Episode 166. Feeling Unappreciated in Your Dental Career? We Need to Talk

Ever had one of those days where you solved 42 problems, kept the practice from catching fire, smiled through chaos… and still drove home wondering if anybody noticed? 

Yeah. 

We’re talking about that today. This episode is about feeling invisible at work, why it hurts more than we admit, and why you’re not crazy for feeling it and most importantly...what to do about it.

HEY THERE! LET'S CONNECT...I'D LOVE TO GET TO KNOW YOU BETTER!

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello, my friends, and welcome back to the podcast. Today, I want to talk about something that I think happens in almost every dental practice. In fact, it's reported to be one of the top reasons people leave a practice or dentistry altogether. And here it is. It's that weird, creepy feeling of becoming invisible. Not literally invisible. You know exactly what I mean. Like if you disappeared for a week, people would absolutely notice all the things that weren't getting done. The schedule would be chaos, the instruments wouldn't be where they were supposed to be. The patients would feel the difference immediately. But maybe not necessarily you, not your name, not your face, just the absence of the functions you perform. And before we go any further, I need to say something. If you have ever felt this way, you are not being dramatic, you're not being needy, you're not too sensitive or high maintenance or making something out of nothing. You are a human, and dentistry is the perfect environment for this to happen. So let's dive in and talk about it. Welcome to the Dental Life Podcast, where we explore how you can have both a successful career and a meaningful personal life in and outside of your practices without sacrificing one for the other. I'm your host, Beth Highman, former dental office manager, Turn Certified Life and Health Coach, and I'm here to help you navigate the challenges and opportunities that come from being a dental professional.

SPEAKER_00 1:38

Let's get started. Today we're talking about feeling invisible in the dental practice.

SPEAKER_01 3:29

You feel like no matter how many balls you keep from being dropped, nobody appreciates your effort. The schedule doesn't care if you're having a hard day. Miss Johnson doesn't care that you skipped lunch because you were trying to get that claim paid from 60 days ago. Those treatment plans still have to happen. Appointments still need to get confirmed. That crown prep takes as long as it's going to take, and we all know that can be longer than we scheduled. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, a lot of us start slowly disappearing inside our own lives. I know this because I did it too. I remember years of walking into the office already mentally exhausted before a single patient had arrived. You know that feeling, that particular flavor of tired that hit you in the parking lot before you even open the door. You unlock the doors, turn on all the lights, look at the schedule, and immediately you have this negotiating going on with yourself. You think, okay, if nobody calls off, if hygiene stays on time, if the doctor isn't in one of those moods, if nobody needs all this financing talk, if the lab cases actually arrive on time, maybe, just maybe, today won't destroy me. I didn't realize it at the time, but I wasn't tired because of dentistry. I was tired because I had become invisible. It felt like to everyone, but particularly to myself. That's the part that took the longest for me to see. I was so focused on managing everyone else's experience, the patients, the doctor, the schedule, the team, that I had completely stopped managing my own experience of my own life. I had stopped checking in with myself, stopped noticing what I needed, stopped asking what I genuinely wanted from any of this. And here's the other thing I didn't realize at the time. I handed my sense of self-worth completely over to the people around me. I was waiting every single day for someone else to tell me that I matter, for someone else to notice, from what someone else to say something. Now, secretly inside, I was saying, oh, I don't need that appreciation. I don't need for people to notice. But we're humans and we do. And when they didn't do that stuff, which was often, I took it as confirmation that maybe I didn't matter that much after