​​Laura Brenner is the Founder of Lolabees Career Coaching, a service dedicated to helping dental professionals design fulfilling and balanced careers. After practicing dentistry for ten years, she transitioned to coaching. Laura is also a dynamic speaker, sharing insights on topics like burnout and career transitions in dentistry.

 

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [02:19] Laura Brenner explains how unhappiness in dentistry led to her viral blog post
• [09:11] What burnout in dentistry looks like and why “doing more” isn’t always the answer
• [12:55] The difference between burnout from work you love vs. work that drains you
• [16:54] How damaging cultural expectations in dentistry can prevent career change
• [21:49] Laura’s “career dating” method to help dentists explore new paths without risk

In this episode…

Burnout doesn’t always come from overwork. It can come from misalignment, stagnation, or even success in the wrong career. In dentistry, where the pressure to achieve is high and the path feels predetermined, that burnout can feel especially isolating. So how do you know when it’s time to pivot and what does that even look like?

According to Laura Brenner, a former dentist turned career coach, burnout often signals a deeper disconnect between your work and your identity. She highlights that many dental professionals confuse burnout with failure, when in reality, it may be a clue that the career no longer fits who they’ve become. The pressure to conform to a traditional definition of success can deepen this disconnection. For Laura, escaping burnout meant giving herself permission to redefine success on her own terms, and now she helps others do the same by guiding them through self-discovery, small low-risk experiments, and building supportive communities around change.

In this episode of The Marketing 32 Show, host Brett Allen sits down with Laura Brenner, Founder of Lolabees Career Coaching, to talk about escaping burnout in dentistry. They discuss how to recognize the signs of misalignment, why taking a break doesn’t always solve the problem, and how to start exploring new paths without blowing up your life. Laura also shares her unique “career dating” method to make change feel safe and empowering.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Brett Allen on LinkedIn
• Marketing 32
• Laura Brenner on LinkedIn
• Lolabees Career Coaching
• The Ten Reasons Your Dentist Probably Hates You Too by Laura Brenner
• 10 Reasons I Hate The Dentist
• “How Women Dentists Can Build Confidence and Leadership Skills With Lani Grass” on The Marketing 32 Show
• Dentist Side Gigs

Quotable Moments

• “I can go on vacation and feel energized coming home, but dentistry, coming back was worse.”
• “We’re the silent ones who are showing up in a room and inside we’re like, ‘I’m in pain’.”
• “If you’re burnt out and you hate what you do, you take breaks and you feel worse.”
• “When you try to fix it and it never gets better, maybe the problem is actually dentistry.”
• “Focus on connection, not competition. Community is everything, especially for dentists who feel like they’re on an island.”

Action Steps

1. Reevaluate your definition of success: Letting go of rigid career expectations opens the door to more fulfilling, personalized goals.
2. Acknowledge and identify burnout early: Recognizing emotional and physical fatigue helps prevent long-term dissatisfaction and potential career derailment.
3. Take small, low-risk steps toward change: Testing new career ideas gradually allows for clarity without sacrificing stability or income.
4. Join a supportive professional community: Being surrounded by like-minded peers reduces isolation and builds momentum during transitions.
5. Prioritize alignment over achievement: Choosing work that fits your values and energy leads to sustainable satisfaction and long-term growth.

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by Marketing 32, the only dental marketing agency with the Practice Impact Formula™ for predictable growth without financial risk.

With a focus on new patient generation, addressing missed opportunities, and expert scheduling, Marketing 32 has helped over 170 practices in the US, Canada, and Australia. Grow in 30 days, or you don’t pay — it’s that simple.

To learn more, visit marketing32.com and schedule a 15-minute discovery call. If you’re a visionary practice ready for impact, Marketing 32 is ready to help you grow!

Episode Transcript:

Intro: 00:13

You’re listening to The Marketing 32 Show with your host, Brett Allen.

