. Grace isn't the same as making excuses. Know the difference, and give yourself some. For more info or to join their live CE course, go to www.wellnessindentistry.com Join Carabelli Club here and save $600 on your yearly membership: https://hubs.la/Q03QQGmD0 If you'd like to chat with Martin about disability insurance, you can click here to find a time on his calendar. He's a licensed agent and happy to connect with you. Get Kyle's founder's discount for Pearl AI by scheduling a demo here: https://discover.hellopearl.com/referral/kyle-stanley/

Every dentist has one. The case that plays on a loop. The one that made you question everything. In this episode, Dr. Martin Mendelson and Dr. Kyle Stanley get honest about the cases that shook them and what those moments actually reveal about the relationship between clinical identity and self-worth. Martin's was a root tip that snapped during surgery and wouldn't come out. Kyle's was a complex bone grafting case where nine months of healing and significant patient expense yielded barely a millimeter of bone growth and ended with a refund request. Here's what neither of those cases actually means: that they're bad dentists. Complications happen in 2–3% of cases. That's not failure that's dentistry. The problem isn't the complication. It's the global story dentists tell themselves afterward. One hard case becomes I'm not good enough, and that narrative has a way of following you into the next chair. Martin introduces the triangle of blame a framework that includes not just the dentist and the patient, but all the uncontrollable factors: genetics, anatomy, biology. Kyle's bone didn't grow. That's not always operator error. Sometimes it's just a patient who doesn't respond the way the textbook says they should. The fix is reality testing. Look at your actual numbers. If your success rate is 97%, one rough case doesn't rewrite that story. For more info or to join their live CE course, go to www.wellnessindentistry.com Join Carabelli Club here and save $600 on your yearly membership: https://hubs.la/Q03QQGmD0 If you'd like to chat with Martin about disability insurance, you can click here to find a time on his calendar. He's a licensed agent and happy to connect with you. Get Kyle's founder's discount for Pearl AI by scheduling a demo here: https://discover.hellopearl.com/referral/kyle-stanley/

Dentists have a nickname for September. They call it Suctember. And Kyle and Martin think you can do better than just accepting it. In this episode, Dr. Kyle Stanley and Dr. Martin Mendelson get tactical about one of dentistry's most dreaded months not to commiserate, but to actually fix it. The data usually tells the real story: if September is slow, look at June, July, and August hygiene numbers first. Lower hygiene visits mean less diagnosis, which means less treatment in the chair two months later. September didn't fail you. The preceding months did, and nobody was watching. The fix starts before September ever arrives. Kyle breaks down the data points every practice should be tracking: new patient acquisition, hygiene production, unscheduled treatment, and patient churn. The average practice has a quarter million dollars in unscheduled treatment sitting untouched on the books. That's not a September problem that's a follow-up problem. Then there's AI. Kyle's company Jazza can automatically re-engage churning patients, chase unscheduled treatment, and reactivate inactive patients every single week hands-free. Martin's contribution is equally practical: block CEO time separately from clinical time, front-load your goals during busier months, and build virtual snow days into your annual plan so September doesn't blindside you. Stop accepting slow months. Start planning around them. For more info or to join their live CE course, go to www.wellnessindentistry.com Join Carabelli Club here and save $600 on your yearly membership: https://hubs.la/Q03QQGmD0 If you'd like to chat with Martin about disability insurance, you can click here to find a time on his calendar. He's a licensed agent and happy to connect with you. Get Kyle's founder's discount for Pearl AI by scheduling a demo here: https://discover.hellopearl.com/referral/kyle-stanley/

