Happy New Year!

I always wished the academic year started in January. Month 1, January, through to month 12, December makes clean, orderly sense to me. Usually traits of high orderliness and OCD are something I see in others as I sit at my chaotic desk eating food with my fingers looking at a screen with 200 tabs and 45 windows open.

To right this wrong, the blog series will follow Aspire education throughout the calendar year. January is Day 4 – direct composites, February anterior crowns and so on.

The series will be about shared learning, what a delegate learns, struggles with, excels at, common misunderstandings, and what we as teachers learn. How social energy and psychology affect dental education. You’ll see it all especially the amusing parts.

If a learner ever feels belittled or, God forbid threatened, their subconscious spends more time avoiding being wrong than trying to be right. Humans are hardwired to avoid loss and failure but importantly the effect is much stronger than the comparable drive to win or succeed.

Losing £100 feels much worse than the equivalent good feeling finding £100 creates. The negative emotion is stronger and lasts longer. It can be remembered for years. This translates to relationships too. The pain of being rejected feels much worse than the high of being accepted. Tinder/Bumble/ and all swipe left or right has capitalised on that fear of rejection and minimised it for a small monthly fee.

Dental complaints do much more damage to you than the equivalent compliment builds you.

In teaching it means that delegates are often quiet and don’t want to engage at first. If a few braver souls ask questions, ask for clarification, ask for evidence to back up a claim, ask for a live demonstration, ask anything….and everyone gets to see that such interaction is not just welcome but truly desired then the whole group learns to do the same. The learning environment improves quickly.

This is similar to one on one social interactions. Imagine talking to someone sat next to you at dinner who won’t speak back, at all. They nod and smile but never engage with you, ask you no questions and never tease you (teasing is not cruel BTW, it’s an invitation to play).

Such an interaction requires a one-way flow of energy, from you to them. The best conversations are where you are both equally engaged, involved, actively listen and do it all with good humour and curiosity. Time passes undetected in such exchanges.

As a supposed teacher we call this ‘group energy’. Some groups offer masses of energy and others less so.

I write this to give you insight into what every teacher experiences when a different class of learners walks into the room. Our job is to show everyone in each group that it’s ok to engage. That if you do your fellow delegates are grateful as you asked us exactly what was on their mind. It also massively helps us! If the same group miss the same point…. it’s not the learners’ fault and we have to change our teaching! That is one of a few ways the course evolves and improves each year.

The anxiety of speaking up loud in a group or challenging something publicly is real. A reasonable number of people simply won’t do it and that is ok too. There is no punishment, and we have abundant energy to spare. As a teacher I worry if I can do more to move such folk into a position where they feel they can engage. It’s an annual challenge to help people get the absolute best out of their investment.

We made that our philosophy right from Day 1 and it has never been more strongly felt. Delegates give us time and money and we don’t want to waste one second of it. We want everyone to get the absolute maximum yield they can. Each person is different, wants different things and hence get different outcomes. Sure, everyone gets much better at clinical dentistry, some want more psychology, better communication, better phrasing or administration.  Many want more money and less stress. That’s a good place to start if you don’t have any specific goals for your career.  Less worry about work and agency to increase your income (and more importantly asset wealth) as the year progresses.

I make no bones about proudly stating some of the results are astounding. People with some clear resolution on what they want (goals), agency to go and get it and a likeminded community to help them are capable of simply amazing things. That’s the psychological cocktail that unpins a lot of success – goals based on things you really value, ability to achieve them and help from a loyal team/mentors. Boom!

Many delegates when we meet them on Day 1 really have no idea about their goals. They are surviving week to weekend and getting Sunday blues about that first patient walking in on Monday morning. More on Day 1….in September (bloody academic calendar).

Anyway, this is just an introduction. This will be honest, warts and all 12-part blog series. It will cover each day from both sides or the learning experience. The psychological aspects of learning and of dentistry, particular struggles delegates and we have along with all the wins.

Raheel and I would like to wish you ALL the absolute very best for 2022. May it be a year of reconnection of dentistry to its human values, where you feel valued as the amazing person you are, where patients value you, you don’t fear complaints each day, where sense and reason and solidarity can re-emerge and you look forward to being at work.

Let’s make the in-fighting and sabotage in our profession disappears, where bosses and associates see each other as valued people and prosecution lawyers are so devoid of work they all have to retrain as florists. Where authorities in dentistry remember that respect is a human value and has to be earned and cannot be coerced or gained through fear. And also that respect is a value so very worth earning.

Short of Chicxulub II arriving, 2022 can’t be worse than last year. Either way, God willing, we will be here for you dear reader and will look forward to bright, meaningful and productive year ahead. We’re in this together, we always were!