Connie says she hates long introductions so let me sum her up in just 25 words.
25 years.
Two million people.
1,000 organizations.
Hall of Fame speaker.
Award-winning author.
Seven books.
Former Radio/TV personality.
Comedienne.
Human Behavior Expert.
And…( what we all probably could use now and then)….a Therapist.
Bottom line: Get ready! To dig deeper, laugh harder and learn more about how TO GET WHAT YOU WANT out of life than you ever thought possible!
http://conniepodesta.com/
VIDEO - DUwHF #1076 - Connie Podesta
AUDIO - DUwHF #1076 - Connie Podesta
Howard: It's just a huge honor for me today to be podcast-interviewing Connie Podesta. Thank you so much for coming on the show. You've got to be the best speaker in dentistry.
Connie: Oh no.
Howard: I've had so many people tell me that.
Connie: I may be the funniest speaker in dentistry.
Howard: You may be the funniest- Connie says she hates long introduction. So let me sum her up just twenty-five words. Twenty-five years, two million people, a thousand organizations, Hall of Fame speaker, award winning author, seven books, former radio TV personality, comedian, human behavior expert, and what we all probably could use now and then, a therapist. Bottom line-
Connie: Oh, that's enough.
Howard: That's enough?
Connie: You're probably the one that could use a therapist the most. People are applauding now as they're listening to this.
Howard: You know what? Every time I find a therapist, after the third or fourth session, they quit the profession and they leave.
Connie: Oh no, I wouldn't-
Howard: They said that they gave up. But you have spoken to a thousand organizations. How is dentistry different than all the other industries? Or is it the same?
Connie: No, it's unique. It's not that there's not other industries like it, but dentists are CEO's and they run a business and they have to sell and they have to market and they have to have cost centers and they have to train their employees and they have to do HR. It's a company, but they don't act like that. They don't act like they're a CEO. They don't act like they have to train and market. And let me give a disclaimer before I get a thousand emails on our Twitter. This is not every dentist. There's some listening right now and work with us who would totally do that, but on the average… It's the same with doctors. Physicians of everything, dentists or doctors, but anyone in that area, therapist, these self-care help people go into it and they don't want to even think of it being in a company. They don't want to even think that money and profits make any difference. They want to kind of think that they're in a "for the good of mankind" type of profession and that if they talk about money or talk about sales or talk about closing deals or talk about marketing or talk about training, then that takes them away from the genuineness of helping others and so that's a little different. Most people, even churches now, we'll say we're a business and we have to run it like a business, so I would say that most of the work I do with dentists is just about that. How to wrap their brain, head, mind and heart around the concept that you can be really good to people and want to help people and want to make a difference in people's lives and still be a really genuinely fine business person.
Howard: It reminds me of the most interesting conversation I've ever had. It was with a Catholic priest from, I believe it was Fort Scott, Kansas, and he had his mind blown. He was in the seminary for eight years reading the Bible, then he graduated and he's thrown in charge of a church with an elementary school that's in debt and parents-
Connie: He's now a CEO.
Howard: And he's like I had zero, zero, zero training for that. So then the same thing if you're a dentist. You go to school eight years and you're ready to sit down and do the biggest calculus, geometry, trigonometry problem- And it's worse because when you talk about training staff, when you talk about marketing to other people, when you talk about selling dentistry, they got accepted because they had great science skills. So it naturally unselects the- If you went to college and had a great time and a great personality and went on dates and concerts and were the life of the party, you would've never got accepted into med school or dental school, law school. So what do you do with all these dentists who want to be in the library doing science? And when I asked them, and we poll, so these aren't gut feelings. We've been polling dentists on Dentaltown since 1998. We say, "What stresses you out the most?" It's their own team, they'll tell me.
Connie: And they're stressing the team out the most. It's very mutual. If you ask the team, "What's your biggest stressor?", it'll be the dentist. They'll say the dentist, and so-
Howard: You got to nip this whole thing in the bud. You need to start lecturing to only deans. You should go to deans and say, "You're accepting the wrong guy."
Connie: Oh no, you're going to get me going.
Howard: "You don't want a math major."
Connie: Well, it's not that they're accepting the wrong guy, but they're not teaching it as a business. I would imagine, and you are the expert, in very few dental schools are there courses about leadership management, marketing, sales, training, competency, HR. So they're not being taught anything in school. Even as a teacher when I was going through education, yes, I was taught how to teach kids, but I was also taught about management and discipline and running a classroom. We were taught other areas, not just going in there and teaching because there's a lot more. And so I find with a lot of health care type professionals is that nowhere in school was it even brought up that, "Oh by the way, this is a company and this is a business and you're going to have employees and some of them are going to need to be fired and you're not going to have any documentation and then you can't fire them or get sued and then everyone else is going to quit because they can't stand the person that you can't fire, so they're going to go leave and you're going to be stuck with this person for the rest of your life." No one bothers to mention that to them.
Howard: Yeah, it's funny because in my walnut brain, high turnover means something's wrong with HR. When you're talking about staff training, the easiest way to train the staff like- Next Monday, my Laurie has been with me twenty years. I had a whole mess of people that have been with me twenty to thirty years and I go into an office and no one's been there two years except this one girl. She's been there fifteen and she's the doctor's favorite, and he doesn't even realize that that's the toxic bombshell. If you got one person that's been with you ten and no one else that stays two, it's algebra. Simple algebra. So when you said selling, God, they think that's a four letter word, and, they honestly believe that a good doctor doesn't sell and they tell you, "I didn't go to school eight years to sell. I'm a doctor. I'm the best dentist in Dallas."
Connie: What I share with my dentist is I said, "Every time you smile when you walk in the room, every time you ask them a question, "How is your day?" Every time you explained to them so that they can understand the procedure that you're doing, every time you connect with them, that's selling. You're selling." Dentists often have a misconception, a very poor one, of what selling is. Selling isn't just pushing a product or a service on someone. Selling is getting someone's buy in and consensus. So if a dentist is selling and their staff is selling, it starts from the minute I walk in the door. What's the climate like? What's the environment like? How do people greet me? How do they get along with each other? How does the dentist relate to me? How does he or she connect? How do they connect with their team? Selling starts way before I'm brought into a room and given the treatment plan and told how I can put this on my credit card for the next sixty months.
Howard: And the dentist doesn't realize these dirty little secrets that the receptionist hates the hygienist. How long does it take for a new patient to pick up inter-staff (unclear 00:08:03)?