Brett Allen: 00:18

Hi, Brett Allen here, host of The Marketing 32 Show, where I connect with leading dentists, dental influencers and industry experts to uncover the latest strategies and insights and innovations that help dental practices grow and thrive. This episode today is brought to you like all the other ones, by our team here at Marketing 32. We are the only dental marketing agency that I know of that fully stands behind the work that they do and is invested in your growth. Because if you’re not growing, we don’t get paid. So if you’re needing help growing your practice or curious what it’s like to work with our team and our practice impact formula that we work with so many practices across the US, reach out to us at marketing32.com and let’s see if we’d be a great fit. Quick shout out to Lani Grass and her interview with me about personal development and the importance of becoming the best version of yourself. Check that episode out. It’s phenomenal. You’ll really enjoy it.

And today, I’m excited to have a new friend, Dr. Laura Brenner, on the show. After dreaming of becoming a dentist her whole life, she learned that dentistry wasn’t a match for her. She practiced for ten years before leaving clinical dentistry to become a blogger, a speaker, and a certified professional coach. After her blog post, “The Ten Reasons Your Dentist Probably Hates You Too” went viral, she began connecting with dental professionals around the world who wanted more from their careers. This inspired her to create lullabies career coaching to guide dental professionals in designing their careers on their terms so they can create joyful, balanced lives.

Laura, welcome to the show. Excited to have you on.

Laura Brenner: 01:55

Thanks so much for having me, Brett. And I love hearing Lani’s shout out because she’s a good friend of mine.

Brett Allen: 02:00

Yes. Yeah, we just became great friends. She’s. She’s so awesome.

Laura Brenner: 02:05

Awesome.

Brett Allen: 02:05

Well, let’s dig in that blog post, that title, I, I understand why it went viral. Just the title alone makes me want to read it. What? What was that about? Can you help us dig into that? Maybe that would be a great place to start.

Laura Brenner: 02:19

I sure can. Well, I was very unhappy in my dental career. I started, I graduated from dental school in 2001 and in, gosh, 2010. I had just reached my limit. I was hanging by a thread in dentistry.

I just felt like I couldn’t make it work anymore and I just, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have any creativity. I didn’t know who I was, I didn’t know what I liked. I felt completely stuck and paralyzed, and I started a blog. And what led to this actually was as I was complaining every day to my husband about how unhappy I was in my work.

One day he saw this ad in the newspaper for a travel show host contest that was being hosted or sponsored by a travel website. Brilliant. Speaking of brilliant marketing. You know you want to build your website, create this contest where everybody has to send people to vote for you every day. You’re going to get a lot of traffic, right?

Brett Allen: 03:25

Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of that. Yeah.

Laura Brenner: 03:27

Oh, yeah. So when he suggested that I do that, I was like, no way. There’s no way I can do this. I’m not creative. I’ve never been on camera.

I don’t wouldn’t even know what to say. And ultimately, after a lot of going back and forth and realizing that I was tired of just talking and never doing anything, I thought, you know what? I’m just going to do this. I need an energy shift. I’m really stagnant in my life right now, so I’m just going to do it.

No strings attached, no worries. And it turned out to be a very fun, creative process for me that when I did not win, it wasn’t a surprise, but it really opened my eyes to seeing that maybe I could branch out my creativity. So I started a blog, blogged about food and travel, two things that I really enjoyed for about a year. And one day I saw a blog post titled ten reasons I Hate the Dentist and I was like, all right, fine. You know, we hear that all the time as dentists.

So yeah, it does get old. And she was joking. Her mom was a hygienist, this 20-year-old woman who wrote this post and so I was like, okay, fine, I’m going to write a reply to you and to her. “10 Reasons I Hate The Dentist” I replied, well, here’s titled “The Ten Reasons Your Dentist Probably Hates You Too”, and it was super organic. It was really Sarcastic and all the things we always want to say to our patients but never get to because we’re so professional.

And I actually, I, I wrote it and I sat on it. I didn’t post it until I several months later, I actually did quit dentistry for good. And at that point I was like, hey, I don’t have patients to worry about anymore. I can post this. And literally the day I posted it, it went viral.

That night, my phone started ringing like, ding ding ding, just alert after alert after alert.

