January Learning
I’m going to try to be consistent and write each of these monthly blogs between groups 3 and 4 attending for each day. That way we have a feel for how each session has gone but are mentally focussed on the subject as there is still one group to go. I hope we can keep that consistency throughout 2022 and in recent times it has been even rarer to get an opportunity to plan for something consistently!
Consistency can also be construed as a habit and as you have foolishly read this far I am going to shoehorn into your brain a consistent list of habits for you….
- Don’t eat processed food
- Exercise your body almost every day
- Get as much natural sunlight as you can everyday
- Sort out your sleep hygiene
- Don’t drink alcohol
- Find your values, then live a purposeful life with worthy personalised goals which are derived from your values
Seriously those six points will at least help with many problems.
Anyway…January sermon over…back to learning!
So, I was delegate on Jimmy Makdissi’s course for CBCT interpretation and reporting (I look at a lot of CBCT’s in my day job so it makes sense that they make sense!). The course was online on a Saturday, hosted by Jimmy himself and it was superb.
He is a wonderful teacher, knows his subject so expertly, is kind, empathic, experienced and fun.
The reason for mentioning this experience is that it’s a great reminder for people who often provide the teaching to be on the other side of the table. Like when you or I go to the dentist, it feels weird right?
Jimmy knew all the answers and we didn’t. We could offer answers but that meant the chance of being wrong, perhaps stupidly wrong and saying something that causes me/us to risk feeling one of the worst emotions a human can experience, public humiliation. When a question is posed and you know the answer it’s easy so shout it out, if you are uncertain or just shy it means sticking your neck out and taking a risk. Humiliation can be very small but if it is public it magnifies massively.
Public humiliation is rivalled only by deep guilt, raging anger or worst of all utter hopelessness on the menu of misery us humans can live through (or sadly not live through).
I answered a question incompletely that Jimmy posed and had a nanosecond of feeling foolish when another delegate, my follow Zoom-learner, smiling and looking like he had just passed his GCSE’s got it more completely right. It was an impossibly fleeting moment of negative emotion but it was there and it was real. I took note of my feelings.
It reminded me of why a very few of our delegates at Aspire are so reticent to join in and offer questions, answers or challenges. (Jimmy was kind to all and rid everyone of any possible chance of feeling foolish. He is very good at his job indeed and a great teacher.)
I remind myself of the ageless Confucius quote:
‘The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life’.
Both asking and answering questions is harder for some than it is for others and teachers should keep that in mind.
Humiliation or shame is an emotion. The ability to see your emotion arriving like a third person observer is at the heart of mindfulness/mediation/stoicism or whatever the most fashionable version of that is this season.
The emotion arrives from within your subconscious, be it the fear of speaking, the attraction to that girl over there, the eagerness to prep a tooth, the anxiety of answering questions publicly. It arrives unbidden and from within your subconscious.
Like when you read a great book and cannot wait to turn the page…you think that’s you creating that urge….
It’s not, it’s your feeling brain, your subconscious. You get to experience the urge. All we get to do is observe our emotions, create a small space and perhaps alter and influence them with our conscious brains. Now that happens too fast most of the time and none of us are robots.
Nevertheless, this was a timely reminder that every delegate wants to get it right, to be involved, to contribute and to be of value. Just like you want with your dentistry every day. Feelings, some positive and some negative creep into that moment and make our day better or worse, our self-esteem and confidence grow or ebb. No one wants to feel shame, no one wants to do wrong yet so many of us practice in fear of doing something wrong.
My experience and writing this made it clear to me that it’s always 100% the teacher’s responsibility to create a learning environment that makes every delegate feel as good, as comfortable and to get the very best of themselves that they can.
I confess we take pride in our humility (nice oxymoron Rich) in that regard. If I can explain my contradiction I mean that we beat ourselves up to make everything better all the time and to all our delegates…loud, chatty and like a bubbling bottle of champagne, to the quiet and spectral tooth preppers who move like spies…all contribute and all help us make the Aspire set up an ever-improving place to be.
Anyway, these composites we have been doing together in January. Wow. It’s easy to say but seriously the delegates have absolutely smashed it. The results are really brilliant to see. Perhaps, the three commonest errors with anterior composites are the final shape, lack of opacity (from undercooking the dentine layer) and under finishing. The first two tend to present immediately as the patients says ‘the colour is wrong’ and the latter as a white line or a stained margin. There are plenty more but by even just their second layered composite the delegates in 2022 seemed to just get it all.
It truly gives me faith in the future of our profession to see such smart people looking to excel. Many will consolidate these skills on the 8 hours of hands on Day 11 revision and practice day!
We make a point to remind everyone that practicing skills on plastic teeth in a lab isn’t the same as real life dental work so we have to make the gap between those two environments as small as possible. We do this with 1:1 feedback and visualisation of real-life problems. Most of the practical problems – lips, tongues, saliva etc can be overcome. The final frontier, as always, is the patient’s personality and therein their expectations. Seeing that mutual recognition across the group when we discuss how to manage that is something we will never tire of. Understanding that the composite you just did will generate feelings in the patients subconscious and they will feel an emotion. The emotion is largely based on it’s appearance. Good or bad and what they both mean for you as a lovely diligent dentist trying to do the best you can.
That again is emotional intelligence and we introduce it with the second of two questions we ask everyone in January to start thinking about.
- How hard will the restoration have to work mechanically?
- How hard will the restoration have to work psychologically?
Question 1 will always be answerable with a half decent occlusal exam and optimised with planning and technique. Question 2 means entering the world of psychology and emotional intelligence.
So perhaps I’ll wrap this up on that point. Each of us, each patient, each delegate has experienced exclusively and uniquely our lives, felt our feelings and emotions and each day, each moment and each experience can only every be known by us. In a way that is sad as it suggests an idea that we are all somewhat alone in our unknowingness, but at times, for some moments we connect, truly connect and that is too special to ever not treasure.
