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Dentists, Puns, and Money is a podcast focused on two things: The financial topics relevant to dentists leaving clinical practice and the stories and lessons of dentists who have already done so.
1. The stories of dentists who have transitioned from full-time clinical dentistry.
2. The financial topics that are relevant for dentists making that transition.
If you’re a dentist thinking about your exit from clinical, and you’d like to learn from the experiences of other dentists who have made that transition, be sure to subscribe to your favorite podcast app.
Host Shawn Terrell also dives deep into the many financial components of exiting dentistry, including tax reduction strategies and how to live off your assets.
And, we try to keep it light by mixing in a bad joke… or two.
Please note: Dentists, Puns, and Money was previously known as The Practice Growth Podcast until March 2022.
Welcome to dentists, puns and money. I'm your host Shawn Terrell and my guest on today's show is Dr. Shivani Kamodia Barto. after graduating dental school in 2018. Dr. Cambodia Bartow practice for three years before life took her to Japan and put her clinical career on hold. Dr. Shivani has since put her background as a yoga teacher to work and is now building a wellness coaching business for other dentists. She shares all of her insights on the burnout and stress associated with dentistry in our conversation. As a reminder, our company dentist Exit Planning helps dentists leading clinical with the financial peace of that transition specifically how to reduce that massive lifetime tax bill and how to optimize living off your assets. If you are interested in guidance on your taxes and your income as you exit clinical schedule and initial consultation with us on our website, which is dentist exit.com. Again, schedule your consultation at dentist exit.com And with that introduction, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Dr. commodo Bartow All right Dr. Shivani Cambodia Bartow Welcome to dentists puns and money. I am excited to hear your story. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you for having me. We'd like to start the podcast with some background on each guest. Would you be willing to share with the audience to some of the key elements, the highlights of your journey and sort of how you've reached this current point of your career?
Absolutely. So I am originally from upstate New York and went to college at University of Buffalo and then dental school at University of Michigan. graduated from dental school in 2018. I met my husband there and while he was in residency in San Antonio, Texas, I was practicing as an associate dentist and the general dentists and after our time there my husband's also in the Navy and for his job. We were brought to Okinawa, Japan for a three year commitment. And so I left my job in clinical dentistry and now we're we've been living here for about a year and a half. So I'm tuning in today from Japan, and we've got another year and a half year and so it's been a very interesting journey going from focus for the majority of my life on this one goal of becoming a dentist and practicing and then now leaving that job and starting something else. So it's been an interesting journey. And for the audience, are you currently practicing as a general dentist or how has that move affected your your dental, your clinical? Yeah, so just because of rules and regulations that I am not able to practice clinical dentistry while we're out here. And so that has allowed me to open some other doors of opportunity. And I guess I can backtrack a little bit as well. So in 2012, I did a yoga teacher training it was when I was doing my undergraduate degree. One of the summer breaks I went to Costa Rica for a month I needed a 200 hour yoga teacher training. So since then, since 2012 for over 10 years, I've been teaching yoga asanas. So I've been teaching at different yoga studios, campus gyms, you know, the works of it all. And it's been something that's really changed the trajectory of my life. I think it's changed my perspective as a dental student of how to manage stress as a dentist how to manage the physical stress that we experienced, and it's been really important to me throughout my entire educational and professional career. So when we moved out here to Japan, I focused fully on joining the my yoga world and my dental world and making yoga and wellness more accessible to healthcare professionals. So with your future or no future in clinical dentistry, I guess not pinning you down to where you want to go eventually. It sounds like you guys are gonna move back stateside at some point or at least that's the plan. We're just clinical dentistry fit into that for you I guess it's a big question mark. So so I you know, I have always liked to have been really passionate about sharing yoga and wellness with other healthcare professionals, having the time and space to fully commit myself to building a business based on that. It's been all consuming. It's been very time consuming. And so my goal was that I would be able to build a sustaining business within our three year time here while