Connie: For some patients they will never pick it up, but I've quit two dentists and the only reason why I've left both of them- And both of them I felt were very clinically skilled, very technically competent. Both of them I left because the toxicity within the office, you could feel it between the dentist and a couple of the staff, you could feel it between some of the staff, I could tell when I went back to the front desk that no one liked that woman, and that's not fun. No one wants to go to a therapist or a doctor or dentist. We are all three. I'm a therapist. You're a dentist, a physician, whatever. None of us in these professions are people dying to come see us, and so it has to be a very pleasurable experience to get us to want to come back.
Howard: And talk about what you mean by when you say you're a therapist.
Connie: Well, for thirty years I was an LPC — that's called a Licensed Professional Counselor. I have a graduate degree in human relations and counseling with another fifteen, twenty hours on top of that. So for many years I did private therapy. People would come into my office. I worked in a huge clinic, I worked alongside psychiatrists, and I'm still using all those tools. And I'm also a standup comedian. That's really weird because those are two totally different parts of the brain. Comedy is very right-brain, creative, out there, impulsive, spontaneous, and therapy is very left-brain, dig deep, look at the psychological aspects and ramifications of every action or move. But it served me really well because when I'm talking to groups, I'm very, very funny, laugh out loud funny, but my humor is not jokes. They're laughing because they're like, "Oh my God, I just did that. I just said that yesterday. Someone just used that on me to get their way with me." So they're laughing because I bring people up to a place where they're so self-aware of what they do. And I help, especially dentists- There's so many professions and dentists certainly aren't the only one where they also never had any training in school in psychology, which is the understanding of why people do what they do, say what they say, react the way they react, behave the way they behave. If you don't know that and someone yells or hollers, your brain has no idea of what to make of that, how to handle that, how to react to that. So you just kind of let whatever comes out of your mouth come out of your mouth. So I teach my clients, here's the psychology of human behavior. Here's what makes people want to work for you. Here's what makes them want to sell for you. Here's what makes them want to come to you for their dental treatments. Here's what makes them want to walk away from you. Here's what makes them want to leave your practice and never enter your door again. And most dentists, they've never heard that before. The first time I did a session for ADA, in the morning we had maybe four hundred people, in the afternoon I had like fifteen hundred, was standing room only. Because in the morning, no one had heard of me and I started talking about all the things we're talking about now. Why do people do what they do? And I always say psychology equals money. Psychology equals big money because the secret of making money, the secret of running a good business, the secret of any business, entrepreneurship or attempt is to understand the nature of human beings. And the more you understand, the more you will increase your market share and the less you understand, the less you're going to keep good help, the less you're going to keep good staff, the less you're going to keep good patients.
Howard: God, there's so many places I want to go. I think I'm going to start real dark. When I got out of school thirty years ago in '87, dentists really thought and believed they had the highest suicide rate, and now because of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and all that, the armed services have taken up the charts. But we been having a spate of suicides lately. We just had Anthony Bourdain who was successful-
Connie: Kate Spade.
Howard: Kate Spade. They're all from here. David Spade grew up here, and so did his brother.
Connie: But success has nothing to do with suicide.
Howard: Well, I just want to say that since I've been here thirty years, every year, a dentist in Phoenix committed suicide. Last year it was three. So let's start at the bottom. Did you ever hear back in the day that dentists had a high suicide rate?
Connie: Let me ask you a question. Are you comparing that to how many sheet metal workers commit suicide each year and how many therapists commit suicide? Are you comparing that? Is one dentist a year more than-
Howard: Oh, I don't know. I'm not an expert in that.
Connie: No, I wasn't trying to- But I'm saying it could be not normal. That's abnormally correct. Let's put it that way. Not normal to commit suicide, but that abnormal, correct. But I don't want to get into suicide because I can't answer that or I'm not an expert on it, but I can tell you that in dentistry — and I coach a lot of dentists and work with a lot of their teams — there's a really high degree of unhappiness. And unhappiness and sadness can definitely lead to choices that aren't healthy or safe for you, and I tried to look at why are some dentists unhappier than some other professions I know-
Howard: And you do believe that dentistry is probably unhappier than other professions?
Connie: Not dentistry as a whole, but there's a lot of people unhappy with their job, but you can see why. It doesn't pay any money, it sucks, it's dirty, it's dangerous, it's horrible, there's no respect. And there's a lot of industries that are like that. They're not doing what they want to, so that makes sense. When you have lots of negative factors and people end up unhappy, you go, "Okay, well I guess…" but I'm working with some dentists, not now, but have worked with some dentists who are making great money and they have a nice home and they have decent staff and they're doing a job that's very, very respected and they're not in a dirty job, they're not in a dangerous job and yet they're still unhappy. So that's where I'm trying to look at: why would that be? I did find very early on in working with dentists that many of them are unhappy because this was never the job they wanted. They didn't choose this. It's like the boy whose dad played on the football team and I remember- I'm going to share with you a session. Years and years and years ago, I was counseling two families, both of whom have had a sixteen-year-old boy tried to commit suicide. And one boy was the most amazing- Is it "flautist" when you play the flute? Is it "flautist" or "flutist"? But anyway, he could play the flute. It was unbelievable. And the other boy was a soccer player. Top, top, top, probably could go to the Olympics. So why are these boys suicidal? The boy that could play the flute and two or three other instruments, his father was on a major football team. Major, major player, football team. And the boy who could play soccer and was unbelievably athletic, his father was a musician. So both fathers were disappointed in their sons, and it brought me to tears because I just wanted to go back to their birth and go and switch the babies, because had they been switched, they would've been fine, correct? Each one would have been lauded and applauded and validated, but because their families didn't value what they did- And so I'm finding in dentistry, there's a lot of dentists who didn't want to do this. In fact, it appalled them. It disgusted them; I've had dentists say that. But their dad and their granddad and you've got the dentistry going and it's in the town and they're on every committee and they're on the boards and they've gotten so much notoriety and so much fame, and so there was never a choice in their mind.
