Episode 21
A Look Back at an Extraordinary Year
Welcome to a very special holiday episode of Contrary to Ordinary. Today, we’re taking a look back over some extraordinary conversations from across 2023. The mission of this podcast has been to figure out what makes a person extraordinary. Are they born with it? Can it be taught? Is work/life balance even possible for people who have made extraordinary strides in their careers?
Extraordinary people come in many shapes and sizes, but this show has identified a few common traits that they share. They’re usually curious, lifelong learners who love to gain more knowledge. They don’t waste time and don’t sit still for too long. Finally, they don’t do it for the money. They do it to help others and the world.
Thank you so much for listening. Contrary to Ordinary will return in 2024 with more extraordinary conversations.
This episode features the voices of Dr. Rella Christensen, Dr. Doug Young, Machell Hudson, Dr. Philip D. Marsh, Stephanie Staples, Dr. John Kois and Professor John Featherstone.
Resources
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What's In This Episode
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A comparison of three, very different dental origin stories
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Some fantastic advice about following your dreams
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A real example of what it means to challenge the status quo
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Extraordinary people telling their stories
Transcript
Recording:
Extraordinary.
Leader.
Innovative.
Integrity.
Honest.
Courageous.
Curious.
Thoughtful.
Brave.
Unafraid.
Dr. Kim:
There is a place where technology and art meet, where work and play are one and the same. When the threads of curiosity are pulled in this place, the spark of innovation ripples across industries. Those who make this place their home are giants, titans who pursue creative passion while leaving their mark.
Speaker 1:
Creative.
Flexible.
Brilliant.
Clever.
Confident.
Dr. Kim:
They are courageous thought leaders set on changing the practice of dentistry and their corner of the world. More than the sum of their parts, we deconstruct the traits that bind these uncommon innovators.
Recording:
Humble.
Daring.
Disciplined.
Playful.
Principled.
Spontaneous.
Open.
Dr. Kim:
To discover what makes them contrary to ordinary, where we explore the extraordinary.
Hi there. I'm Dr. Kim Kutsch, host and founder at CariFree. I'm fascinated by what makes the paradigm shifters, world shakers and art makers tick. Let's embark on a journey. Extraordinary is a place where ordinary people choose to exist. Together we will trek the peaks of possibility, illuminate the depths of resilience, and navigate the boundless landscape of innovation to discover how some of the most innovative dentists and thought leaders unlock their potential and became extraordinary. On this season of Contrary to Ordinary, we explore the motivation, lives and character of the innovators who see limitless potential around them, the people behind some of the largest paradigm shifts in the practice of dentistry and beyond.
Welcome to a very special holiday episode of Contrary to Ordinary. Today I'm going to take a little time to reflect on some of my favorite extraordinary conversations from 2023. I began my podcast journey in March this year on a mission to learn more about what makes someone extraordinary. I feel like I've gained a lot of insight and inspiration during the last 10 months, and I really hope you have too. As we often do on this show, I'd like to start at the beginning with one of my favorite dentist origin stories. Sometimes we have someone inspiring in our family who is there in the profession right at the beginning of our journey. For the former co-founder and director of the Clinical Research Associates Foundation, Dr. Rella Christensen, it was her uncle.
Dr. Rella Christensen:
My dad only had one brother, and this was the dentist. He needed help in his office one year, and I was about 15 years old at that time. And so I lived with him. He had a beautiful home in Palos Verdes and his practice was in Redondo Beach. I've worked there doing operatory cleanup and instrument disinfections-
Dr. Kim:
All the grunt work, yeah.
Dr. Rella Christensen:
And he had a laboratory technician with a really nice lab right there in his office and used to like to play around. In those days, they would dribble a little mercury into your hand and you could play with it.
My uncle was very much a mentor. He really wanted children and couldn't have them. So he was very involved with both my brother and myself. He was an excellent dentist. He had excellent hand eye coordination, and he was a perfectionist.
Dr. Kim:
I was going to say, so excellence was important to him.
Dr. Rella Christensen:
That's a word that was important to dentistry in those days.
Dr. Kim:
Yeah. Oh, for sure.
Dr. Rella Christensen:
It's a word that has become less used today. I hate to say it's disappeared.
Dr. Kim:
I mean, we judged our success and failure by how tight our restoration margins were. Right?
Dr. Rella Christensen:
Well, this was the age of cast gold.
Dr. Kim:
Right. Oh, yeah.
Dr. Rella Christensen:
Yes. They used silver amalgam, but my uncle went to USC and they prided themselves on gold work there, and he was a master with it. That definitely rubbed off.
Dr. Kim:
So you went to USC as well, right?
Dr. Rella Christensen:
I did.
Dr. Kim:
And you got a hygiene degree.
Dr. Rella Christensen:
I did.
Dr. Kim:
Dental hygiene.
Dr. Rella Christensen:
That particular profession was suggested by my uncle. Bear in mind, this would've been... I graduated from high school in 1956 and in California at that time, they were just crying out for dental hygienists, the dentists in the state. So he really encouraged that. I wouldn't have known a thing about it had it not been for my uncle.