I was taking a break from clinical dentistry and then as we move back to the US have some sort of hybrid, so be able to practice clinical dentistry on my own terms, maybe that's part time or in some unique time way. Perhaps it's, you know, just covering for people locum tenens, or taking a bit of time off every year so I can focus on my business so that's something that I'm open to see what happens. And hopefully, you know, by the time we leave, I am in a position with my wellness business where I feel comfortable giving up this time freedom that I have, because I will say having the time freedom of not having to go to an office, not practicing clinical dentistry and then coming home and then working on my side gig has been really what's moved the needle for me. So it's definitely been an adjustment, I would say with time management, but I'm very happy that I've had this opportunity. Oh yeah, if you would share a little bit more about your wellness business that you've been working on, while you've been in Okinawa and Japan and sort of what that is and who you are trying to help with what you're doing. Yeah, so I started yoga just because every time I went to a yoga class, I felt amazing after and my body felt amazing. It helped me prevent injuries and prevent pain. And it also really helped my mind and just going into a 60 minute class going for an hour yoga class a couple times a week really helped me as a person throughout many years of my life. And as I got deeper my practice as I got my yoga teacher training, I learned about many different aspects of yoga that are not physical. So that can be meditation breathwork the whole philosophy that we don't, not as current in our culture. So I learned a lot about this wellness philosophy. I think of yoga almost like the OG personal development, right? It's been around for 1000s of years. And it's kind of a original way that people are able to better themselves. And there's a way really wildly out structure for how we can do that. And I spend a lot of my time learning and really throwing myself into how I can be a better version of myself and live a happier, more fulfilled flourishing life. You know, that's always the goal for people is right how can I better and live better and yoga provide a roadmap to that as well as wellness and personal development? Oh, my tiny passion is just a tiny passion. But my small view of how yoga can affect people's lives grew much bigger over this 10 year period. I've been teaching and I really wanted to share it with other people. You know, I see a lot of people in pain in dentistry physically and emotionally. It's a very stressful job, we take on a lot of stress. And if I could just share a couple things that I learned along the way and make that job easier for some people. That was really my goal was to help preventing some of that unnecessary pain and stress that we feel in this job and allow dentists to live a better life and just be making some small lifestyle changes. And as we moved out here, I can backtrack a little bit. So my life really changed when I started engaging in immersive events. So meaning, like I mentioned, I went to my yoga teacher training that was something that I went to for 30 days, fully there. It was immersive and transformational. Every experience I reflect in that 10 year period that I've really learned or transformed, really changed my life. It's been immersive. So it's maybe it's a three day like development weekend workshop, or maybe it's going on this like a big backpacking trip around a certain area of the world. There are times when I've withdrawn from like my normal life and I've been able to put on a different identity or a different hat and just allow myself to experience the environment that I'm in and fully embody some of these techniques and habits and practices that we've learned. So I've noticed that it's really hard to just go to a 60 minute yoga class and feel like your whole life has changed. You need a little bit more time than that. And so that's where I learned that maybe my passion isn't just teaching these 60 minute classes. It's something bigger maybe my purpose is something bigger and that's where I fell in love with retreats, creating this special place this immersive experience. I can bring people together and teach them and take them through an experience right. So a retreat, a yoga retreat or a wellness retreat can be three days long. It can be seven days long, it can be a month long. I just kind of varies it can be in many different locations around the world, but usually they're in beautiful tropical areas. I get to teach people all of these things that I've learned and it's not just in that one hour yoga class. It's in this multi day immersive experience. So I felt really, really called to creating yoga retreats and wellness retreats for healthcare professionals, where I can teach other people things that I learned. I also recognize I don't know everything, and I can also bring in people who can teach us together. And so we all have our own individual magic gifts that we can share for the world and one of my gifts is just creating the space to bring other people in where we can all learn from each other.