Summer's over. And for most dentists, that means one thing: time to make up for it. That instinct is exactly what Dr. Kyle Stanley and Dr. Martin Mendelson are pushing back on in this episode. The idea that you need to "make up" for summer assumes summer was a mistake. It wasn't. If you planned it, lower production in August isn't a problem — it's a data point you already knew about. The hustle spiral that hits every September isn't discipline. It's guilt. Kyle puts it plainly: dentists have been hustling since high school. Grinding to get into college, then dental school, then an associateship, then ownership. At some point you're redlining in first gear — and that's how you blow the motor. The dentists who last longest aren't the ones who push hardest. They're the ones who figured out how to be sustainable. So what does a healthy fall reset actually look like? Start with curiosity, not panic. Look at your patient base and ask who's actually worth keeping. Fall is a great time to quietly dismiss the patients who drain your energy — and if you have a mature practice, your numbers might not even dip. Then make one change at a time. Not everything. One thing. Give yourself some grace. You've been conditioned since childhood to feel the weight of September. That feeling is normal. Just don't let it make your decisions for you. For more info or to join their live CE course, go to www.wellnessindentistry.com Join Carabelli Club here and save $600 on your yearly membership: https://hubs.la/Q03QQGmD0 If you'd like to chat with Martin about disability insurance, you can click here to find a time on his calendar. He's a licensed agent and happy to connect with you. Get Kyle's founder's discount for Pearl AI by scheduling a demo here: https://discover.hellopearl.com/referral/kyle-stanley/

An unspoken expectation is a premeditated disappointment. In this episode, Dr. Kyle Stanley and Dr. Martin Mendelson dig into one of the most quietly destructive forces in dental practice — and in life: uncommunicated expectations. The burned-out light bulb nobody changed. The treatment plan the patient rejected. The procedure that didn't go smoothly. Most of the frustration dentists carry daily traces back to expectations they never said out loud. Kyle's framework is simple: expectations, communication, and boundaries. Master all three and most of the friction in your practice — with your team, your patients, your family — starts to dissolve. Miss any one of them and you're setting yourself up to be perpetually let down by people who never knew what you needed in the first place. Martin flips the script on how to handle it when things don't go as planned: come at it with curiosity, not judgment. Not "why is this so hard?" but "what's actually happening here and what can I learn from it?" That single shift — from reaction to inquiry — changes the emotional cost of a hard day in the chair dramatically. The real takeaway: people don't change until the cost of staying the same is higher than the cost of the conversation. Have the conversation. For more info or to join their live CE course, go to www.wellnessindentistry.com Join Carabelli Club here and save $600 on your yearly membership: https://hubs.la/Q03QQGmD0 If you'd like to chat with Martin about disability insurance, you can click here to find a time on his calendar. He's a licensed agent and happy to connect with you. Get Kyle's founder's discount for Pearl AI by scheduling a demo here: https://discover.hellopearl.com/referral/kyle-stanley/ Get Kyle's founder's discount for Pearl AI by scheduling a demo here: https://discover.hellopearl.com/referral/kyle-stanley/

DSOs are collapsing. DSOs are taking over. Which is it? In this episode, Dr. Kyle Stanley and Dr. Martin Mendelson cut through the noise around the DSO landscape and bring some actual data to a conversation that's been running almost entirely on emotion. Yes, some large DSOs are facing real financial pressure. Kyle breaks down why: a decade of overpaying for practices at inflated valuations, cheap debt that isn't cheap anymore, and private equity math that only works until it doesn't. But the "DSOs are taking over dentistry" panic? The numbers don't support it. According to the ADA Health Policy Institute, 73% of dentists still own their practices. DSOs aren't taking over frequency bias is just making it feel that way. Then there's the quality of care debate. Kyle and Martin have both worked on the lab side. They've seen substandard work coming out of private practices and DSOs alike. Bad dentistry isn't a DSO problem it's a human problem. The real concern with investor-backed models isn't necessarily the quality of the crown. It's whether the crown needed to be done at all. The bottom line: make decisions based on data, not headlines. Control your emotions, build your business skills, and become a great leader or hire one. And if you're ready to do the work in person, join Kyle and Martin at Light Side Live, November 6th and 7th in Phoenix, Arizona. For more info or to join their live CE course, go to www.wellnessindentistry.com Join Carabelli Club here and save $600 on your yearly membership: https://hubs.la/Q03QQGmD0 If you'd like to chat with Martin about disability insurance, you can click here to find a time on his calendar. He's a licensed agent and happy to connect with you. Get Kyle's founder's discount for Pearl AI by scheduling a demo here: https://discover.hellopearl.com/referral/kyle-stanley/