Dr. Kim:
Right. So he kind of nudged you in that direction.
Dr. Rella Christensen:
Once I knew that I couldn't be a medical illustrator, I was looking for something where I could use my hands and do something.
Dr. Kim:
Maybe help people in the process.
Dr. Rella Christensen:
I really wanted to do that.
Dr. Kim:
I love this story because I think it shows how much family, encouragement and mentorship can influence us early in our lives. Without her uncle, Rella might not be who she is today or have helped the people that she's helped. However, not everyone who enters the profession has or had a parent or family member who was a dentist. Sometimes the extraordinary family members that light our way have beaten the odds and inspire with their tenacity and vision. Take Dr. Doug Young, Professor Emeritus at the University of Pacific. He only found out about his father's extraordinary journey from China to the US after he had passed away.
One year after he got here at age 12, his father passed away. So he was basically homeless in Chinatown in San Francisco at the age of 13. So he is 13, he is in a foreign country. He is basically orphaned in a country that he didn't speak the language and he's on his own and he's homeless. I can't imagine.
Dr. Doug Young:
It's more amazing because I didn't know a thing about this. I learned of this at his death. Somebody at the memorial stood up and talked about his early childhood and I'm going, "Oh my gosh. Why didn't he ever mention this to me?" He had every opportunity to jab at me when I wanted a new bicycle or something. He could have said, "Hey, I was homeless at 13."
Dr. Kim:
Right, right. What happened to him after that then?
Dr. Doug Young:
According to the story that was told, he was selling newspapers on the corner in Chinatown, and his elementary school teacher walked by and asked him, "What are you doing? Why are you on the street?" And she took him in basically, and then his life was meager as far as he didn't have the opportunity to go to college. He picked fruit with the farm workers to make some money. He immediately joined the Naval Air Station to serve the military, and there was another story that he told at the memorial where he fell off a plane that he was fixing and broke his arm, and the next week his platoon shipped out and not many of them came back.
Dr. Kim:
What an extraordinary journey. Imagine only finding this out about your own dad after he had died. I would have so many questions. Not everyone is lucky enough to have extraordinary people in their family to inspire them or a clear direction of who and what they want to be. Some people just know that they want to help people. Machell Hudson, CEO and founder of Integrative Dental Coaching had a difficult upbringing but found direction and her love for other people.
Machell Hudson:
I didn't know what I wanted to do except I knew I wanted to nurture people and I was going to love people really, really, really, really well. And if you know me now, that's still something that I say. I really just want the opportunity to love people really, really well, and I have this great opportunity. One was through friendship initially and then being a mom, and that's the greatest gift. You asked me, what am I most grateful for? I am grateful that the Lord gave me my gentle giant and trusted me to love him so well and grow him into a loving, kind, smart young man. And then third, dentistry. And some people giggle at that like, "Who loves dentistry?" And well we do.
And we get to make so many people feel cared for and really have so many... from our patients to the people who make up our profession, make a difference. Feels good. My faith is the core who I am. I think we just love people for who they are and try and bring out their strengths. Maybe they don't see them because I feel like that's what happened to me. I've been gifted people who really showed me what my gifts were and I'm grateful for them. So yeah, I think every day when I wake up, I pray to be an example of the Lord and goodness and love people where they're at.
Dr. Kim:
You have to love people where they're at. That's a piece of advice I think we can all get behind. Speaking of advice, there's been a lot of it that has resonated with me personally over the last year. However, a real gem came from keynote speaker and coach, Stephanie Staples.
Stephanie Staples:
Work harder on yourself than on anything else, and everything else will be better. Too many people that are waiting for the boss, the government, the wife, the whatever to try and change, something to change, no, just work on yourself. Everything else is going to get better.
Dr. Kim:
She also advises living intentionally and not just assuming that other people have had an easy journey.
Stephanie Staples:
So I'm just saying before we just let those words roll out of our lips, "Oh, it must be nice. Oh, it's easy for them. Oh..." Maybe, but maybe also they have planned this and worked toward this and are leaning into what they love, and if there is something you love, maybe you can't do it to the nth degree, but maybe you can do it to some degree. So just because we really like doing things at 8, 9, 10, I am here waving the flag for like 4, 5, and 6. What can you do at 4, 5, and 6? I don't know, I've had a lot of luck with 4, 5, and 6.
Even before creating this life that has been very intentional is creating a me that's very intentional that it's like, "Well, I don't like that person that I was before and I want to create a me that I want to spend the rest of my life with." And all of a sudden, you know what? People find that me really interesting now and really fun to be around and nobody invited me on a podcast when I was... before. But I created a me that I wanted to be around, which led me capable to create a life that I want to live.
Dr. Kim:
And I think I'm hearing from you also a level of self-awareness. You had the episode where you crashed in the basement floor. Being able to wake up from that and go, "Something is wrong. Something's seriously wrong with my life and I need to make a change. I got to figure out what that is," but being self-aware enough to say, "I'm not happy or I don't feel centered in what I'm doing," and then say, "I want to make this change and I want to proceed forward and go do that." I think self-awareness is probably a trait of extraordinary people.