And so hosting retreats is my core of my business. In addition to that, I also do one on one coaching and group coaching. So if you have a specific goal, if a healthcare professional has a specific goal, they want to live a better life or they feel like they their stress level is a 10 out of 10. Right now I can work with them in a group setting or one on one setting and help them reduce that number so their stress level can come down to five out of 10 three out of 10 to zero out of 10 but the goal is to be able to lower stress levels and teach people how to manage stress better and increase their quality of life and their fulfillment, their happiness and their flourishing. So that's in a nutshell what my business looks like hosting retreats, coaching and then I also have an online course where it's more like pre recorded on demand type of content because I noticed the dentist sometimes having lots of meetings after work is actually not something that you want to do if you have a patient cancellation or you have an extra gap of time, able to like log into this platform that I've created and watch a couple of videos on the better version of yourself. So much interesting stuff there and had never considered the immersive element and to really get into it into something that will help you get into something in a way that actually has an impact long term. So someone who is a little bit more inclined on the self improvement stuff, generally speaking, I like that and I like did you call yoga OG personal development is that yeah, 1000s of years. I love that. And it's you know, personal development, but the whole field of that that's out there right now or mastery or optimization. There's a lot of different words for it. We're all teaching each other the same thing. It's it's just a different vocabulary. And you know, science is now catching up with many of the things that yoga has been teaching us for 1000s of years. So for breathwork, for example, breathwork has been a part of yoga philosophy and yoga practice for so long. And now in the last, I would say, five years or so there's been so much research on the physical benefits and the mental benefits of breathwork and regulating our nervous system and changing how different stress hormones are released in our body. And we can scientifically quantitatively see the effects of breathwork and now there's a whole cult following for this like science based breathwork. We've actually been doing it for 1000s of years and so I love that there's so many different ways to think about it and learn and learn about it because my entry point was unique. I think not everyone's attracted to this, like old traditional philosophy, and many of us in the dental field, love the science. We'd love to geek out about it. And that's really compelling for us to pick up a new habit of knowing that science is catching up with this old philosophy and saying okay, now I can really understand why this is good for me and I'm gonna start doing it. It's interesting to me that you had that foundation of yoga before you went to dental school because I would think that a lot of people that are dentists that are into yoga, that's a small enough subset of people probably in and of itself. People getting into yoga, Dennis getting into yoga, in my mind would probably more likely be a reactive thing than a proactive thing. So maybe to back up a little bit for you. What was it like having that foundation with yoga going into the stress of dental school and how did you see other people experiencing that stress of dental school and I'm guessing that you at one time or another prompted some people that you were friends with in dental school to consider it yoga as a practice is what I was alluding to. Yeah, I I've been known to be a yoga pusher around my friends. I've always wanted to say someone has an eager opinion like oh, you should try this pose in yoga, so that's Yeah, so I, you know, I'm not immune to stress. And I will say as a young student in my early 20s, I didn't always practice what I preached. I did at least have the information. I have the knowledge and I think I did the best I could with what I had at the time, especially in dental school when they're during the depths of it when you have just so much going on. And there is a lot of demand coming from you needing able to go into this yoga studio for an hour, put on this calm voice and be able to go and move my body in a way that I know is gonna make me feel better, was like a vacation. It was like a paradise something I could escape to and be able to leave that place knowing that I'm always going to feel better. I rarely need to say that. Like they regret going into that yoga class. I think having been the teacher gives me they gave me the accountability. So a lot of times as a student there were, you know, I wish that I could have just spent the extra hour in the library or in the SIM lab or you know, catching up on work, but I was you know, I had that commitment of teaching this class, I have to be there and show up. That was the ultimate commitment that that gave me the consistency because Yoga is not about how flexible you are or how strong you are. It's about how consistent you are. And, and wellness in general. You know, when I say yoga, I'm really talking about the whole umbrella of wellness. It's all about that consistency. And so the fact that I was a teacher forced me to be consistent, and I think that's what I needed. I needed that accountability. And I think a lot of my peers around me didn't have that meaning they didn't they weren't required by anyone to show up on their yoga mats several times a week, whereas I really had that requirement or high set that as something that I needed to do for myself. And I think that changed the way that I processed the stress and manage the stress and I was always able to see challenges in dental school. I mean, as an as a practicing dentist as an opportunity for growth and knowing that the outcome is not so much about the outcome. It's about the journey. And no matter what I'm still going to be able to define success on my own terms. So it changed my mindset of what it means to like reach for goals and what success how I define success. I think that's really what it changed for me and being less attached to that end outcome and being okay to fail. You know, you can fall out of yoga pose and you know, not do it perfectly, but at the end of the day, you're still showing up as the best version of yourself and I think what I learned on my yoga mat I was able to carry out through other parts of my life one of my close yoga dental friends, Dr. Diana Liu, she's a dentist on Instagram she always says your yoga mats a training ground for life, right? So what you practice of staying in uncomfortable poses on your yoga mat, the brain training that you're doing in the body training of training your nervous system to overcome discomfort and to overcome meaning when you do fail or you fall out of a pose where you feel like you can't do something it's a training ground to well to prove yourself that you can grow that you can overcome and that success is always defined on your own terms. What have you learned about dentists since you've been able to immerse yourself more in this in this Wellness Business the last year and a half? You're not focusing too on practicing clinical What are you learning about burnout and stress among your fellow dentists? Two answers to that the first one is probably how we define success. But I think we've spent years decades being groomed to be specifically more goal oriented on certain things. That really sets us up for failure of saying like I'll be happy once I graduate dental school I'll be happy once I make my first million or once I open my own practice or you know that the goalpost keeps moving? Or it's like I'll have time to commit to my own well being once I do XYZ, that definition of success I realized for a lot of dentists is really wrapped up in our identity and it's very culturally conditioned into us.