Brett Allen: 05:33

And that’s amazing.

Laura Brenner: 05:34

Yeah, what it was was suddenly there were all these other dentists or assistants or hygienists or spouses of dentists or children of dentists who were like, oh my gosh, this is all the stuff we want to say. People from other countries were like, people say this to us too. So it really was a great connector to realize that I wasn’t so alone.

Brett Allen: 05:57

Yeah. like, wow. That’s impressive. So I think you bring up something big here. There’s a lot of pent up emotions in dentistry of from people who you work with, your ideal person that you help, who got into dentistry because, you know, it looked like a good career for them, the income potential, owning your own practice, all you know, giving back all of these things that draw people into dentistry, and then they’re in dentistry and they find out, what am I doing?

This is not authentic to me, right? So let’s talk about the work that you’re doing. You found that out for yourself. And so what was that journey like leaving dentistry. And tell us more about the work you’ve been doing since you left.

Laura Brenner: 06:45

Dentistry seemed like my dream job. And a lot of times people who choose dentistry, it’s because as patients, we value it in some way. Or we think that the topic, the content, the actual work would be interesting. We probably like healthcare a little bit or a lot. We want to help people and we are really told that it is such a well balanced career.

And it it is, it can be. I also think times have changed a little bit in dentistry in some ways, has gotten a lot harder than it was when I first started, but I became very disillusioned with it because I thought it was going to be this perfectly straightforward, simple thing where all the patients were like me. They were happy to come see me. Things go how you plan. And what I discovered was, this is nature, and nature isn’t perfect.

And when you think things are going to go as planned, they oftentimes don’t. And it’s just the way it is. So you really carry. I carried a lot of the weight of the world on my shoulders. I felt responsible for all of my patients.

I felt responsible for their experiences, for their feelings, for their happiness, for their outcomes. And it became such a burden that I became very burnt out. And this was in 2004, three years into practice. And I thought that you I was too young to be burnt out. Right?

Because we imagine, at least before we used to imagine it, that it you had to be working for a long time or be older to feel burnt out. And I didn’t really know it was burnout until about 15 years later when I was researching for a presentation I was doing at the dental convention here in Denver, a presentation on burnout in 2019 before burnout became really popular. And now we’re kind of burnt out on burnout, aren’t we?

Brett Allen: 08:59

Yeah. Yeah. Start talking about the grind and how, you know, take life by the horns and burnout is definitely a real thing. And now we’re. Yeah, there’s a lot of people talking about it.

Yeah.

Laura Brenner: 09:11

Yeah. It’s a real thing. And it’s, it’s a, it’s sort of the, the term of the year of the, decade. It’s just what we’re talking about. And so I started, I started seeing that I was burnt out in dentistry and I didn’t know what it was.

I just thought I hated it. And then, you know, I’ve been helping other dentists with burnout. My favorite way of helping them with burnout is to not do more of the thing that’s burning you out, but actually do less of the thing that’s burning you out so that you can get that. Yeah, space and variety. Because so much in dentistry, it’s like, oh, if you’re burnt out, take more.

See? So you can do more of the procedures you like or buy a practice so you can have more control. Everything’s more and more. But that’s a great solution for some people. But for others it’s the wrong fit.

So I kind of focus on those others who more just makes us more burnt out and instead less is really the way to go. And, you know, I wondered, did I throw away this career thinking I hated it when I was actually burnt out? But yeah, the secret is no, it was the right move for me. And ultimately, you know, I’ve experienced burnout in work that I love, and they’re totally different experiences.

Brett Allen: 10:44

Oh, interesting. Let’s go there. Because I think a lot of us can probably relate to that. We have things that we’re just grinding through. We’re, you know, we’re just, you know, toughen up and get it done, do the work.

But there’s other things that we have passions about that are maybe side projects or hobbies or things that we really enjoy. Talk to us about when you go full into that, you can also get burned out there or experience a different type of exhaustion. Maybe I don’t know what the right word is.

Laura Brenner: 11:17

Yeah. Well, you know, I think first of all, doing the same thing every day for 20 years is going to burn anyone out, right? I mean.

