Friendships – A View from the Dentist’s Chair, part I
July 15, 2010
The novelist and scholar C.S. Lewis once said: “Friendship is born at the moment when one person says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.” Recently, I’ve begun to give more credence to building and maintaining friendships than I have for a long time… maybe ever.
Fortunately, it’s made easier thanks to the Internet. As of the writing of this post, I have been blessed with over 200 Facebook friends between my two pages. Some are individuals I’ve been friends with “forever”, others are those whom I’ve met once or twice, a few are people who “found” me after we’d been absent from one another’s lives, and many are patients from my Kansas City dental practice.
I know a lot of business people, including cosmetic dentists like me, resist making meaningful friendships with customers. They feel as though that invisible barrier between the public and private must never be crossed; but in creating this kind of wall, are they perhaps missing incredible opportunities?
I’m sure you know me well enough to realize that I do not fear the unknown. I am not afraid to call a patient a friend and get to know him or her; consequently, I’ve been encouraging my team members to boldly go where no cosmetic dentistry team has gone before (with apologies to Star Trek for lifting their intro!) This means giving them the green light to move beyond an acquaintance relationship with our clients if they so desire and move into the realm of friendship building.
Of course, this will have some major ramifications. All change does. So in the next blog post, I’d like to discuss some of the short-term and long-haul results that turning patients into friends can have.
Until then, I encourage you to connect and reconnect with people… you never know when a true friendship may arise!
