Fazeela Khan-Osborne advocates for a successful career and personal growth through mentoring.
A mentor is an essential element for building a successful dental career. Not just for novices either, as even clinicians with years of experience still need a person (or persons) by their side, who does more than simply offer professional advice. That’s because a mentor is also key to personal growth and development and can give you a practical framework for finding genuine fulfilment in your work.
A great mentor will be someone you trust, for their input and feedback. When you’re starting out, their role will be to help with assessing each patient, so you can decide whether to treat or refer. A safety net, to ensure your dentistry is appropriate and within your competency, their guidance will be invaluable as you grow in confidence. A mentor can also help you to change bad habits, including a negative mindset imposter syndrome often afflicts new dentists who are feeling overwhelmed by the challenges of practice ‘real’ life. Being encouraged to take a different perspective, to look at the glass as being half full, can boost emotional well-being and mitigate one of the major sources of stress. A mentor can enable you to realise that you can do this!
But they will go beyond as-and-when support for tough times. A mentor will keep you on track with your long-term goals, so that you achieve them. In any workplace, setting clear and measurable goals will elevate performance and motivation as well as your chance of success. Share your aims with a mentor, and they will keep you accountable if you find yourself losing focus.
They will also help you to develop leadership skills – a fundamental, but vastly underrated quality for being a brilliant dentist. You need to be more than just a clinician; you need to be an effective communicator who can demonstrate empathy and compassion, and a good listener who can give and accept feedback. These ‘soft skills’ aren’t only applicable to your interactions with patients, they’re essential to good teamwork with colleagues in and an outside the practice. A mentor will also help to promote self-awareness, adaptability, as well as the ability to self-appraise. Knowing when to ask for support, to delegate other tasks – this can come from good, productive peer-to-peer mentoring.
During your career, a mentor will help you improve and expand your network. They can open doors and connect you with new people you admire and who may also, in turn, mentor you further down the line. A brilliant mentor will have money-can’t-buy insight into how to get ahead – the best courses to take, dentists to work for, which consumables to use and equipment to invest in. The relationships you have with your mentors will continuously evolve and, even from day one, you’ll have things to teach them too, based on what you’ve observed.
You may have acquired a mentor at dental school, or in those first few years treating patients; further training will ensure you find mentors whose values you align with and who will be key to your career.
For me, all novice dentists should consider postgraduate training in implant therapy, as this is a sought-after treatment that will enable you to help many more patients comprehensively. Quality implant education programmes will offer peer mentoring as part of their training. Becoming an implant dentist is a lifelong learning journey and you will need to have a mentor with you at every stage. From help with specific tasks and complex cases and situations, to advice on how to overcome personal obstacles, such as work-life balance, they will be key to your clinical success and personal enjoyment. This is an area of dentistry where the stars really stand out – because they’re finding solutions to problems that would have once been impossible to solve – so it’s imperative that you start to build your network early on and align yourself with the right people. In London’s west end, The One to One Implant Education offers fully accredited postgraduate training to take you from novice to confident implant dentist. The programme includes tiered peer mentoring, with every delegate receiving a tutor who has completed the course. A significant portion is hands-on, live surgery alongside the latest evidence-based theory, and you’ll be taught by globally renowned implantologists, on an individual and group basis, who will continue to support you in the years that follow. You’ll make friends for life too.
Mentoring has a key role in dentistry, which requires a combination of practical skills, knowledge, interpersonal skills and mindset in order to be successful. A mentor will be your advocate, professionally and personally, helping you build confidence and resilience, so you can treat patients confidently and safely. As an implant dentist, you will need mentors to guide, support, and advise you, at every stage of your career journey, in order that you offer only the highest-quality care.
For more information please visit https://121implanteducation.co.uk