Brett Allen: 11:25

Oh, yes.

Laura Brenner: 11:26

If you think about it, burnout is probably partly boredom, right? I mean, I know technically the definition of burnout is more than boredom, but you could see how boredom could be a part of it. You know, burnout really is very much that compassion fatigue. You resent the people you’re helping. You have a very short fuse, and you’re really disillusioned by your work.

And I think the burnout itself looks the same. But if I compare how I compare my burnout when I was practicing dentistry, which was doing something that really was not aligned to support me as a person versus the coach, I’ve. I burned myself out all the time coaching because I love what I do, so I don’t stop, right?

Brett Allen: 12:13

Oh I see yeah, there’s definitely a difference there.

Laura Brenner: 12:16

Yeah. And the difference is, is when I burn myself out with the work that I love, I need to stop. And when I stop and take breaks and do more fun things and get support that I need, and maybe take a vacation and do like take a like leave it. Yeah, right. I feel better, I can go on vacation and feel energized coming home.

But when I was practicing dentistry leaving, it was great when I was about to go away. But coming back was worse.

Brett Allen: 12:54

You dreaded it.

Laura Brenner: 12:55

You dread? Yeah. Yeah. It’s like you if. If you’re burnt out and you love what you do, you.

You take breaks and you feel refreshed. If you’re burnt out and you hate what you do, you take breaks and you feel worse coming back to it.

Brett Allen: 13:09

I can totally relate to this. I can totally relate to this. This is reminding me of so I. I’m not sure how many people know this, but in college I was an All-American swimmer. I swam for Auburn University.

Great program under David Marsh. Coach David Marsh, he was actually the US Olympic coach. And then I transferred and swam for BYU. That’s a different story, but I got burned out at Auburn with swimming from the hard work. I mean, we were just grinding every day.

I began to hate swimming because of how much there was actually looking back. There was depression there. There was like trauma there because we would do these incredibly hard workouts in the morning and all day. We would do two a day. All day.

I’d be dreading the afternoon practice. I wouldn’t be able to focus during classes at school. I had this cloud over me of depression really all day. And as soon as swimming was done in the evening, I could relax because it was like I was done. But then every morning I would dread waking up.

I just hated swimming, so I quit, I quit swimming and I took a break. I went on a church mission trip and while I was on my church mission trip, I had these dreams of racing again, and I wanted to get back into it. And I had a totally different experience at BYU. But that’s not a knock against Auburn swimming.

Excellent program. It was just for me. I had burnout, I had total burnout like you’re talking about. So to those dentists who are hearing this right now and they’re coming to the realization, yeah, this is definitely what I’m dealing with. How do you help them?

One thing that you said you really wanted to talk about is redefining success. Is that how you help them is by doing that or.

Laura Brenner: 15:01

Well, that’s definitely a key. I think the important thing when you’re feeling burnt out is to really get clear on what is causing it. So, for example, it sounds like Brett with you, you still loved swimming, but it was the overdoing of it that burns you out. And so you were able to go back to it and really enjoy it in a way that you created boundaries and.

Brett Allen: 15:28

Yes, yes, yes.

Laura Brenner: 15:30

Right, right. And so I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced any of your work at any time in your life where when you try to fix it, it never gets better. That’s when it’s like, maybe the problem is actually like if that were swimming, for example, maybe the problem is actually swimming, not the fact that you’re doing too much of it.

Brett Allen: 15:53

Yeah.

Laura Brenner: 15:54

See what I mean?

Brett Allen: 15:55

Yeah, there’s a difference. There is a difference. I needed a significant break from it to heal and to process that and say, no, this is what I want to do. But I see the point. I see the point you’re making.

Laura Brenner: 16:07

Yeah, yeah. Because for me, no matter how much of a break you give me from dentistry, I never, ever. And still to this day, I never, ever want to go do it again. I love the profession. I love being a part of it.

As long as I don’t have to do the clinical dentistry.

Brett Allen: 16:26

Right.

Laura Brenner: 16:26

So if you take a break of a year and you go back and you realize you like it again, great.