all. That's the part I really want to dig in today, because I think that's where a lot of you are living right now. And I think there's something important, something freeing on the other side of that. So here's what we're unpacking what invisibility actually looks like inside of dental practice, what it does to you over time, the brain science behind why it hits so hard. And then the part I want you to hold on to, the truth about where your power in this situation actually lives. I really wanted to dig into this talk about feeling invisible and unappreciated in your dental career because it's something that has come up so often in my coaching practice recently. Here are some examples. Notice which one makes you go, Yep, that happened to me last week. So here's the first scenario, let's say. You are the person everyone goes to. You are the glue that holds everything together. Something needs to be fixed, they come to you. Need someone to stay late? Tag, you're it. Something needs to get covered, again, you are the obvious choice. Need someone to remember literally everything all the time without being asked. You are the girl. You become the reliable one, the dependable, the one everyone counts on. Which sounds like a compliment until you realize that reliable people often become invisible because everyone assumes, oh, they'll handle that. The handling gets expected. The excellence gets assumed. An assumed excellence stops getting noticed at all. Scenario number two: you're at the front desk, phone is ringing, patient standing right in front of you, doctor somewhere down the hall asking a question. Someone from hygiene appears in the doorway and just asks, Can you print something for me real quick? Your lunch is somewhere in the break room getting cold. And a patient, a beautiful, oblivious human being, says, Must be nice to be able to work in a dental practice. So here's scenario number three. You spend 30 minutes, a full 30 minutes you don't have calming down an upset patient. You have to rearrange the schedule, move three appointments, call insurance, find a financing option. You save that afternoon's production. The patient leaves smiling. They even hug you on the way out. The doctor cleanses up and they go, Great, is my three o'clock here yet? No acknowledgement. No, how did you handle that so well? Just who's next? And here's the part that makes this complicated. Most of the time, nobody in any of those scenarios is being deliberately cruel. Most dental practices aren't filled with terrible people. They're filled with busy people, stressed out people, people who are also operating in some version of survival mode. And in survival mode, we stop seeing each other clearly. But here's the version of invisible that I think is the most specific to dentistry, and the one I want you to really think about. The better you get at your job, the more invisible your work becomes. Sit with that for just a second. It's like the hygienist who manages an anxious patient so skillfully the appointment runs perfectly. Invisible because it worked, no drama. Or the office manager who catches the scheduling conflict before it blows up the afternoon. Again, invisible because the crisis never happened. Or the dental assistant who has every instrument ready before it's asked for, who keeps the procedure so seamless the doctor's day runs like clockwork. Again, invisible because seamless looks like nothing from the outside. One of the wildest things in our practice involved a patient who wanted to replace crown 6 through 11. It created a full-blown soap opera. Problem was the patient wanted whiter teeth, but the bicuspids were already crowned two, which meant picking shade felt less like dentistry and more like solving some mystery. The doctor was sweating. She had stepped out for maybe 30 seconds. Doctor C's assistant B walking down the hallway. Hey, come here real quick. Can you help me with the shade? Now, to the doctor, it was simple. Man needs shade help. Man asks nearest human. But to assistant A, it was betrayal, treason, the collapse of civilization. Assistant A was so upset she refused to assist for the remainder of the case. But here's the funny part. The doctor was so locked into those shades, the contacts, the margins, and giving that patient a beautiful smile, he never even realized Assistant B finished the case with him. But to Assistant A, it was everything.

