Everyone has a superpower, it’s just that not everyone might have discovered their superpower.
Everyone has a special talent or a skill or a character trait that can be used to make things better for them and for other people around them.
Mine is emotional intelligence.
I only discovered the concept of emotional intelligence in the early 2000’s at a brilliant dental CPD lecture by Alistair Mann who was the postgraduate Dean for the South West when he came to lecture to a BDA group and in a great stroke of wisdom my then boss asked his to do a talk on emotional intelligence from the list of possible topics that Alistair had given.
I was immediately captivated by the concept of emotional intelligence especially by the fact that it’s learnable as apposed to classic intelligence IQ which is pre-set.
Emotional intelligence was first described by Daniel Goleman in his book Emotional Intelligence and the concept has been taken much further forward since then.
Following on from this and through further years of research Goleman has identified and described many aspects of intelligence, both social and functional and if you care to take a look at it you can see it in your children and in the people around you.
Once you see emotional intelligence for what it is; you can practise it and you can try to make it better just like trying to get better at riding your bike or swimming or running or any of those things.
It’s a very special skill because it can be used both for good and for evil but when used by really clever people for good; it’s an extraordinary force for the better.
One of the most interested things about emotional intelligence is that it’s critical in successful healthcare and in particular in meeting new patients and new people, where you have to or would be better to develop a high trust environment as quickly as possible (remember for good or for evil).
It’s taken me a long time to realise this and even longer to be able to talk about it but when people I don’t know observe me in my consultations in the practice, they can see that I’m not the best implant clinician, I’m not the best recorder of information, I’m not the best photographer or the best radiographer but I am pretty good at the emotional intelligence section of the consultation.
The emotional intelligence section of my consultations last approximately 10 minutes in it’s truest form but all my consultations for implant patients are 1 hour and that is absolutely essential to build the bridge to the high trust environment.
My consultations have a pretty strict structure (although I don’t think it looks like that which is really important) and I have been persuaded now to put a consultation teaching session into The Campbell Academy programme for 2021.
This will be a Master Class in the middle of next year where we will go through all aspects of the consultation process that we use in the clinic and what we’ve learnt from other places and from our travels around Britain and around the world.
We’ll talk about the introduction and how important that is and then the emotional intelligence section of the consultation. We’ll look at the clinical aspect in detail and what we feel are the important things that you need to pick up in a consultation to keep you out of jail. We’ll discuss the presentation of information to the patient and then the presentation of options and then we’ll talk about the ‘what next?’.
This Master Class will take one-day (but really it should take 1 week) and so this is an early call because if we are still on the standard operating procedure for academy stuff it will be restricted to 23 people and that’s a lot less than the Master Class in January 2020.
I look forward to seeing you there, sign up if you want to be involved and be interactive on the day. Better if you bring your emotional intelligence than sit at the back and don’t contribute.
Blog Post Number - 2525
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