Brett Allen: 16:31

Great. Yeah. Okay.

Laura Brenner: 16:33

Also taking a break of a year of your career is a very expensive, almost impossible thing to achieve, right?

Brett Allen: 16:42

Maybe I, I wonder like those of us, those, those who own a practice. I can see how that would be really, really difficult to do. I wonder if an associate could do that.

Laura Brenner: 16:54

Some people do. I think people can make it work. But the challenge is, I think a lot of times, instead of being really intentional with your time off to figure out what you want to do, you just let everything go. And then and then you don’t know what else to do. So then you’re stuck going back and, you know, maybe you’re lucky it works out, maybe you’re not lucky and you realize that you don’t love this work.

So you know the work that I do. I think, first of all, it’s important to be real with yourself. And maybe you try. It’s just like in dentistry, if you have a tooth that has a sensitivity, for example, you’re going to try the most conservative treatment on it before you get to extracting it, right? Because you don’t want to do something irreversible.

So you’re going to kind of try things out to see if it fixes it first. Same thing with your career. If you’re burnt out, you may try things to fix it, and if it works, then amazing you’ve got your answer. But if it doesn’t, then it’s we know that there’s something deeper going on. And so it’s like, how can we face that and then create solutions.

So when if I tie it back to the whole thing about redefining success in dentistry, I think we’re so railroaded in our culture of dentistry. We’re railroaded into this belief that the only way to be successful is to have $1 million practice. Right. Or to be in an owner, even associates. I’ve.

I never felt this way, but I speak to a lot now who they feel like they are less than because they don’t own practices.

Brett Allen: 18:39

Yeah. Isn’t that interesting? Yeah.

Laura Brenner: 18:41

Yeah. And you could have a completely fulfilling happy. I mean, I think being an associate sounds way better than being an owner.

Brett Allen: 18:49

Yeah. A lot of less stress to worry about, that’s for sure.

Laura Brenner: 18:53

Absolutely right. And yeah, there’s a trade off. But why do we say that there that it’s not as good. Right. Or if people want to teach people, you know, there’s always for years been this idea that, you know, I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase those who can’t do teach, which really irks me.

Brett Allen: 19:13

Oh, yeah, that bugs me too.

Laura Brenner: 19:14

Yeah, it irks me because it’s like, yeah, it’s so unfair. And not only that, what if you’re the one who gets out of dental school? You practice for 5 or 10 years, you realize you don’t like it, but instead you really actually love teaching for the sake of loving it. Yeah, you’re going to stop yourself from choosing that because you’ve we’ve been taught in dentistry that dentists who can’t make it in the real world teach. I mean, that was truly what we thought when I was in dental school.

Brett Allen: 19:42

Oh, wow. Yeah. That’s so damaging.

Laura Brenner: 19:44

You know that.

Brett Allen: 19:45

I didn’t I didn’t know that there was a stigma like that. No. Yeah.

Laura Brenner: 19:49

No, I don’t know if I think there probably still is. But, you know, I may be a little out of touch with that since I’ve been out of dental school for a while. But you see how that creates a culture, and then you see how we won’t allow ourselves to do what we want. And when you can choose to do what you want and and trust in that and be confident in your choices, then you open the door to, to choose your life on your terms, instead of having to live according to all the rules and the shoulds that other people have created for you that don’t serve you.

Brett Allen: 20:29

Yeah. I think we’re tapping into some psychology here around development. Right? As kids, we base a lot of our decisions on what our peers are saying and or what reaction we’ll get from our parents or what others will think of me or the opinions of others. Right?

I feel like my journey into adulthood now. I’m 43. I’m like, I’m gradually shedding all of these limiting beliefs of like and just doing life on my terms. It’s so freeing when you actually connect with who you are and, and and be authentic to what you want versus living your life around the expectations of all these other important people in your life. And I recognize that that’s very hard, and I want to give respect to people who are in the middle of battling all of this.

But so talk about redefining success in dentistry. So let’s go more into that. How do you help people? So say I’m a client who’s I hate dentistry. I don’t want to be in dentistry anymore.