So there's something obviously that's like a bad way to live. But I think it can really set you up for unhappiness because you will realize when you do reach those goals, that maybe you're not you don't feel the way that you thought you would feel. And so I always coach my clients to redefine what success means to you. Really like what does success feel like to you? And then how can we make that more accessible every single day. So instead of success being a destination or your goal being destination is the feeling or the emotion that you're chasing? And oftentimes the things that come up are the word freedom. You know, a lot of people want financial freedom, they want time, freedom, location, freedom, they just want the freedom to do whatever they want. And when you peel the onion and you take back the layer on top of that, the question then becomes what does freedom feel like to you and for me, it's like not setting an alarm. It's it's feeling like I'm on vacation every day or a little bit of vacation every day. And then I can say, well, how can I design my life where I do have that maybe it's drinking my coffee watching the sunrise that feels like I'm on vacation? Or maybe it's going to bed at like 8pm so that way I don't have to set an alarm in the morning because I'm just gonna end up waking up at like 6am When I have to even earlier. And so it's all about like read, defining and changing your perspective of what that success can feel like. And yes, it's important to have goals in life. That is a key part of our fulfillment, but it's also knowing that it's more about the emotional feeling that we're chasing. You think maybe when you when you start your own practice, you're gonna feel a certain way or maybe when you retire you're gonna feel a certain way. And oftentimes that is not in alignment. So creating more alignment between what we want and why we want it. And the second part of that answer so the question I think was, what do I see as common themes and burnout in dentistry? Yeah. What have you learned about stress and burnout among dentists that you work with in the last year and a half that provide some insight to people that are listening? Yeah, so the second thing I've learned is, let's say you get everything you want in the world, you have like the perfect schedule, all of your patients are amazing. You're working part time, you're making full time money or you know, whatever those like ideal. The ideal world is, unless you do the inner work, you're still going to feel like there's something missing. And that comes from like the conditioning that we've spent 10 or 20 years in this busy environment, where we have learned that, you know, our nervous system, our body and our mind have been conditioned to a certain baseline. So for many dentists, our baseline is busy. When we're not busy, it feels wrong, something goes off. So maybe you have that ideal schedule where you're not busy anymore, and you're like Okay, so I'm not busy anymore. All my stress should go away. And I actually learned I say this personally, because I felt Oh man, I'm done practicing clinical dentistry for a couple years, my life is gonna be perfect. And then we moved here and I realized like, Oh, my stress kind of follow me here. Maybe dentistry wasn't causing the stress immediately. It was something within myself. So I had been used to this like certain level of stress and busyness. And I started to find other things in my life to get busy with they just wanted to fill that space fill that gap. And a lot of people experienced that. So and you probably can relate to this as you work with a lot of dentists who are exiting clinical dentistry. We like don't know what to do with our hands. We just like we feel we feel that like anxiety that bubbles up where we just have this big blank space we worked so hard to create. And now we don't know how to fill that space. And unhappiness really comes when we have a lack of focus. And so if we our nervous system has been at a high level of stress, that's