Howard: Ryan, isn't that amazing what she's saying? Because my four boys, ever since they're this tall, everywhere I've ever taken them, every dentist said, "So are you going to be a dentist like daddy?" And then when they started going into their own- Because I always told my sons, "Dad only want you to be happy and healthy." I really disappointed my dad because he owned nine Sonic Drive-In's and he wanted me to drop out of high school and start a Drive-In in a small town, Hutchinson, Kansas and Kearney, Nebraska and all this stuff like that. And all of his franchise friends, their sons were dropping out of high school-
Connie: So see here, you went to school, did something that very few men or women can accomplish, did something very smart, required a lot of skill, but yet you were a disappointment to him. And so that's one reason. I have found that there's a great number of dentists who for whatever reason knew early on they did not want to do this, but the thought of even- And it's very similar. I'm going to compare dentists to farmers here, but in agriculture, the same type of thing. It's the family farm. It's been there forever. Your great, great grandfather. We have worked the- And here they've got a son who just wants to go to school-
Howard: I got to interrupt for one second. Ryan's grandfather was kicked out of the family will because he was the first one in the family to leave the dairy farm and go to Wichita State University and become an engineer, and his mother wrote him off for death. Can you believe that?
Connie: So you have one thing. And it's stronger in dentistry or agriculture. It's stronger in the industries where the family owns the business and that's been handed down and it could be like Woolworths. I think I watched a show about Woolworths, about the third son. You know, "I don't want to do a five-and-dime store." So that's one thing. I've seen and definitely talked and counseled some dentists who wanted to be a surgeon or wanted to be something else and it wasn't going to happen, and for whatever reason the family sees the surgeon in the family as better than the dentist in the family, which is a perception that's not accurate. But if that's the family you're in, if someone sees the surgeon as better than the dentist or better than the CPA or better than the great guy who stays home and raises his kids while whatever your other choices. So I've had some dentists whose families don't respect what he's doing as much as a sibling. And then I have a lot of dentists who are just unhappy because it isn't what they thought. They don't want to run a business and all of the staff and they just hate it. They thought they'd be in business for themselves. That's what some of them thought. They thought, "I don't have to go to work. I don't have to report to anybody. I don't have to have a boss. I'm going to run my own company," which is kind of the American dream. Not with the millennials; they know that's not true because they watched their parents screw that up. But back in that age, they thought that if they own their own business- And then they get to it and they're not free at all, they have compliance issues and regulations and all sorts of insurance and there's so much more to it. And they would just — I use the term dental — like to go "dental-ing" around. They would just like to go in their room and dental all day. They just want to dental, right? Do their dental-ing stuff. And they can't be that isolated; there's so much more to it. So I'm just giving you a few reasons why some dentists- But I have to tell you, in this last few years, I'm not seeing it like I did ten or fifteen years ago. I think today if a young man doesn't want to be a dentist, he'll tell his dad, "Dad, too bad" or a young woman, "Too bad, I don't want to do this. So you'll have to sell the business." I think more of them are understanding it's a business because they get it, especially if they grew up in their mom or dad's business. So I'm seeing dentists a lot happier now and a lot more creative and a lot more fun with their teams, so I think it's good news.
Howard: Yeah, because we were little, our generation couldn't really communicate with your parents what you thought, what you felt.
Connie: But now they are. They're communicating a lot. Maybe for some of us older, too much. But anyway, let's get into good things about dentistry.
Howard: I want you to address this. So the average American between age sixteen and seventy-six will purchase thirteen new cars. The median price is thirty-three thousand five hundred, they finance it over five years — sixty months. When I go into every zip code in America, 5%, one in twenty dentists, sells a median price of a new car — thirty-three thousand five hundred case — damn near every week. They did a full mouth rehab, All-on-4 implants, all this, and then the other seven people in the same medical dental building say, "Our town's broke. There's no money. Nobody can afford this. It's insurance only, blah, blah blah." So the Americans, they buy a new car every five years-
Connie: Because it's fun!
Howard: But why can one out of twenty dentists convince you that you have seven cavities, you need three crowns, root canals and implant, and they just throw you the whole case, do it all day long, and then the other one walks in there and say, "Well Connie, unfortunately-"
Connie: Okay, you want the answer?
Howard: "-your insurance will only cover-"
Connie: Here's the answer. The one dentist, I like him or her. I trust them. I believe in them. I don't think they're full of crap. I don't think they're selling me a bill of goods so that they can pay their next house payment. I believe them. I believe that they wouldn't be telling me anything that's not true. I believe that they would do everything they can to save me money. I believe that they will try to save my teeth as much as they can before rushing into some treatment I don't need. I believe them; I don't believe the other six.
Howard: So how do you build believability and trust when we're selling the invisible? You know that this is a bottle of water. You know this is an iPhone. But when I tell you you have four cavities, that's invisible.
Connie: No, you're not invisible though. You're the one that's telling me that and I have an intuition. We all have an intuitive feeling about people, and part of the problem now that I really see, for example, as a professional speaker, I am one of the very few speakers who pretty much answers my own phone and if you're wanting to hire me, you will talk to me. You don't have to go through somebody, I've never had a salesperson, I've never had a marketing person. I'm the product. I'm the one that can sell myself better than anyone else, and so what we have now is all this outsource thing, and I get it. Dentists are hugely busy and so am I, but I want that connection because if the client doesn't trust me, they're not going to bring me in and pay me unbelievably great money to entrust their whole staff with me or their whole audience with me. And this is where dentists need so much more work on, hiring and firing and putting people in the right position and watching what's happening. If I come in and I just intuitively like you, our personalities connect, you're funny, you tell me what you're doing, everything about your treatment I like, by the third or fourth visit, I'm sold. I believe in you, I trust you, I think you do the right thing. And then we have the whole set and it's time for the whole plan and you send me to Wanda Rue Rue or whoever in her little office who is now the one that's going to tell me that I need to finance $33,000 and I don't like her at all. Maybe she's snooty, maybe she's not friendly, maybe she's overworked and harassed, maybe she doesn't know what she- I don't care what it is, but I don't like her and guess what? I'm not going to do it. Dentists keep saying to me, "I'm a great guy. Why can't I sell?" Because you're not selling. You sent me over to her or you're sending your people over to her, and so it's really important that whoever they are entrusting to do their selling, whoever they're entrusting — they don't call it selling; they call it sharing the plan — to share their treatment plan has to pretty much mimic and reflect their own personality because if I like the dentist, then I'm going to like someone who is a clone of the dentist and they don't usually do that. If the dentist is bottom-line and structured and detailed, the odds are that dentists will hire somebody who's outgoing and friendly. If the dentist is outgoing and friendly, they'll probably hire someone- "I need someone in my office detailed." Well, that's a real problem when it comes to sales because if I like the dentist because of your personality, then it's going to be very hard for me to attach to someone who's selling me and asking me for money who I don't like.