It seems like Stephanie's peers welcomed the change in her. But sometimes other people don't agree with what you say or do. For many of my guests, this has also been the case in their professional lives. Quite a few of them have had to battle back against the dogma of dentistry and academia with the arrows in the back as proof. I've experienced this myself, and I know it can really rock your confidence. The extraordinary thing is being able to get back up again and stand your ground. One person who has had to stand his ground repeatedly is Dr. Philip D. Marsh, Professor Emeritus of Oral Microbiology at the School of Dentistry at the University of Leeds in the UK. This is his story.
Professor Philip D. Marsh:
We published a paper where we'd done a local study with school children looking at the microbes in dental plaque, and we published this and one of our conclusions was there was evidence that strep mutans wasn't inevitably associated with demineralization and therefore other bacteria could be involved. Sometime later I got through the mail, a letter from the editor, which was from a very distinguished Canadian oral microbiologist who wrote a rather forceful letter criticizing our publication and finished with that the failure of me to adhere to some of the principles has inevitably led to the conclusion of microbial non-specificity in the initiation of lesions.
"Unfortunately, such papers unnecessarily confuse many readers and in my opinion, have been damaging to the progress of the science." So as a young research worker, this was an unbelievable shock. And it was again, one of those sort of blows to your self-confidence. You wonder if you are going in the right direction or not. We did write a robust reply and I said, "On the contrary, we believe that an open mind and the application of novel and more precise approaches to the study of a disease with a complex multifactorial etiology will lead eventually to greater advances in the field of cariology." And hopefully, that's what we've done.
Dr. Kim:
The road to wider acceptance is sometimes long. However, there are some influential people in our field who have a more open mind toward things they don't immediately understand or know. I was so lucky to have one of these people, Dr. John Kois, director of the Kois Center as my very first guest on this podcast. His approach to education and challenging business as usual is truly inspiring.
Dr. John Kois:
What I tried to do at the center, to be fair and respectful, is I preferred to be a game changer rather than an expert regurgitator. And to do that, I would say to move that needle requires quite a bit of responsibility to take the arrows, but I feel that's what you meant when I talked about if you show me the data, I'll change or prove me wrong, is I feel more comfortable with the data now and more secure on those platforms to be able to do that. People get very uncomfortable with skepticism when you're learning something new. And that shouldn't be the part that really worries people. I feel when I listen to somebody, even when what they're saying is very different, my first inclination is why could that be right? And I embrace the skepticism and I continue to see if it creates some kind of logic that moves me to what people call the second level of being quizzical.
Dr. Kim:
Right. I was going to say curiosity.
Dr. John Kois:
Curiosity. So-
Dr. Kim:
Is the key there, right?
Dr. John Kois:
Is the key. And if you're starting to now ask questions that seem to be answered in what makes sense or the data makes sense, we move to the third level of learning, which is called agreement. And now you can sort of embrace what might be new, but nothing changes until you get to the fourth level, which is called commitment. You have to have ownership to what that is, whether it's whatever thing you do in life, whether it's controlling your health or being on some fitness program or whatever you do, it takes a level of discipline to move that needle. And those pieces are what creates the difference between it being just education that stays on the table and nothing happens with actually doing something in your life and-
Dr. Kim:
Making it life changing.
Dr. John Kois:
That's what I feel is what we're trying to do at the center. And we don't always hit the mark, but it's not just about knowing better, it's doing better. And if you don't know better, you can't do better. And if you know better and you don't do better, you feel worse about yourself.
Dr. Kim:
In the end, we all follow our own path. It's a real blessing if we have or have had a life that we can look back on and say, "I'm proud of that." In Galatians 6, verses four and five, the Apostle Paul says, "Each one of us should test their own actions. Then they can take pride in themselves alone without comparing themselves to someone else, for each one should carry their own load."
The holidays and the coming of the new year are also times when we think about what's next. We are given the occasion to dream a little, creating resolutions for what we'd like to achieve in the coming year and beyond. I'd like to close this holiday episode by talking a little bit about what it means to follow your dreams and persevere with them. But before we hear the last word from Professor John Featherstone, the retired dean of dentistry at the University of California San Francisco, I'd like to wish you all a peaceful holiday season. Thank you so much for coming on this journey with me, and I look forward to bringing you more extraordinary conversations in the new year. Now, let's hear from John.
Professor John Featherstone:
Follow your dreams. I've followed my dreams. I've had some really weird dreams over the years and I've followed them. But the corollary to that is... and I used to say this to the students, if you come to a fork in the road, which we all do, take it. And they would look at me and say, "Dr. Featherstone, what on earth are you talking about?" And I'd say, "Think about it. Let me add to that. Take it and don't look back." In other words, make your choice. Follow your dreams. You might have two dreams and you follow one of them. Don't turn around and come back and don't ever think about what would've happened if, because that's totally non-productive. And don't forget the people who matter to you the most.