Episode 655: What To Do When Things Don’t Go As Planned…

Kiera and Tiff reflect on what happens when life, work, or anything in between goes awry. Tiff shares the experience she recently had traveling that ended up being one of the best happy accidents to ever happen. This topic is the perfect reminder to identify the temper tantrum moments in your practice and figure out to control the circumstances the best way possible and create systems that’ll solve problems forever.

Episode resources:

Reach out to Tiff and Kiera 

Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast

Become Dental A-Team Platinum!

Review the podcast

Transcript:

0:00:05.8 Kiera Dent: Hey everyone, welcome to The Dental A Team podcast. I'm your host, Kiera Dent and I have this crazy idea that maybe I could combine a doctor and a team member's perspective. Because let's face it, dentistry can be a challenging profession with those two perspectives. I've been a dental assistant treatment coordinator, scheduler, filler, office manager, regional manager, practice owner, and I have a team of traveling consultants where we have traveled to over 165 different offices, coaching teams. Yep, we don't just understand you, we are you. Our mission is to positively impact the world of dental. And I believe that this podcast is the greatest way I can help elevate teams grow VIP experiences, reduce stress, and create A teams. Welcome to the Dental A Team podcast.

0:00:50.8 KD: Hello, Dental A Team listeners. This is Kiera, and you guys, guess who I've got with me? The one and only Spiffy Tiffy. She got like a little vacation on accident. So how's that vacation treating you today, Tiff?

0:01:02.6 Tiff: You know what? It's pretty fantastic and I couldn't have been asked to be rerouted to a more beautiful day in San Diego, so it's been fantastic.

0:01:10.9 KD: So you wanna tell... I mean, Tiffany and I have actually considered starting a new podcast called The Travels of a Dental Consultant. Tiff, why don't you just share our first episode right here. What happened yesterday?

0:01:25.4 Tiff: Yeah, so I've been told a million times that I need to just write a book or a blog or whatever about travel because there's always something, and my motto, which is probably just progressing my travel mishaps, but my motto in life is like if I left for an office and something chaotic didn't happen with my travel, did I even really leave? So.

[chuckle]

0:01:44.6 KD: That's why you get it, you create...

[overlapping conversation]

0:01:46.2 Tiff: It's totally fine.

0:01:47.8 KD: 'Cause I go out there and I say, "I'm unavailable for stress and chaos." That's my motto. And so I got smooth flying, offices are easy peasy, here and there I'll get a little bit of a frustrated person, but most of the time, 'cause that's what I want, I am unavailable for stress and chaos. Tiff on the other hand's like, "Bring it on world, I'm ready."

0:02:07.9 Tiff: I know exactly who helped you come up with that verbiage by the way.

[laughter]

0:02:13.4 KD: It's great. It's very great.

0:02:15.2 Tiff: Yeah, she would probably yell at me when she hears this podcast. I'm sure I'll get a text. So, anyways, my travel I was in, this is the first day of February we're recording this. So if you're remembering, the Dallas area, really Texas in general is freezing over again. This happened a couple years ago and now they're freezing over once again. And I just thought it'll be fine, it's not that bad. Like you guys are freaking out. Chicago's frozen all the time. I have driven through Wisconsin and all of those states when they've been frozen and it's fine. And it was not fine. So I left Longview Texas on a, what should have been been two and a half hour drive to Dallas, and Dallas' elevation is higher. And so there were ice warnings and frozen water coming from the sky warnings. And I was like, it's totally fine. And the closer and closer I got, it was like I left and it was about 30 degrees and then it was 27 degrees and then 23 degrees and the roads were just getting worse and worse, and no one's on the road. By the way, restaurants have shut down because they don't want their team members to have to drive to the restaurant. And so there's nobody else.

0:03:33.6 KD: Yeah, because they don't have any way to plow those roads.

0:03:36.2 Tiff: None.

0:03:37.1 KD: I think you forgot that you're in a place that does not even have snowplows, salt, nothing. Those people are just downright stranded. They're like, "We don't even know what to do, hunker down, pray for sun. We don't know what to do with ourselves." And yet you're like, "I'm gonna just drive. It's gonna be great guys. I am an Amazonian who knows how to drive in the snow, don't you all worry."

0:03:56.3 Tiff: I'm like, "You guys are being ridiculous. People drive in the stuff all the time." And to Kiera's point, they have the necessities to be able to drive in that, which Texas I don't think is equipped for it. So now I know. So black ice, frost snow, the works, nobody's on the road. I'm not sure that we were, there were maybe like five of us at times, grouped together, which I'm like, "Please don't be anywhere near me. I'd rather be by myself. Because if you slide or I slide, we're surely hitting each other and that's way more dangerous to me than just like sliding into this bank right here." So I was like, "Please just get away from me." But I'm not sure we were even driving in lanes, we were just driving where the ice was the cleanest.

0:04:40.7 KD: And so by the time anyways, three and a half hours plus, to Dallas, my one flight, my flight out of Dallas had already been canceled, which was later in the evening. So I was like, I have plenty of time I can drive nice. Then I had to take a flight that was about two and a half hours earlier. And I was like, "I gotta make up about 30 minutes on this icy tundra." And so I didn't. And I got there, I got to the airport 15 minutes after they started boarding and still needed to get through security. So if you know anything about the airport or flights, they closed the gates 10 minutes before the flight takes off. So I had about seven minutes.

0:05:18.3 KD: But let's put an interjection. This is only if you're on American.

0:05:23.1 Tiff: Touche.

0:05:23.2 KD: Most of the other airlines are fine. American, hard pass no. They will shut that door, 11 minutes, you're toasted. Don't even try to get to that gate. I have been sitting on their tarmac on a connection with their own freaking airline and they're like, "Nope." And I'm like, "What do you mean? Nope, you held me on that tarmac. I had nothing to do with this. And you said, I'm shutting the gate 10 minutes before I see the plane and it hasn't even pushed back." So that's for all the... If you can't tell Tiff and I... Maybe not Tiff, me and American and DFW.

0:05:52.6 Tiff: It's DFW.

0:05:53.3 KD: They're like a total... It's awful but go on. Okay, so 10 minutes Tiff's not gonna make this.

0:06:00.6 Tiff: I'm not making it. Surely. There's no way. There's literally no way. So I get through security at the time that they should be closing the gates and I'm like, it's fine. I've ran through, DFW has more of my exercise life than any other airport. So I'm like, it's fine, I'm gonna run.

0:06:16.0 KD: DFW is the only place I run. I'm the same way. Like I literally, I don't run except for DFW. I don't even run for fun guys,