Weekly Motivational Moments with Eric Vickery: Beware of killer words that limit effective communication.
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About Eric Vickery
Eric holds a degree in business administration and brings a strong business and systems approach to his consulting. His initiation into the field of dentistry was in the area of office management. He managed dental practices for over ten years and has been consulting over 250 offices nationwide since 2001.
Episode Transcript
Transcript performed by A.I. Please excuse the typos.
00:04
Hi friends, welcome to your weekly motivational moments with Eric Vickery, President of Coaching at All-Star Dental Academy. This week, I want to talk to you about killer words. These are words or phrases that limit your effectiveness. And we talked about significance, we talked about you’re only as effective as you can communicate a couple weeks back. And I want to make sure that we’re really clear on this. There are words that you are using that are killing your effectiveness.
00:33
They are words or phrases that give patience an out. Things that reduce the significance or the severity of the diagnosis. Things that make it sound complicated. So I wanna give you three categories of these limiting terms. Number one category is anything that minimizes the severity of it. If you can’t use the word pregnant at the end of the sentence, that’s a problem. You have a little bit of pregnancy going on here. You have a little bit of bleeding, okay?
01:03
Category two, filler words. These are words that are put in place by you. You have no idea, use them. For me, my killer words are uh or um. Things that devalue my communication skills. For you, it might be just, possibly, kind of, maybe, might wanna think about someday considering a slight chance of doing this. Number three, these are words that are your technical jargon.
01:29
Well, you have an MODL amalgam with defective margins with a Class 5 buckle that needs a crown, right? And so patients are gonna pick up on the words that you’re using, they’re gonna create a foot in the door to say, no, thank you. I don’t wanna do that, it doesn’t sound impactful. And these are why you’re hearing things upfront like, oh yeah, it’s not really bothering me, I think I’m gonna wait. So your action this week is to write down on a whiteboard, on a chart, on your desk, anything you hear that is a limiting phrase that your team members are using. Don’t write their name.
01:58
just write down that you heard the word that they’re using. And then start looking at that and saying, okay, you walk in the room, you see on the whiteboard, you see little written down 17 times. I wonder if I’m saying little or kind of, or possibly, or literally, literally, literally. You’re literally using that word over and over again, it loses its effectiveness. So start communicating as a team, where are you struggling with these killer words? How can you improve upon them to improve the effectiveness you can communicate? Which will then in turn,
02:27
improve how effective you are with case acceptance and getting patients healthier, faster. All right, guys, make it a great week. Watch out for those killer words and have a killer week. Take care. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Dental All-Stars. Visit us online at alls