SPEAKER_00 11:40

She felt invisible.

SPEAKER_01 11:46

In dentistry, your work can disappear into that's just how it's supposed to go, because you're so good at making it go that way. It's almost like you get penalized in recognition for being excellent, which when you're thinking about it, that's one of the most absurd paradoxes in existence. And then, and this is the specific version that I think makes people want to just flip a tray table. Someone less experienced, less skilled, but more vocal, maybe they make a suggestion in a team meeting and it lands. It gets discussed. It may even get implemented. And you're sitting there going, I've been doing that for two years. I just never announced it. I never made it a big deal. This is the texture of dental team invisibility. It's not usually dramatic, it's quiet and accumulative and specific. And it is very, very real. So, what happens when this goes on long enough? Because it doesn't just stay at the surface, it goes somewhere. And usually we do one of four things, and most of us cycle through all of them at some point, some at the same time. So here's the first thing we do: we do more. You think maybe if I work harder, stay later, save somebody one more time, then they'll notice. Spoiler, usually they give you more work because now you're proven beyond any doubt that you can handle it. You've tried to become more visible by being valuable and instead became more indispensable with just another fancier kind of wallpaper. Or we have the second response. We become martyred. I'll just do it. It's fine. I got this. And internally you're thinking, I absolutely do not got this. I do not got this. I haven't gotten this for six months. But on the outside, you're saying, oh, it's fine, because it becomes easier to just absorb it than to try to explain it. Here's the third response. We emotionally quit before we physically quit. You still show up, you still smile, you still see patience. But inside, you left six months ago. You're running on muscle memory and so-called professionalism, which is genuinely impressive, but it's not sustainable and it's not what you signed up for. The loneliest part of this one is the moment you catch yourself being genuinely indifferent about something you used to care about. And then you think, oh, when did that happen? It kind of feels like grief because it is. And then there's response number four. We start creating stories. Stories like, nobody appreciates me, nobody notices, nobody cares. And sometimes the data actually supports that. The situation is real and the story matches it. But sometimes the story becomes heavier than reality. Here's how that works: you have a circumstance. Nobody thanked me for handling that situation today. It's real, it happened. But your brain says, see, nobody values me. So you start to feel invisible, unappreciated. So what do you do? You pull back, you stop speaking up, you stop volunteering ideas. And now, and this is the painful part, you have accidentally created more of the very isolation you were trying to escape because you withdrew, and the people around you read that as being disengaged. So they stop including you, which confirms the story and makes you pull back more. The invisibility that started as something you thought was happening to you has quietly become something you are now participating in. Not because you're doing anything wrong, but because that's what unaddressed pain does. It finds a way to protect itself that ends up costing more than the original wound. And this right here is what I want to stop and say something important about. Something that might feel a little uncomfortable at first, but that I genuinely believe is the most freeing thing about this entire episode. Before I get to that, I want to give you the brain piece of this situation. Because it matters for how seriously you take what you've been feeling. Your brain is constantly running a background check. Not consciously, you don't feel it happening, but underneath everything, your brain is asking questions on a loop. Do I matter here? Am I safe? Do I belong? Am I important to the people around me? Look, these are not shallow questions. They are some of the most fundamental things the human brain needs answered in order to feel regulated. They are wired in to your brain. They are not optional. And when the answer keeps coming back as only when I'm useful, only when I'm needed, only when I'm performing a function, your brain starts to conserve energy, which explains why suddenly the patient chewing ice in the reception room gets on your last nerve. Someone asks, hey, can I ask you a quick question? Makes your eyes start twitch. A schedule change that would have been just a minor thing six months ago feels catastrophic. New software training makes you want to fake your own death and start over somewhere without insurance portals. Not because you're broken, because you're exhausted at a neurological level. And an exhausted brain has a much smaller window for what it can handle. Here's the science that I think matters most. Feeling chronically overlooked, socially excluded, unacknowledged, that activates the same regions in your brain as physical pain. Peer-reviewed neuroscience proves this. Being ignored consistently, it registers the way a physical injury does. So if this has been going on for months or even years, your brain has genuinely been processing it as something at hurt. When you kept showing up, when you kept managing the schedule, when you kept handling everyone else's experiences. This is not a small thing and you don't need to minimize it. But, and this is a significant but, understanding why it hurts doesn't mean we stop there, because here's where it gets really interesting. I want to say something now that I really need you to hear, not as criticism, not as, well, actually, have you considered, not as a way of dismissing anything we just talked about. I want you to hear this as something that I genuinely believe will give you more power than anything else I say today. Nobody is in charge of your feelings except you. And stay with me on this. I know some of you just felt maybe a little bristle, a little, but Beth, the situation is real. The culture is real, the lack of recognition is real. As long as you're waiting for someone else to make you feel seen. Who is actually in control of how you feel every day? They are. And as long as they have all that power, the power you handed to them, you are going to feel compelled to manipulate and control them in order to feel