our baseline for us to take change our environment, the nervous system is gonna stay there. So we need to do nervous system training, and we basically need to retrain our minds and bodies to lower our stress levels to be able to manage stress better. The ideal ways to do that are through yoga, breathwork, meditation, physical activity, you know, all the healthy wellness habits that we learn about. And then the last part of that is actually technology. So I think that this is something I learned about myself and as I've been coaching clients over the last year that I've learned that it's 100% adds more stress into our lives. So are you familiar with the analogy of the stress bucket? I'm not but I'm all ears. Right? So if you imagine a bucket and metaphorical bucket contains our stress, we all have a bucket and it's the water or the rain that's filling the bucket is the stressors that we have in our life. So perhaps it's work stressors, family things, health issues, natural disasters, it's oftentimes when we have an increased demand, a lack of resources is when we feel stressed or we have a stressor, and we have this bucket in ourselves that contains all of this stress, and then we've got tabs at the bottom to help us relieve that stress. So we've got you know, proper sleep, physical activity, whatever you like. To do for fun, that helps relieve stress. When there's an imbalance when the stressors when are filling our bucket too fast, and we're not able to relieve that stress fast enough. So when the stressors outpace our capacity to relieve that stress, when we can burn out, and we have sneaky things that we do that feel like we're relieving stress and that is often overconsumption. of things such as technology, news, Netflix, alcohol Gu on like shopping. So when we over consume those things as a coping mechanism for stress and actually just recycles the stress and right back into our bucket. So we're putting ourselves we're finding ourselves for that burnout without properly relieving stress. And I've learned that technology is like a huge way that we recycle stress. And when we can have a healthier relationship with technology when we feel like using us and we're using it as a tool. And we're not spending three plus hours of screen time scrolling on our phone, we are able to properly relieve stress. So technology is a really, really big one. And especially personally in my life. I still struggle with it. And I'll say it's hard for you to connect to that statement. I just need that think about what you would do if you're waiting for an elevator or like if you're waiting in line at the grocery store. Your default is just to like take out your phone, or email or scroll on Instagram, not as taking away this really precious time that your mind has to process, the stress that's going on around you or life in general. There's a lot of really magical things happen to our mind in value when we're idle when there's little pockets of solitude throughout our day. So when we're constantly reaching for our phone, it's just like Reed just perpetuating that cycle of needing to keep our baseline of busy that level highs because we feel like oh, there's nothing going on. Let me reach for my phone and check my email. And so it's like perpetuating this cycle of busyness. long winded answer as a way to say that I've noticed some common themes and dentists that tend to feel stressed out and technologies is one of those so interesting because I can relate to a lot of this and just what I do myself personally and one of the things I enjoy working with Dennis is because I have a similar personality I think to a lot of dentists dentists are high achievers, and they're very efficient. And I'm guessing that if they are not going 100 miles an hour all the time they there's some part of them that feels lazy or like they're not living up to their potential. I hear you saying is that the the bar needs to get reset a little bit just in terms of like what productive is and what non productive is.