Howard: Well, it's amazing because in their walnut brain, if my dental office cost $1 a month in overhead, if they do $1 a month in dentistry, their overhead's 100%. So most of them think, "Well, the way I'll lower my overhead is I'll try to buy cheaper gauze and not pay my staff and not get medical insurance and just keep cutting costs until everything's dead."
Connie: Yeah, and I've talked to staff without dentists. Oh my God, I wish I could tape it, but it's too private. You keep going back to "you get what you paid for" and you do. Patients aren't stupid. They know when you're cutting costs. It's the same way in speaker fees. People will say to me, "Connie, your speaker fee is too high." And I said, "But it's not too high for what I'm giving you. You may not want what I'm giving. You may not want the amount of stuff I'm going to teach you and the amount of money I can bring into your business and the amount of work I can do to help your team be better. You may not want that, but my fee's not too high." But being cheap on anything, if they're going to cut costs- I've been in dentist office where they've cut costs and the team is miserable. If people aren't getting paid what they're worth and they're not valued, then they do the least amount of work possible and they're miserable and they're not happy and they're ticked off every day they come to work and they're unhappy and we feel the energy in the air the minute we walk in.
Howard: You know, if your overhead's $1 a month, you need to do $2 a month in dentistry and you can't cut costs on your electricity, your taxes, your labor, you can't cut your way to zero. But if your office costs $1 a month, you can sell your way to two, but they hate sales and it just so frustrating. And what I understand is a lot of people, they just start with the worst tooth because they're like, "Well, I can't tell Connie she has eleven cavities." But when I went to a physician, I wouldn't want the physician saying, "Well, I can't tell him he's going to have a heart attack and prostate cancer. I'll just-"
Connie: Lie.
Howard: Yeah, I'd want to know the whole physical. So let's go back to staff. So when I go into dental offices, I've always said that I can smell a successful dental office in like two seconds. It's fun, it's friendly, everybody's jovial. And then you go on the other 95% and it's like a library, it's weird, you go up front and they hand you a deal to sign in like you're a cow. In Ahwatukee, we still have some that slide the glass over. You slide the glass over and so I'm waiting for her to come over and just brand me. Like a (unclear 00:29:25) dental patient.
Connie: Well, partner's not often working.
Howard: Partners?
Connie: Partners, because so many dentists partner with someone that they wouldn't even go have a beer with, and they're purposely thinking, "Well he or she is going to bring another dimension. I'm bad at this so they're going to do this and I'm good at this and he can't do that or she can't do that." But now you've messed up the office because everybody gravitates towards one personality and now what happens is we have teams now, teams against teams and even though one's on one side and one's on the other, it's like when we used to have no smoking areas at the back of the airplane; there was really smoke everywhere.
Howard: Do you remember any flights with smoke?
Connie: Yeah, I'd be in the row right in front of the smoking area.
Howard: I tell my boys about that. They don't even believe me.
Connie: Yeah, so the smoke was everywhere. It's kinda like that and I always say the dentist, "Before you go into a partnership, think about you're sharing office space, you're sharing teams, but most of all you're sharing breathing space and you're sharing energy and that energy is going to be felt so if you have a good rapport and a good team, making a little less money might be, in the long run-"
Howard: It's funny because when they come out of school, everybody in the world is well-aware, that half the marriages end in divorce and by the way that number is coming down, but it's coming down just technically. The reason it's coming down is after World War Two, they were getting married at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. So they were married to someone until twenty-six, then they got divorced and that counts as divorce. Millennials are getting married a decade later than World War Two, so if you live with a guy for seven years and then you broke up, the divorce rate's coming down because you're not counting. Like I got a friend who tells everybody she's never been married, but she's lived with four different guys for ten years.
Connie: That's pretty smart.
Howard: Then I have another girlfriend who doesn't want to go out and date because she feels shameful and she goes, "I can't go date. I've been divorced four times." So one who never signed the paper, she's like, "Oh, I've never been married." And this one's like, "Oh my God, I've been divorced four times," and they both had the same exact life. But the point I was making is that they're all aware that marriages fail, but no one ever talks about the fact that when two dentists become a partner or two physicians or two lawyers, those fail too, and those are uglier than the divorces because when you divorce someone- Like when I had my divorce. She's the mother of my four kids. I wouldn't argue. I just like, "Where do I sign?" But when you are divorcing someone that you don't make love to, you don't have children with you don't have families, they go to a war and there's one divorce in my backyard that was like each dentist paid almost half a million in legal fees over five years. They paid a million dollars in legal.
Connie: Because there's so much anger. But anyway, you made one comment here that I find disturbing. You say on one hand, dentists aren't always making the money they want, correct? And some of them are not having an easy time and yet they don't want to sell. Is that correct? And then they shouldn't be dentists. It's just as simple as that. I can't think of a job- In fact, if you don't want to sell, there is no job. You should just never have a job and be homeless or because there's not a job that doesn't involve selling. And so if you have a mindset I don't want to sell, then it's not going to happen. The problem is instead of going on the bandwagon and screaming from the top of the roof, "I don't want to sell," they should do a little psychology on themselves and figure out why selling, they perceive it as a bad thing. That's the key and in my last dental group of several hundred people, we were working and we talked about this. I said dentists don't have a hard time with selling. They have a hard time asking for money. That's two different things. They have a hard time asking for money and they're not the only ones. A lot of people have a hard time asking for money. They don't want to see themselves in that position that they have to ask someone to give them money. And it goes way back to childhood, and one of the stories I tell on stage all the time is when people say, "When did you know you're a good salesperson?" And I said I guess I knew it around eight or nine. I was eight or nine years old, I was in the fourth grade and I had been called out of class to the principal's office and I walk in and my dad had been called out of work. He's in one chair, empty chair for me in the middle, and my mom on the other side. Very ominous, everyone's mad, and they proceed, principal and superintendent, to tell my mom and dad that I am charging girls a nickel to go to the bathroom — which is true. I was. But I said I wasn't charging them to go the bathroom because even at eight I knew that was really creepy, but I was charging and they said, "Well, what are you charging them for it?" And I said, "Well, I charge a nickel in the bathroom." "Well what for?" And I said, "Because I'm really good at answering questions and everybody has questions that make them sad, and so if a girl comes in and she has a question, I usually have an answer that helps, and then she pays me a nickel." Well, that was the end of that. We walked to the car. Now for all the dentists and staff and everybody listening, I want you to go back to childhood and just think for a minute the messages you got about money. A lot of people, let's say they grew up with not much money, and then the message is, "Well, we don't have much money, but we're really good, honest people." Well, what does that mean? That means people with money are what? Idiots, horrible, they're dishonest, they're not loving people, they're not good people. Or they had a lot of money, but no one was home and everybody fought and so money is now the root of all evil. So a lot of dentists grew up in homes where the money message and the message about money was very dysfunctional. So when you have a dysfunctional perception of money, you cannot sell.