appreciated. The dentist who didn't say your name in the meeting, the colleague who talked over your idea, the culture that moves way too fast to stop and acknowledge people properly. They are in control of your emotional state every single day. You handed them all your power completely, and most of them don't even know they're holding it. Think about what that actually means. It means your worth, your real, genuine, built from years of showing up worth, is being determined by people who are also stressed, also busy, also imperfect, also probably invisible in their own way. People who may have no idea what your day actually looked like. People who are not qualified to be the judges of your value and were never meant to be. And yet, every day that you leave work feeling unseen, every Sunday night that feels full of dread, every moment you absorb the silence where a thank you should have been, and you take that as evidence that you don't matter, you are giving those people all of your power. Now, here's what I'm not saying. I'm not saying the culture doesn't need to change. It does. I'm not saying you shouldn't speak up, you shouldn't advocate for recognition, shouldn't call out what's missing. You should. I'm not saying your feelings aren't valid, they are completely valid. What I am saying is this only you can make yourself feel invisible. Because invisibility isn't just something that gets done to you, it's something you agree to when you decide other people's failure to see you is the final word on your value. And you can stop agreeing to it. Your worth is not up for grabs, it's 100% intact. There's nothing you can do to take away or add to it. You are 100%. 100% worthy because you are a human on the planet. And look, this is not a small shift. I want to be honest about that. This is not, oh, just decide to feel better and everything will be fine. It is real, ongoing, sometimes uncomfortable work to reclaim your own sense of worth from the hands of people and systems that were never meant to hold it, much less decide it. But it is the work you can do. And it starts with one question. What if you didn't need them to tell you? What if you already knew? What if the 20 minutes you spent de-escalating that patient mattered? And it mattered whether the doctor noticed or not? What if the scheduling conflict you caught before it became a crisis was excellent work, regardless of whether anyone said so? What if you stopped waiting for the acknowledgement to make that contribution real? Because here's the truth the contribution was already real. It was real when you did it. The acknowledgement doesn't create the value in that, it just reflects it back. And when the reflection doesn't come, the value doesn't disappear. You just have to learn to see it yourself. It is you that has to lay your head down on the pillow at night. How you appreciate you matters more than an ounce of how others appreciate you. This is the most important thing I'm going to say today. So I'm going to say it slowly. The moment you stop outsourcing your sense of worth to the people around you, the moment you decide that your value is your responsibility, not something they grant to you, is the moment you take all of your power back. Every single bit of it. And that is not arrogance. That is not deciding you're better than the feedback you received or the relationships you're in. It's simply refusing to let someone else's busyness, their blindness, or bad habits become the measure of who you are. You are not wallpaper. You never were. And it's time to stop living like the opinion of a busy Wednesday afternoon gets to decide that. Now, I want to talk about the version of this that runs even deeper because I think this is the wound that lasts longest and the one we address the least. I want to ask you a question. Where did you become invisible to yourself? You know you still have opinions. Not about the schedule, not about any insurance portal. We all have opinions about all that. I mean about your own life. Someone asks you, What do you want for dinner? You don't know. What do you want to do this weekend? You don't know. What would make you happy right now? It's a blank stare because you've spent so much time managing everyone else's preferences and their needs and their feelings that you have lost contact with your own quietly. You pushed all of that to the back burner and then further back. And then one day you went looking and it's all empty. I think it's one of the signs of burnout nobody talks about enough. You stopped having opinion, not in some quiet, introverted way, in a hollowed-out way. You think you genuinely don't know what you want. You're running the practice on autopilot and running your life on autopilot, and somewhere in there, the pilot quietly left. Ask yourself honestly: have you stopped having goals? Not work goals, your goals. Have you stopped having fun? Genuine fun, not fun adjacent to something productive. Have you stopped resting? Real rest, not collapsing on the couch and scrolling because you have nothing left, genuine restoration for your soul. Have you stopped celebrating your wins? Do you even notice them anymore? Because here's how this connects to everything we just talked about. When you outsource your sense of worth to other people, when you can't celebrate and appreciate yourself because you're waiting for others to do it for you, you don't just lose power over how you feel at work. You lose the habit of turning toward yourself at all. You become a stranger to your own experience of your own life. And then you wonder why you feel invisible when the first person who stopped seeing you was you. Your whole life cannot be schedule, patience, production, errands, laundry, sleep, repeat. That is surviving. That's not living. You are a person, not a position. You have a life outside the practice that matters. Not because it makes you a better team member, because it makes you a fuller human being. Your hobbies, your friendships, your goals, those weird interests of yours, those random enthusiasms and the things that make you laugh, line dancing, gardening, mystery novels, an inexplicable collection of something, another Christmas tree because you love Christmas trees and you have the space for it and nobody else gets a vote. Whatever it is, you need things that remind you that you exist outside of what you produce. Go be a person, a full, opinionated, rested, occasionally delighted person. This is not optional. This is living. Okay, four real things. Here we go. Number one, stop waiting. Start