Or maybe I’m borderline. I don’t know what I want. How do you come into the picture? And what kind of tools and help do you provide?

Laura Brenner: 21:49

Yeah. So I’ve basically created a roadmap based on my experience and based on the experience of observing others in dentistry who have pivoted away from clinical, you know, from your standard clinical careers and done things differently. So looking at what I’ve done, studying them, looking at my clients, the ones who’ve been successful over the years and, and found non-clinical careers or, or careers, you know, started businesses that maybe served dentistry in a non-clinical way or have completely left dentistry. It’s like looking at the patterns and what are people doing that works for them. And so I think probably the first best thing I’ve done is created a community for people to not feel so isolated, because when you want to do this, this work is so isolating that it’s almost impossible to keep yourself going through the hard times.

It’s so hard, and it takes people so much longer than they want or need because of that isolation. So part of my program is being in a community with other like minded dentists who are making the changes that they want, and and that helps you look at your mindset and your fears and the things that are getting in your way, your beliefs that that all the shoulds that you think you could never work through. And if I divide it into pillars, I’d say that’s kind of the first pillar that I help people work on is your belief of what’s possible for you. And once you do that, then you can give yourself permission to truly explore and commit to creating changes and the exploration. The next pillar of exploration is who are you?

What are you? What’s important to you? What do you love? Because we are the good. Talk about expectations.

We’re the good little boys and girls that everybody wanted us to be. And we’ve chosen this really noble career, and we’ve done it. And we do such a good job and we’re such achievers that we really depend on that for our identity, and then we lose sight of who we are. And we can’t even make the simplest decisions like what I want for dinner tonight. You know, and so it’s that’s the second pillar is like, who am I?

What’s important to me? What do I want? And once, you know, once you’ve given yourself permission and then you know a little bit more about who you are, then we start to look at what are some tangible things I can do. And once you come up with ideas, it’s really just about picking one and then exploring it in a way that’s not going to cost you a lot of money and not going to cost you a lot of time. And that.

And in order to do that, you’ve got to break it down into very small, doable steps that if you change your mind after doing 2 or 3 steps towards this idea that you have and you decide it’s not for you, you’re not out anything, and in fact, you’ve gained something because you’re not stuck anymore. And you now know more. It’s like dating your career. You now know more about the career you want to marry.

Brett Allen: 25:02

Yeah.

Laura Brenner: 25:03

You know.

Brett Allen: 25:04

That’s I think that sounds like an easy way to start to venture and explore a new path. I think that it is. Yeah.

Laura Brenner: 25:17

And that’s the thing, because it feels so daunting that it really does make it easier. It’s like we it is truly like dating, like, take the pressure off. It’s just a coffee date. If you don’t like the person, you don’t have to go out again. Right.

So if you just have your coffee date with this idea and you don’t like them, you don’t have to do it again. But if you think you’re going to find a perfect plan B that doesn’t involve any action, it just life just doesn’t work that way. And that’s where I think we paralyze ourselves because we’re looking for we want all the ducks to be in a row before we even take a step. And so this allows you to change without jumping off the career cliff. I like to call it so it is so much safer.

Brett Allen: 26:00

Yeah.

Laura Brenner: 26:01

And and it just.

Brett Allen: 26:02

Makes you safer.

Laura Brenner: 26:03

Yeah, because we’re dentists. Gosh, we don’t like to take big risks.

Brett Allen: 26:07

Very conservative. No risk. Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is super helpful.

So you mentioned you have a Facebook group or a community or people that are. Yeah. Where can they join that? How do they find you? Yeah.

Laura Brenner: 26:23

So my Facebook group is called Dentist Side Gigs. And you don’t have to be a dentist. You can be anybody in dentistry. And it’s just like I feel like I want to represent. Maybe underdog isn’t the right word, but maybe the silent ones in dentistry were the silent ones who were the ones who were showing up in a room.

And everybody else is like, I love this. And inside we’re like, oh, I’m in pain. And nobody’s representing us. And that’s what I want to do, because that’s how I felt.