So here's what my message is. We walked to the car, my mom gave me the first message about money. She was the one that wrote the checks and tried to save and everything, and her message was that I had totally mortified her. That was her word. I've mortified her. She can never go in front of other women again, and I am never to charge. I had to promise her I would never charge a nickel to any little girl again, and I promised. My dad said nothing. So later that afternoon he asked me to go with him to the hardware store. Any major conversation my dad and I had about life was in the car on the way to the hardware store. So we're in and he looks at me and he was a salesman and he was a really good salesman and he looks at me and says, "So how good are you?" I go, "What do you mean?" He goes, "Well, how many questions can you answer? Like if five girls asked you a question, how many could you answer?" And I said, "Well, like four." And he said, "Then charge a dime." And I said, "But mom said I couldn't charge a nickel." And he said, "I don't want you to ever charge a nickel again either. Charge a dime." So I had two very different messages about money. One was it was horrible and terrible what I was doing and had I listened to my mom's message — and bless her heart — I would not be where I'm at now. I have no trouble selling and asking money for the value I bring to the table. No trouble at all. I'm not greedy. I'm not selfish. I don't do bad things with money. I give it away, I share it, I'm generous, but I have no trouble looking someone in the eye and asking them for money in return for the value I bring to the table. But that's because I chose my dad's message. My dad's message was, if you're good at something, then charge what you're worth. And I said, "Well, what if I'm not good?" And he said, "Then people will stop paying you anything." Well, there it is, right? There's the best money message in the world. If you're good, keep charging until you reach your limit. If you're not good and you don't deserve it, which I think a lot of dentist- I've heard them say, "Well, I don't know if I deserve all of this money." And that comes from childhood too.
Howard: Okay, we're talking about the psychology, the therapy of selling. This is the reality in most dental offices. When the doc gets done doing this root canal for an hour, when he's done, he just runs straight to his office and shuts the door. He doesn't want to deal with the staff and it's just stressful. He's happiest when he's in his private office and the door's shut. Yet we just watched the NBA finals with Lebron James on. The coaches are walking the floor, they're trading players, they're totally involved in the game. If that dentist was that coach, he would have stayed in the locker room during the whole game.
Connie: See, I've hunted and hunted till I found a dentist that doesn't do that at all. And that's what dentists have to realize. We're making choices now. Used to be, there was one dentist kind of in a neighborhood or in our neighborhood or one that your parents had gone to forever. No one was dentist shopping. Now we doctor shop and dentist shop and therapist shop, and if someone comes to me once or twice and doesn't think I'm doing a great job with them, I'll never see or hear from them again. I wanted a new dentist when we moved and I went to two. Tried each one two or three times. Both of them twice. And one, the staff was horrible in and two, the dentist did exactly what you said. He had absolutely no conversation with me and when he was done, he walked away and I never went back. And who I have now is amazing. So dentists have to be aware that they no longer have the option of being who they'd like to be or maybe even being who they really are. That's part of work, and sometimes dentists will look at me and say, "Well, I can't pretend I'm happy if I'm not. This is just who I am." Well then don't be in the public eye. They're in the public eye. When I go on stage, I've been on stage when I'm going through a divorce or when my kids were sick or somebody was taken by an ambulance; I've been on the stage all sorts of horrible times.
Howard: So you've written seven books. I'm on Amazon. If my homies had to start with one of your books, which one would you start with?
Connie: "Life Would Be Easy If It Weren't for Other People".
Howard: "Life Would Be Easy-"
Connie: "-If It Weren't for Other People". It's basically how to deal with idiots.
Howard: Okay, I see it's all five stars, "Life Would Be Easy If It Weren't for Other People". We'll talk about that. Let's start with that book. So it's a book about dealing with idiots.
Connie: Yes, but most people, by about chapter two, are seeing themselves so much that they realize that really the title should probably be "Life Would Be Easy If It Weren't for You." If I could have titled it the way I wanted, because we're our own worst enemies, we sabotage ourselves, we criticize ourselves, we make stupid choices, we were too aware of what's non-important and totally unaware of what is important in life, and especially in relationships. You talked about the divorce rate with dentists. Well, I can tell what a marriage is going to be like just by seeing a dentist one time. If they're not going to talk to me, they're not talking to anybody. If they don't know how to communicate and have fun with me or their staff and they don't know how to do it with anybody — their spouse or their kids or anybody. And it's hard. They say that marriages are broken up from communication. It's not broken up from communication; they're broken up from lack of communication. It's not that people are communicating too much. They're not telling what they need, and I also think for the male dentist, a lot of them are really tired of being around women and I get that and I'm going to have some women killing me now, but women, we can be a little more drama and every woman that's listening to this, oh my goodness, just disclaimer again, but we can be a little more emotional, we can be a little more drama. We also say what we need. We tell people. We expect more. We expect more from promises of people so there's all good and bad. But a dentist other than an OB-GYN is probably one of the few men, male dentists, who is surrounded with females at home and at work, and that's tough too. I think sometimes what they do at home- And I know some of them will say this, they're so tired of dealing with women all day and their problems and their needs, that when they go home, they don't even want to talk to their wife or their daughters because they're done with it. If they worked with guys all day- I worked with guys in construction work and they can't wait to get home to their wife and daughters because it's so refreshing. It's so different because they've been working with the guys and their testosterone, and their argument and they're debate and so I think that hurts marriages sometimes too. Not that they're doing anything with the women at work, they're just "female-d out" sometimes by the end of the day. But, I'm going to put it back on the male dentist now, they create a lot of the drama. They create a lot of the emotion that comes out. It isn't necessarily the women that are doing it. The male dentist allows too much to happen. They don't get in there, they don't solve problems, they don't have crucial conversations. They have no tips, strategies or techniques for how to deal with the woman in the front that's not talking to the woman in the back or one that comes in late, and so what they do is, they go back, close their door and they avoid it. They just avoid it. So everybody is allowed to do whatever they want to, and so the one or two women in the office who are kind of a pain in the neck and bossy and arrogant or hormonal or mad or whatever they are, they can get away with murder now and they begin to run the office and your good people leave. I tell this to my dentist, I said, "Your avoiding isn't making it better. You know who's going to leave? The good ones. The bad one, she will be with you the rest of your life. She will follow you to your grave. She's not going anywhere because you don't want to get rid of her, but the good ones, the ones who are kind and compassionate and get along and engage and have great relationships, they'll be out of there in an instant."