Yeah, rest is productive. Rest is productive. I will say that 100 times I will die on that mountain rest is productive. And that is something that culturally in America, we don't acknowledge. I think we're starting to and I think a lot of people I think with you know burnout being so prevalent now. We have to, you know, you can't show up as the best version of yourself. You can't be as productive in the office. If you're if you contain if you injured your back or you're not taking time off. If you're mentally burnt out as well. You're not going to be able to show up as the best version of yourself. You're literally gonna make less money because you're not practicing at your optimum level. So rest is productive and taking I mean just like with a car right you wouldn't like run a car for 30 years straight about turning it off and getting it for a tune up. So why would you do the same thing to your body? And yeah, breast is productive. question that comes out of that is for dentists that are running on the edge of burnout all the time and sort of recognize it. Can they work themselves out of that on their own very well or in your experience? Does it take someone else to sort of angle that that ball for them to give them permission to live life in a different way with different objectives? Yeah, I tried it both ways. And it just takes longer on your own. It's just a little messier. But is there someone that's like been in your shoes before? And they kind of know the path, why not their hand and like Let them guide you to the other side. And I think that's what coaching is, you know, I've always worked with a therapist. I've always worked with a coach. And I think those two in conjunction has been really helpful, because it allowed me to see the blind spots that I might not realize that I had. Yes, you can learn it on your own. There's lots of books and podcasts and resources like different people you can learn from. I think having someone take you through it, and it doesn't even need to be someone that's like Robbins or like this big guru. It can be someone who is a dentist who maybe a couple years ago they went through the same route recovery. Now they can tell you how to overcome it. Basically, you and it can be a friend. It doesn't have to be a coach. It can be someone that maybe you've developed a relationship with a mentor, but having helped and I think being comfortable asking for help is really key. So we've been chatting a lot of interesting stuff for a half hour or so before we start to wrap things up is anything that I haven't hit on that you think would be important to convey to the audience. I guess I'll say for dentists who are we're in their careers like I am and they've been wanting to leave like differently. I think my whole generation sees that we don't have to follow the standard roadmap of you know, open private practice, practice for three years alone, associate and then retire. Like I think that is now out the window for many of us and I would encourage those who are my age or early in their careers to start building their house a side gig so start building your passions outside of dentistry, and get to know yourself again, because for the last 10 to 20 years, you've been so focused on one specific goal and you are so much more than a dentist just because you have so many more dimensions and ways that you can help people passions, strengths that you that you have and to be able to develop those parts of yourself outside of dentistry is really a really powerful way to do all the things that I talked about, like redefine your vision for success and how success feels to you. And it gives you the confidence to know that if and when you ever want to step away from dentistry or create a hybrid where you practice part time and do something else that also gives you fulfillment. You have the strength the courage in that foundation already set. So for those that are listening that are interested in a lot of what you're saying and are interested in learning more about you and your your company and potentially working with you what's the best way to reach out and get in touch and to learn more? Lily Yes, I have a website Dr Shabazz and the.com It's a fun plan. My name is Shivani and shavasana, which is one of the best yoga poses. Finally, because when you lay down and you like go to sleep, basically. So Dr. savasana.com, you can find all the information on one on one coaching, my online course and my retreats, and Instagram. I love sharing my life there. I think although I have a rocky relationship with technology, and I've had to create a lot of boundaries, I love being able to share the beautiful things that I experienced in life interact with other people there so people can see me and I'm having a chat following you on Instagram since we scheduled this podcast a couple months ago. It is a very beautiful life that you live so I enjoy seeing some beautiful scenery of Japan and Okinawa. Thank you for sharing your life with everyone. The name of the podcast is dentist puns in money. Do you have a joke you'd like to share? I have a yoga joke. Oh, let's see if I can pull it up. I didn't memorize it. Well, the one is that I've been teaching yoga for decades. It's been a long stretch, which I thought was funny. I mean other yoga joke is how does T Rex feel after practicing yoga? I don't know it feels like a dinosaur.
It must be dinosaurs and dental jokes because a lot of them are that we seem like there's the dinosaur reference a lot of dental jokes. I hear but no those are for sharing. That is Dr. Shivani Kamodia Barto. dentist and wellness coach for dentists. Dr. Shivani thank you for sharing your story and your wisdom and for being guest on at this point in money. Thank you for having me. Thanks for listening and following along. Are you a dentist nearing your retirement from clinical or have you already hung up your handpiece? Would you like a treatment plan? For the financial components of your exit from clinical. Our company that does exit planning helps dentists like you reduce taxes in retirement and optimize how to best live off your assets including the ideal time for you to start taking Social Security. If you'd like guidance on those critical pieces, or just a second opinion, schedule an initial consultation with us on our website, our web address is dentist exit.com And there's no obligation for your initial consultation, that website again dentists exit.com. As a reminder that says Exit Planning and Terrell advisors LLC is a registered investment advisor. The information presented should not be interpreted or construed as investment, legal tax, financial planning or wealth management advice. It does not substitute for personalized investment or financial planning from dentist Exit Planning or Terrell advisors LLC. Please consult with your accountant and attorney for tax and legal advice. This podcast conveys the views and opinions of Shawn Terrell and his guests and the information herein should not be considered a solicitation to engage in a particular investment tax planning or financial planning strategy. information presented is for educational purposes only. And past performance is not indicative of future results.