saying. Some of you have been silently suffering a long time, waiting for the people around you to figure it out through telepathy. They are not gonna figure anything out through telepathy. They are busy, they are stressed, and they cannot give you what they don't know you need. Say it out loud, in a normal voice. I need some help with this. I would love to be included in that conversation. I'd like to know that what I'm doing is landing, not as an explosion, not as an ultimatum, just as honest, clear, professional communication. The conversation that feels too vulnerable to have is almost always the one that needs to happen. Number two, build your own record. By the end of the week, write down three things you did that mattered. Not the dramatic saves, the quiet ones. The patient who came in terrified and left calm, the conflict you caught before it escalated, the thing nobody noticed because you handled it so well there was nothing to notice. Or on a personal level, that piece of cheesecake you decided not to eat because you know it wasn't going to serve you and your health goals, the few extra steps you took on the treadmill, that third glass of water you drank, write them down because your brain, under the weight of feeling unseen, starts to lose access to evidence of your own confidence. It stops offering it up. You need an external record sometimes to push back against that erosion. You need proof that you can point to on the days nobody else is reflecting it back. This is you seeing yourself. This is you being your own witness. It matters more than you think. And then when the moment is right, speak your contribution out loud, not as a demand, as information, calmly, clearly, specifically. I wanted to let you know that I've been managing the schedule differently and our chair time has improved. Just state the fact, state the impact, let it land. This isn't bragging, it is professional self-advocacy. And it is also, and this is important, it is you taking responsibility for your own visibility instead of waiting for someone else to provide it. This is reclaiming your power in real time. Now, number three, stop wearing exhaustion like a personality trait. And I say this with love. I did this for years. Some of us got very comfortable bonding through, I'm so busy, I'm so exhausted, I'm completely slammed, and venting has its place. Community through shared struggle is real. But if I'm exhausted, has become your primary mode of self-description. If that's the answer to how are you, every single time, it's worth asking, is this just how I am now? Have I accepted this as permanent when it doesn't have to be? Exhaustion as a constant state is not a personality, it's a signal. And you now know enough to respond to it instead of reporting it. I never allow myself to utter the word busy anymore. I am in charge of my schedule, period, full stop. That one has been monumental in appreciating myself, my time, and how I spend it. And now, number four, build a life outside the practice. Please. This one is non-negotiable. When your whole identity lives inside the practice walls, every slight at work becomes an existential threat. Every moment of invisibility becomes a statement about your fundamental worth. But when you have a full life, people who know you outside of dentistry, things that have nothing to do with production, the bad Tuesday stays a bad Tuesday. It doesn't become evidence that everything is going wrong. You are a person, not a position. Go live like one. So here's your question for the week. In the last month, when did you feel truly seen? Not thanked as a group, not a generic, great job, everyone. Truly, specifically seen. Your contribution, your name, your particular expertise noticed by someone who had the standing to notice it. When was that? And how long did you wait? If a moment came to mind, hold on to that. Let it remind you what it feels like and what you want more of. But remember, it's you and what you make it mean that's really going on. This is not about them. If you're going to go back through 30 days and come up empty, I want you to hold on to that too. Not as shame, not as confirmation that nobody cares, but as honest information as motivation. But also, and I want to end here, I want you to ask yourself one more question. In the last month, when did you make yourself feel seen? When did you write down what you did well? When did you acknowledge your own contribution? When did you say to yourself, even quietly, even just for a moment, that was good work? And I did it, and it mattered. Because that is where this starts. Not with them finally getting it right, with you deciding you're no longer waiting for them to get it right. So here's your reframe: being invisible at work is not a reflection of your value. It is a reflection of a culture that has not learned how to look. And the moment you stop waiting for that culture to see you, the moment you decide your worth is something you carry, something you're responsible for, not something they grant you. That's the moment you take all of your power back. I want to close with this because I think it's the truest thing in the entire episode. You are probably not invisible. You simply have become so good at carrying things so quietly, so skilled at making the hard things look easy and the chaotic look managed that the people around you forgot how heavy those things actually are. And here's what I want you to take with you this week. The work now isn't becoming louder. The work is allowing yourself to be fully seen, starting with yourself. Notice when you're tired. Notice when you're proud. Notice when you handled something with grace that deserves to be noticed. Notice when you're growing. Notice when you need help. Notice when a Tuesday was actually pretty good and you showed up for it, and that is worth something, whether anyone else said so or not. You are worth noticing. Start there. Start with you. And if this one landed for you somewhere real for you, come find us in our free Facebook group Beyond Dental Burnout. We talk about this more in depth over there. Until then, have a fabulous week. I'll see you on next week's episode and in the Facebook group. Bye. Hey, have you had a chance to download your free copy of my mental hygiene checklist yet? Visit Beth Heilman Coaching.com to get your copy. It teaches you the practical skills you need to achieve the same level of excellent mental hygiene as your dental hygiene. Don't miss out on this valuable resource for both your personal and professional growth.