Howard: It's so amazing because the reason there's such an intense continuing education with all these institutes all around the world is because the dentist, he's so miserable in the office, he's so miserable at home, that instead of solving anything, he looks so forward to, "Oh my God, Thursday after work, I'm flying to the institute of how to be the best dentist in the universe and stay in a resort," and it's escapism. And it's like, dude, why are you learning these technical skills at $3,000 a weekend? Why don't you just fix your toxic environment at home? And I've known a lot of these guys for thirty years.
Connie: As a therapist, here's what's so maddening and frustrating about that. They'll go and take class after class after class on how to be a better dentist, but God forbid they walk into a marriage counselor or a family counselor because they have a kid that they don't get along with or a spouse that they can't or partner they can't- That's terrible. And so, (unclear 00:46:15) "I don't do therapy." And I go, "Yeah, you do. You go to five conventions a year. That's therapy. Therapy is just when you're learning about a relationship. So because you're going and learning about how to do a better treatment or how to get along or how to make more money, that's no different than going with your spouse to learn how to treat each other." It's the same thing, but they've separated. That's therapy and this is executive coaching. I kid them and I've started telling dentists, "I'll be your executive coach." I'm really going to be their therapist, but they don't want that. But if I'm their executive coach, that seems okay.
Howard: So then is your other book more the staff dealing with the dentist? You have another book. Says, "How to Be the Person Successful Companies Fight to Keep".
Connie: No, my next (unclear 00:47:06) book is "10 Ways to Stand Out From the Crowd". "StandOut" has been my logo — StandOut Leadership, I do StandOut Sales, I do StandOut Relationships. "StandOut" just stands for how do you blow away the competition? And you brought up something else about the dentist, the one that can sell the deal and the six that can't. The same thing in speaking. There's tons of speakers out there that's, "The economy's not right and I just can't sell and no one will hire me and no one will pay my fee and no one has the money." While meanwhile, there's tons of us getting the money and getting our fee and speaking and it's a few things. One, it's maybe my speech is better than theirs, maybe my attitude is better than theirs, maybe my sales technique on the phone is better than theirs. And not just dentists, but people in sales who don't want to be in sales love to give excuses. The first one is price and the economy. "Prices too high. Economy is horrible. I can't sell it." And then the next one is, "Well, no one really wants to buy this. I can't explain it well." The next is the brand. "No one heard about me." And then there's territory. "Well, look where I live. If I lived in that town, you know they would spend more for dentists. But look where I live." And really all of those are excuses. Any dentist that says that territory's his problem or the economy's his problem, I could find another dentist right in the same area with the same economy and the same city and the same everything who's making a fortune. Because none of us want to say, "Hey, I think it's me. I don't think it's the economy. I don't think my wife or spouse is leaving me because I work too much. I don't think I can't get a good staff to stay with me because the hours are too long." At some point people have to start saying, "I think it's me," and every dentist I've worked with who comes to me because they're not making the money or they don't have the staff, or they have too high a turnover, they hate their job or they can't stay married, the first thing I say is, "You know this is going to all be about you?" And they go, "I know," because they know me. They know if they come to me there no BS. They know that I'm not going to, "Let's talk about your-" They know I'm going to get down and dirty and say, "Here's why you aren't making money. Here's why spouses won't stay with you. Here's why your kids won't talk to you. Here's why you hate your job. So now let's learn it and now let's move on."
Howard: So is that an age thing? Because everyone blames everything on everyone else, and it's truly a gift to realize that the man in the mirror is responsible for everything going wrong. Is that part of the journey or-?
Connie: No, it's part of no journey. There is no journey. It's part of staying in the same little town your whole entire life. The journey doesn't begin until you stop blaming other people. You're at the beginning of the journey. You're on the dock.
Howard: But do you think like twenty-five year olds blame everything on everyone else and by the time they're fifty it's fifty-fifty or is it something that we're… Because you just had six thousand-
Connie: No, I don't see it as much as age of blaming people as the way you grow up. If you grew up in a home where everybody blamed everybody and everybody was mad and everybody was tired and everybody was exhausted. The odds are pretty good that's what you're going to do. If you grew up in a home where people kind of took responsibility and they tried to find solutions and they collaborated as a family and they made decisions together and it was fairly respectful then- That isn't always true. There could always be one kid. Where did this kid come from? They must have been switched in the nursery but a lot of it just is you're growing up again.
Howard: So I want to shift gears from old guys like me down to the babies who just walked out of school. Last week we had six thousand twenty-five-year-old babies just walk out of dental school, and here's Disneyland versus reality. Disneyland is, you're right, birth rates are plummeting. Like in Japan, it's under one child per family point nine because they sit there and say, "God, look at my father. He stressed out in high school to get to the best college and he got a job at Honda. He works twelve hours a day, six days a week and dropped dead, and I don't want to do that."
Connie: People can talk and talk about the millennials. And I usually really am their advocate. We created the millennials. The millennials, it's not that they don't have a work ethic, it's not that they don't want to work, but they don't want to do it the way we did it because we sucked at it and we were miserable and unhappy and divorcing and hating our jobs and ended up retiring with no money. The millennials grew up with parents who wanted more money and who both worked jobs usually and they came home- When I interviewed a group of kids a few years ago, young people, not kids, but young people. I said give me two words to describe your parents. Tired and angry, tired and angry, tired and angry. Five-year-olds answer that way. Tired and angry. So you have these millennials growing up in a home where everybody's tired and everybody's angry and everybody's pissed off and nobody's happy, and yet the parents are saying to the kids, "You need to go to school and get a job and do what we're doing and make money." Well, if we grew up in a home where they were working two jobs, coming home late and were happy and loving and hugging us and caring for each other and we were having a ball, then they would have adopted our same work ethic, but we're trying to shove our work ethic down the throat of somebody who's too smart to swallow it. They saw the results and the results are horribly painful for these kids.