Brett Allen: 26:57

Oh, that’s so great. If this is if this is resonating with you and you feel like, oh, I, Laura Brenner is speaking my language. Join her Facebook group. What? Where else can they find you or how can they contact you? Your website?

Laura Brenner: 27:13

Well, you can google ten reasons your dentist hates you too. You don’t even have to get the title exactly right and you’ll find my website. It’s Lolabeescareercoaching.com or on Instagram it is Doctor Lolabees. So Doctor Lolabees.

Brett Allen: 27:31

Lolabees. What’s Lolabees? What is that?

Laura Brenner: 27:34

Oh. Oh well, this is so funny that you asked. So it’s it’s just sort of evolved. But back in. Oh, gosh.

2000. No it was. Yeah. 2001 when I got my second email ever, I was trying to find a name and basically Laura B. evolved because I thought Lolabees. Well.

Laura B was taken. Oh, by the way, at Aol.com that shows how old I am.

Brett Allen: 28:00

Com yes. I was going to say, is this Hotmail? What is this? What platform?

Laura Brenner: 28:04

Well I still have hotmail. I love hotmail, but everyone thinks I’m weird for that. But I thought Lola was kind of cute and catchy. So when I started my blog, I was like, I don’t know what to name this thing, so I’m just going to call it. Lola Bees.

And by the time I turned, you know, my blog really led to my business eventually. And when I turned it into the business again, I was like, we just need to get moving. I don’t need to spend a lot of time. And, you know, people plan too much and try to get stuff perfect. I’m like, I’m just going to call it what it is I’m going to keep with Lolabees.

People know my blog. Okay, now it’s Lolabees Career Coaching. And here’s what’s cool is, you know, the bumble bee. Lolabees is sort of my logo, mascot, whatever you want to call it. Spirit animal, I don’t know.

And bees are very communal animals, and they defy nature because physiologically, they’re not supposed to be able to fly.

Brett Allen: 29:06

Yeah. The way I’ve heard about this, the way in avionics or whatever the. Yeah, the physics behind it doesn’t work.

Laura Brenner: 29:14

Exactly, but they defy it and they can fly. And so it I love it because it turns out that accidentally everything my whole business was an accident right in the it was like like Bob Ross says happy accident. He calls them happy accidents, right?

Brett Allen: 29:30

It was accidents. Yes.

Laura Brenner: 29:31

It was just showing up and doing. And so the bee, the bumble bee turned out to be just the perfect symbol for the work I do.

Brett Allen: 29:40

That’s awesome, I love that. Well, like tradition on this show, we always close with one big domino. What’s that one big thing? If we could help our listeners just have this epiphany, this shift, it would really make a big impact for them. Their lives, their practice, whatever it is.

What’s that one thing in your experience that you think is so key?

Laura Brenner: 30:01

Focus on connection, not competition. And I’m saying this very deliberately to dentists who are in need of community because community is everything. You know, when I first got out of dental school, I was like, I’m so sick of dentistry. I don’t want to have friends in dentistry. And that was a mistake because I isolated myself and didn’t have anybody who understood me.

And I really was on an island. And then you hear about all these dentists on social media or in their town who feel like they’re neighboring dentists competition. And if we can move past that and start to see that we can support each other and have connections, then we can build community, we can get off that island and life just becomes easier. We’re communal animals. We’re communal creatures.

So that’s my nugget.

Brett Allen: 30:58

I love that community over competition. I like that, yeah, there’s that abundance mindset. There’s so much that life has to offer. Don’t think in a scarcity way. Well Laura this has been fantastic.

Thank you for your time and thank you for sharing your wisdom. Anyone who’s listening, if this resonates with you, like I said, reach out to Laura, go to her website, lolabeescareercoaching.com. We’ll put it in the show notes and check out her Facebook group Dentist Side Gigs. Is that. Did I say that right?

Laura Brenner: 31:31

Perfect.

Brett Allen: 31:31

Dentist side gigs? Yes. Well again, thank you everybody. Thank you Laura. And until the next episode, have a great day.