Nobody teaches children how to walk, and almost no children are taught how to run.
For those of you who keep up with the Louis Dunne story, I got a text from him on Friday night to say that he had just run a 15-minute, 15-second 5 km.
His target this year is to go under 15 minutes for 5 km, that is absolutely ridiculous.
If you’ve ever watched Louis run, he runs like a runner, and the reason he runs like a runner is because he was taught to run like a runner, and he trained himself to do so.
High knees, long strides, on your toes, float, touch the ground as little as possible.
Most other people (like me) slap the ground with their feet.
The best runners touched the ground about 15% of the time, the worst, like me, 90% of the time, and that's because they weren't taught how to run.
This metaphor spans across pretty much everything we do, and there are so many aspects of our lives where we teach ourselves ‘how to play the guitar’.
And so, as you read this blog, if you read it on Friday night at 6 o'clock when it gets posted, I will have just finished delivering The Consultation Masterclass at the Campbell Academy in Nottingham.
This is not a consultation master class, per se; it's a sales course. It's about private healthcare and how to explain it to patients and to discuss it, and to present it, and to make it easier to accept the recommendations that you give, which are entirely ethical and honest and in the patient's best interests.
But sadly, this is something that we as dentists never learn, as with all things, some people are better than others, but as with lots of things in dentistry, everybody expects to be good at it.
Almost nobody can do it well, unless they've been taught how to do it well, by someone who knows how to do it well, and that may sound arrogant because I present this course, but I took a long time to learn how to provide a consultation for a patient because I was so terribly bad at it when I exited the hospital service into practice.
I was taught how to consult with patients in an NHS consulting room as a head and neck-surgery trainee; I had all the patience I could ever want, and more queuing up outside the door. I could be as nice or as horrible as I wanted, and it didn't matter because I held all the power and had the ability to say yes or no, or to make people's lives very difficult.
Even when I came into NHS practice, working first as an NHS trainee, then as an associate, and then in an IMOS contract. I had more patience than I knew what to do with, and so while my life felt better when I was being kind to people, I didn't have to be. And then I started to provide implant treatment, and then everybody else did, and then the world entirely turned on its head.
There's an art to the process of meeting people and explaining treatment options to them; there is a mechanical, scientific process to do it properly and consistently, and there's a system of measurement that shows you whether you're actually any good at it or not.
There's a huge range of technological assistance that you can have, and there is a brilliant system to use the whole of the team that you have to make it easier, better and more effective.
There's also a whole raft of psychological insights that are essential to know from meeting someone that you've not met before, and then there is the emotional intelligence toolbox.
Nobody ever taught us how to do this, and people still leave dental school with no real teaching or insight into how to talk to patients.
This is the best place to start, I think.
It's only a start, but it's an introduction to what it's like to actually have to sell what you believe to be right for a patient to them; otherwise, they go down the road to the guy who can't sell, who isn't very nice.
Blog Post Number - 4461
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