You've been staring at that project for weeks. You know exactly what needs to be done. You just can't start. In this episode, Dr. Kyle Stanley and Dr. Martin Mendelson dig into why big projects feel paralyzing and the surprisingly simple fix. Kyle's been slowly dismantling a massive bougainvillea in his backyard, 30 minutes at a time, one trash can per week. Martin organized over 600 recipes into binders by committing to just 10 a night. Neither of them ate the whole frog at once. The same principle applies directly to one of the most avoided tasks in dental practice management: SOPs. Most dentists know they need them. Almost none of them have a complete set. Martin walks through exactly how to start not by writing all of them, but by listing what's most frustrating right now, building the first one, and using AI to scale the template from there. One move. Then the next. Kyle makes a sharp observation: dentists are actually excellent at stepwise thinking clinically. They do it in every treatment plan. The problem isn't the skill. It's applying it to the business side of the practice. The takeaway is simple: make the steps small enough to fit into 20 minutes. Because done in pieces beats never started every time. For more info or to join their live CE course, go to www.wellnessindentistry.com Join Carabelli Club here and save $600 on your yearly membership: https://hubs.la/Q03QQGmD0 If you'd like to chat with Martin about disability insurance, you can click here to find a time on his calendar. He's a licensed agent and happy to connect with you. Get Kyle's founder's discount for Pearl AI by scheduling a demo here: https://discover.hellopearl.com/referral/kyle-stanley/

Last week was Martin's 11th sobriety anniversary. This episode is his way of celebrating it. In this episode, Dr. Martin Mendelson and Dr. Kyle Stanley tackles one of dentistry's most underspoken problems: substance abuse. Between 10 and 19% of dentists and physicians suffer from a substance use disorder. That's not a fringe statistic. That's one in six of your colleagues. Martin shares his own story how imposter syndrome, social pressure, and the slow creep of one martini becoming three became something he could no longer manage on his own. Kyle comes at it from a different angle: a lifelong non-drinker who has watched alcohol take apart people he loves, including his father-in-law, who stayed sober for 20 years until his dog died and then didn't. They talk about what actually defines a disorder when drinking stops being a habit and starts getting in the way. They get honest about the culture at dental conventions. And they share what recovery actually looks like: the 90% success rate for inpatient treatment specifically designed for dentists and physicians, the peer support available through state dental associations, and the slow, quiet moment when Martin realized his new life had taken root when alcohol simply stopped occurring to him. Eleven years is a big deal. So is asking for help. For more info or to join their live CE course, go to www.wellnessindentistry.com Join Carabelli Club here and save $600 on your yearly membership: https://hubs.la/Q03QQGmD0 If you'd like to chat with Martin about disability insurance, you can click here to find a time on his calendar. He's a licensed agent and happy to connect with you. Get Kyle's founder's discount for Pearl AI by scheduling a demo here: https://discover.hellopearl.com/referral/kyle-stanley/

There's a person out there who gets it who was there when you failed your first test, cried in the hallway, and had no idea what you were doing. Thirty years later, you can pick up the phone and be right back. In this episode, Dr. Kyle Stanley and Dr. Martin Mendelson talks about the friendships forged through the shared adversity of dental school and why those bonds are worth protecting. Martin just returned from his 30-year reunion at the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery, the first dental school in the world, where classmates have gone on to everything from cosmetic practices in Manhattan to retirement to coaching other burned-out dentists. What makes these friendships different isn't history, it's understanding. Your spouse might not get why a difficult crown prep ruined your whole day. Your dental school friend will. That's what the Grant Study, Harvard's 70-year research on human development, keeps coming back to: relationships are stress buffers. And in a profession this isolating, that's not a soft concept, it's clinical. Kyle and Martin also get honest about the pull to let these relationships slide. Practice ownership has a way of eating everything. But the dentists who go through hard times alone go to darker places. Send this episode to your favorite dental school classmate. Tell them you were thinking about them. For more info or to join their live CE course, go to www.wellnessindentistry.com Join Carabelli Club here and save $600 on your yearly membership: https://hubs.la/Q03QQGmD0 If you'd like to chat with Martin about disability insurance, you can click here to find a time on his calendar. He's a licensed agent and happy to connect with you. Get Kyle's founder's discount for Pearl AI by scheduling a demo here: https://discover.hellopearl.com/referral/kyle-stanley/