Howard: The two most successful characters on Sesame Street the whole time was Oscar the Grouch and Big Bird, which is played by the same guy, until Elmo came along and became number one. The guy, he said Oscar the grouch was so successful because little kids identify that as dad sitting in the chair and they're barking at the TV and (unclear 00:53:17) and that's like-
Connie: I'm even older than you are. I'll put it out on the air. I'm even older, but my dad worked long hours and he traveled. And I'm not saying that he didn't come home when he was a little tired, but my parents weren't miserable. My dad, I never heard the word "miserable" come out of his (unclear 00:53:37). He'd say, "I'm tired," but we did our vacations in the station wagon and we grilled out and we all played baseball at night. So I grew up in a home where my dad worked and he traveled and he made decent money, but we had fun with the money. When he got a raise, we'd go buy a new car as a family, and I always knew he got a bonus in June and in July we packed up in the station wagon and went three weeks and visited all the state parks. So in our house, him working hard, it didn't defeat our family, it didn't create a horrible family.
Howard: But I want to go back to my original question now. I didn't get it out all the way. So they have this deal where they saw their parents, say they own a deal and it sucked and it was this deal. So they had this fantasy, "Oh, I'm just going to go get a job as an associate. Then I don't want to work like that. I don't have to wear all these hats in marketing and leadership and this and this," and they're miserable. They job-hop. By the time they've been out of school four years, they've had four different jobs.
Connie: Okay wait, I'm going to stop you. You're making an assumption that isn't always true. I know a lot of them that have job-hopped and are not miserable at all. Every single job. My daughter's had tons of jobs. My youngest one, I don't think she would be where she was if she hadn't had those different jobs. Every job she was on, there was something amazing she learned from that one job and then she went to another and learned something. And when I see where she's at now and what she's done, there's no way she could have gone to work for one company and been where she is now with the breadth and width of- And I job-hopped. I couldn't even tell you how many jobs I've had, and where I've worked and what's it done for me? I don't have to niche. Most speakers are in trouble because they can only speak to dentists. They can only speak to customer service. They can only speak- They get tapped out in that one industry. I can speak to anyone anywhere. My target audience is if they have my fee and they're breathing. That's basically all the requirements I have so I can speak to anyone. Why? Because I've done so many things in my life, so I'm not saying some of them are miserable, but don't put- We grew up with "the only reason why you leave a job is you're unhappy", but that's not the only reason why some of them are leaving a job. They're not leaving it because they're unhappy. They're leaving it because they got tapped out. In other words, they learned what they learned and they look around and it's going to take them ten more years to get to this place and they go someplace else and learn something and then they look around and go, "Oh, that will take eight years," and they go here and who knows? They may end up with some of the most unbelievable valuable experience ever.
Howard: Well, the point I was making is that if they go and look at the people that graduated from the same dental school five years ago, ten years ago, they're not going to show me any data where somebody went and got a job and worked for Larry for ten years and is all happy. They jump around, jump around, jump around, till they finally hit rock bottom and open up their own practice. Whereas our generation, when I came out of school thirty years ago, I graduated May 11th, had my own office opened September 21st. Took me a hundred and thirty-three days, but they job-hop for four or five years before they find- It's almost like they know they have to go out and mow the backyard, they know they have to learn how to swim, but they want to walk around the swimming pool for four or five years. So is that a good thing? Bad thing? What would you tell someone? Would you say just suck it up, buttercup and open it up today?
Connie: I would tell them that they're exactly what we created. We rescued our kids. We paid their fines, we paid their speeding tickets, we bought them cars at sixteen, if they were in trouble- I quit teaching really not because of the kids, but because of the parents. They're at the school all the time. I spoke to a major grocery store chain not so long ago with all the general managers, and I said to them, what's your biggest problem with some of your newer employees? And they said their parents. Now this is a grocery- We're not talking school. I said, "What do you mean?" And they said, "Oh yeah, we can have twenty, twenty-five, twenty-eight-year-olds and we'll put the schedule out and then mom will show up and yell at us because that's not fair because so and so, didn't she know (unclear 00:58:06) didn't work Saturday last month and they have a wedding and he's got to go to the wedding and, and they said, "Well, then he'll get fired ," and they'll say, "Well fine, and he can live at home for a while and we'll help them find another job." I keep telling older people, we can't be mad at a group of young people that we raised. They only learned all this from us or they're rebelling against what they saw, which is what we all did. All of us did that, right? So rather than get all worried about him, I just say everybody has to kind of learn on their own journey. And we have tons of fifty-year-old, sixty-year-old dentists who aren't happy, and they did it the way we think. They went, they started their own and they're still miserable, so who knows. We're not going to know the answer to the question you just asked me until these people are fifty, then we'll know whether going to six and seven different jobs before they start their own. When they're fifty and they're happier, then that was right. If they're fifty and they're miserable, then guess what? No way works. Everyone's going to be miserable at fifty regardless of what they do, which would be really sad.
Howard: I can't believe we already did an hour. So if they want you to speak at your next meeting, your website is Connie Podesta. Connie, C-O-N-N-I-E, last name Podesta, P-O-D-E-S-T-A. What are they going to find at conniepodesta.com?
Connie: Well, one thing I want to say though is I have never been this serious in one hour in my whole life. So people listening to me, here's what I want to tell you. I'm thinking about- And you did. You said you were going to take me to a dark place and you took me and put me in a hole for an hour, but you know what I want to say to people talking is, this isn't all of what I'm doing on stage. I really, really am funny and I'm interactive and I don't use PowerPoints and yeah, I get into psychology but not like we've done here. So, I don't want someone listening just to think, "Oh my God, if I bring Connie in, everyone's going to quit or commit suicide, leave their family or leave their job. That's not what I'm after at all, but I do hope on this conversation — I never get to dig this deep that — that at least we've gotten them to think about that. No one has to stay unhappy. That that's the power of therapy, and that's why I'm so frustrated because most people won't go and I'm going to pick on men this time because that's just the way it is. I don't talk genders much because the genders have blurred a lot, which is great, but when it comes to reading, self-help, looking at yourself, going to therapy, men are much, much, much more resistant than women and I think it's a shame in industries like dentistry because therapy isn't just somebody telling you all the things you're doing wrong. Therapy is helping you understand how to find real happiness in this really short, crazy, inside, messed up, screwed up world. And why would no one wants to- I don't get why anyone wouldn't want to take advantage of that.
