The Standard Nobody Can Actually Meet
Dentistry trains its practitioners to pursue perfection. There are prescribed degrees of taper, ideal radiographic presentations, textbook outcomes for every procedure. The problem, as any practicing dentist will tell you, is that the human body doesn’t read textbooks.
Dr. Heath Colledge, who has practiced dentistry for nearly two decades at Comfort Dental’s Golden, Colorado location, has spent a lot of time thinking about what that gap between expectation and reality costs dentists over the course of a career. His advice, looking back: “Don’t expect perfection. Don’t discount very good for perfection because you’ll never get perfect.”
How Perfectionism Feeds Burnout
The pursuit of perfect outcomes isn’t inherently problematic. High standards are a feature of good clinical care. The issue arises when perfectionism becomes the metric by which dentists evaluate their own worth, and when a single imperfect outcome overshadows dozens of successful ones.
Dr. Colledge describes a pattern familiar to many practitioners: “You can have that one patient where something doesn’t go perfectly right, or it goes wrong, or the patient’s upset, and it just ruins you for the rest of the week, because you don’t think about the thousand things you did right during the week. You think about the one thing that went wrong.”
That cognitive distortion, where one difficult case eclipses an entire week of good work, is a significant driver of the emotional exhaustion at the root of burnout. And it’s often made worse by an internal standard that was never realistic to begin with.
Setting Expectations with Patients, and with Yourself
One of the more interesting dimensions of Dr. Colledge’s perspective is the way he has translated this philosophy into his patient relationships. He now addresses the question of perfection directly, before it becomes a problem: “I will tell patients, nobody’s teeth are perfect. If you want perfection, I am not your dentist, because I’m not gonna give you perfection. I’m gonna give you very, very good, but perfection doesn’t exist.”
That kind of candor serves a dual purpose. It protects the dentist-patient relationship by establishing shared, realistic expectations from the outset. And it protects the dentist from the particular strain of working toward an unachievable standard under the implicit pressure that anything less represents failure.
For dentists considering practice ownership or partnership, this same principle applies to the business side of the work. The new practice won’t run perfectly. The schedule won’t always be full. The team will have growing pains. Measuring the operation against a perfection standard, rather than a “very good” standard, is a fast path to discouragement.
Building a Practice That Runs on Realistic Excellence
The Comfort Dental model reflects this philosophy in its structure. Rather than positioning itself around the myth of the flawless solo practitioner, it offers dentists the ability to pursue clinical excellence within a framework designed to absorb some of the operational variability that comes with real-world practice.
Dr. Colledge describes what’s available to a dentist who feels burned out and doesn’t realize there’s another option: “There’s a way where you can still do very well financially. You can still treat patients how you want to, do the procedures you want to, do the dentistry you want to, and yet have partners that are in it with you to help you through the business side.”
That’s not a concession. That’s a more sophisticated definition of success, one built around sustainability rather than an impossible ideal.
Find Out If Partnership Is Right for You
If you’re a dentist who’s been measuring yourself against a standard that isn’t serving you or your practice, there may be a better model worth considering. Visit our franchise website to start the conversation.