And what I get so angry at are people that come to me and say, "I'm unhappy." And I said, "Well, let's try." "No, no, I just don't want to do it." So if you're listening to me and you're unhappy, oh my God, then do something. Go see someone, get some help, read something, change your job, don't be a dentist, go on a vacation, save your mon- Spouses of people who are unhappy at work are going to leave at some point. They're going to leave and they're not going to leave because they didn't like the person or that they didn't love the person. They're going to leave because the person was miserable and instead of changing their life and doing something about it, they decided to come home and take it out on every human being that had any possibility of loving them, and that's why. People don't leave people like that because you work too long or you don't make enough money. They leave because if you're miserable, change it. I know wives and spouses that'll say to a spouse, "I'll make less money. We can move houses. Do any- Just be happy." "Nope, nope. Can't do it." And that's what's happening in dentistry. Spouses are leaving, not because you're working too long, and they're not really leaving cause you're miserable. They're leaving because you won't take positive action to get rid of the misery and do something with your life. And what's going to happen is you're going to be miserable alone now. Right now you're miserable with someone in a family, but you're going to be miserable alone. When there really is people you can talk to and people you can help and training you can get, and an understanding you can get, that could change your whole life.
Howard: I can give you the names of a hundred dentists who say Connie was the best speaker that they ever saw. People are raving fans about you and you are a comedian. I'm sorry, this is really the format to be a comedian.
Connie: I know.
Howard: You feed off the crowd.
Connie: I want to say one more thing and if you guys need to hang up after-
Howard: No, no, no. We don't need to hang up.
Connie: Go to the bathroom or whatever.
Howard: We'll stay here for forty days and forty nights.
Connie: But I want all of you listening, the next conference, because this is another little- What do you call it? (unclear 01:03:30) thing I don't like? Go to the next dental conference and add up how many workshops or sessions are about any of what we talked about. Just count how many in a three or four-day have anything to do with personality, dealing with people, selling, marketing, how to have a better marriage, how to create a better business, how to be a happier human being. There are times, honestly, and I'm very thankful for all the dental groups over the past twenty-five years who have hired me, but often I'm the only one. Maybe there's somebody doing a breakout on time management or balancing home and career, but often I'm the only one and what does that say? I want all of you watching, listening today, ask yourself, what does that say? Everything's about clinical and technical. I get it. That's your craft, but at what point are dentists going to demand from their industry that the industry and the conventions and the CEs and the schools start treating what their real problem is? The real problem is depression and the depression is coming because they've not been taught one single thing about how to run a business, deal with people, motivate people, empower people, document people, have a marriage, talk to their kids, communicate, sell and market.
Howard: There's research saying (unclear 001:05:01) says thirty years ago research went down a dark hole because 90% of all the people who had TMJ were all women, so they started, "Well, it has to be estrogen. It has to be all this other that." It took them fifteen, twenty years to figure out it was because only women raised their hand and had help and went to the doctor. The men had-
Connie: They had TMJ too.
Howard: Yeah, they had TMJ; they just didn't tell anybody. And a big part of why men die at seventy-four and women are seventy-nine and six months, one of the biggest reasons of why they live five years longer- I just had an emergency room physician here on the show, and it's amazing, like they pass out and then they come and the guy's like, "Well, Grandpa, how long have you had black water diarrhea?" So it's true. Men don't get help. When we were little-
Connie: Let's end on sex or let's end on laughing or let's end on something but that visualization, because-
Howard: But it's so true. I remember the biggest fight I ever saw my mom and dad get into-
Connie: You're just going to keep going with the black water diarrhea.
Howard: The biggest fight I ever saw my mom and dad get into was, we drove to Disneyland, my dad was so lost in L.A. and all she wanted him to do was stop at a gas station and ask for directions. My dad was incapable of that. He couldn't do that, and finally she- Anyway, so yeah, men just don't ask for help is what you're saying. They-
Connie: And when you say hundreds of dentists have said good things, I think I feel very proud of what I've been able to bring to dentistry. It's very minute. Tons of people listening to me have never heard my name. I'm not in the dental speaker out there list for everyone to see, but the groups who bring me in or dentists who know what I do and they know how deep I dig and they know that I'm going to do something with their teams and their audiences that no other dental speaker is going to do- I'm not a dental professional. You've got tons of people to talk to about them. I'm a wife, person, human being, happiness. I don't even say happiness. Happiness is such a fluff word, but it's the opposite of depression and if I can alleviate that and I can teach them how to be comfortable selling without it being sales and asking for money and helping people through giving them the right treatment and hiring the right people and just having it be a job that- The two questions I always give people at the end is, number one, when you go to work, is this where you want to be? Is this what you want to be doing all day? And most dentists, many of them will say no. So there's question number one down to two, and the second question, when you go home at night, is that where you want to spend your time at home? And my answer is yes. I love going to work. I love going home. Now I wasn't able to answer yes to both of those a lot of my life. I hated my job and loved going home or I love my job and hated going home, but that's what I would leave with for the dentist. If you don't love what you're doing, then do not just- The weaker approach is not therapy. That's what men don't get. The reflection of a weak man is not the guy that goes and gets help or gets therapy and understands and goes on to be a happy, vibrant, sexual, educated, fun, great boss. That's not the weak position. Does that sound weak to you? Any of those? The weak is to stay paralyzed in a block of cement doing a job with people you don't like who drive you crazy, with customers you don't like, doing a job you don't like. and going home to a home that you don't like. There's no weaker position in the world for any human being, male or female than to take and to accept that that's your lot in life and that's what's going to happen to you the rest of your life. Why would anyone, male or female, resign themselves to that when there's a whole life? I've been there and I understand it, but there's a whole life out there that you're happy when you go to work and you're happy when you come home and I'd tell you what, that's an amazing way to live your life.
Howard: Well, thank you so much for coming on my show today, all the way from Dallas, Texas. It was a huge honor and I've probably had a hundred dentists request you to come on the show. They love your lecture and my gosh, get your next meeting fired up, get your staff fired up. You always call the soft stuff- The soft stuff is ten times more important than that tough stuff.
Connie: And the soft stuff is ten times tougher. It's not really soft at all. This was probably tougher than any clinical thing I'll ever have. The toughest thing in the world is to look at yourself and the toughest thing in the world is to do what needs to do for you not to be miserable. It's much easier just to resign yourself.
Howard: Alright, on that note, Connie, thank you so much for talking to my homies.
Connie: Do I get my wine now?