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716: Increasing Confidence Through Personal Alignment – Allison Lacoursiere

Knowing yourself is the best thing you can do in life. It will lead to self-acceptance, self-love, and more confidence — soft skills that are vital to every business owner. To help you discover and increase your self-worth, Kirk Behrendt brings in Allison Lacoursiere, founder of Clear Coaching, to share the four steps to personal alignment and confidence. Value yourself so you can value your practice! If you're ready to become your better self, listen to Episode 716 of The Best Practices Show!

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Episode Resources:

Main Takeaways:

  • Know yourself.
  • Accept every aspect of yourself.
  • Once you know and accept yourself, honor yourself.
  • Start loving the journey you're on. Stop shaming and blaming yourself.
  • Learn how to prevent and deal with burnout. Don't wait to make a change.

Quotes:

“Knowing who you are and valuing who you are is the key to your confidence. It's not the other way around. It's not, we make more money and then we're more confident, or we get the accolades or the next degree or the next specialization, and then we're more confident. It actually starts from honoring yourself, loving yourself, and knowing who you are. That's how we become confident.” (5:03—5:24)

“What really is worthiness? What does self-worth really mean? It means that you honor yourself, you respect yourself, you trust yourself, and you love yourself, without — name it — the money, the accolades, the profession. It's that you, as you are, as a person, as a human being, feel like you are worthy.” (6:21—6:39)

“How do we establish a feeling of self-worth? The first step is to know who you are. Know yourself. That's without the titles, and it's without all of the things that we present. I'm a coach. I'm a dentist. I'm a dental assistant. Whatever that title is that you have, let's go deeper than that. Who are you, really? It's really seeing the person that you truly are. And sometimes, when we look and we go deeper, we might not like some of the things that we've done in the past, or who we are, or some of our tendencies. Sometimes, we want to change it. But the second step on that path to worthiness is to accept every single part of you and to know that you are worthy, lovable, and accepted exactly as you are today, even if you have bigger goals or dreams.” (7:08—7:58)

“Number one, know yourself. Get to know yourself. And with that know yourself piece, our world is so busy, and I know there are a lot of high performers and high achievers that listen to this podcast. But slow down enough to hear yourself. So, meditating, talking to a coach, talking to a therapist, sharing some of the parts of you that maybe feel excruciatingly vulnerable — really know yourself. And then, once you get to know yourself, accept every single part of you. And that part can be tough. We’re not perfect.” (7:59—8:33)

“The part about accepting yourself too is that you can remove the shame. We attach shame to things like mistakes that we've made, or where we're from, or the place that we grew up. We can attach shame to anything, but shame is not a valuable emotion. It actually keeps us stuck. It keeps us hidden. And so, when you can face these things and accept them, that's when you get to release the shame and you get to feel immediately more confident in yourself. So, it's so powerful.” (9:09—9:39)

“Honor yourself. So, you know who you are. You know what you want. You know where you're going. You've accepted every single part of yourself. Now, it's time to live that out. So, what this looks like is asking for what you need, being honest with people in your life about who you really are. It's saying no, it's saying yes, it's removing yourself from situations that no longer work for you. It's prioritizing yourself as a business owner, as a leader, making sure that you're telling your team what you need. And the honor yourself piece is the one that if we do this well, we actually can avoid burnout. We can reduce the feelings of it. But also, we reduce the amount of energy that we spend on showing up as a person that we're not.” (9:52—10:40)

“This path to worthiness isn't just a one and done, like, ‘Okay, now I'm worthy.’ It's a lifelong journey. Because like you said, when you know yourself, three years later, you're actually changing and growing and evolving. And so, it's keeping these strategies and these tactics in mind in the whole journey, and perspective, and then not making yourself wrong for the times you do say yes, and you shouldn't. I talk to so many doctors that beat themselves up for things that they should have done differently. They should have known better. And guess what? It's okay. Sometimes we're beginners, and sometimes we didn't make the right choice. But we have to stop making ourselves wrong for that.” (11:21—12:01)

“With that honor yourself, it's being able to really hold space for the person that you really are. And some of the reasons why we don't is we don't actually accept ourselves and we want to people-please. We don't feel like we're lovable just as we are, so we try to achieve and fill that empty feeling with performance. And I've been there. Oh my gosh, I am the best performer ever because I wanted to feel worthy. I didn't know that that wasn't from external sources. It was all from inside of me.” (12:03—12:35)

“If you are making the same mistake again and again, my absolute recommendation is to get really curious about like, ‘What is this?’ It's really taking a look at yourself, being honest with yourself, and asking like, ‘What is this? What do I need to do to shift this?’ Because typically, if we're making the same mistake again and again that's hurting us, it's because we haven't accepted ourselves enough or we're not honoring who we are and what we need. So, again, don't make yourself wrong for it but learn from it, because all our mistakes really are is just information to help us be better.” (12:57—13:32)

“Love your journey. So, we are all striving. We're all growing. We're all expanding. As human beings, we're designed to expand and evolve. That's what we're here for. But when you are going to wait until you're perfect, or wait until the business hits $3 million next year, or you wait until you're out of dental school, or own your own practice — whatever you're waiting for, stop, and start to fall in love with your process because our life is happening right now. When we live in the future or the past, that's when we have anxiety. That's when we have more stress.” (13:40—14:20)

“When the fourth step comes — you know yourself, you've accepted yourself, you're honoring yourself, and then you're falling in love with the journey — that's when you get to show up in bigger, bolder, more confident ways. That's where you're yourself, and you're coming forward, and the energy it takes to be you lowers, and your joy increases. And, ultimately, your success increases too.” (14:40—15:02)

“When we look at the consequences of not honoring ourselves, or not feeling worthy of acceptance and love in our everyday life, that's when we open up something that I call the pain gap. So, what the pain gap is is the person that you truly are, everything that you need, truly, your aligned self, and then the person you're showing up as. And so, when that gap widens, that's what gets filled with anxiety, low self-esteem, low confidence, stress, burnout. Again, when that gap is this wide, that is the consequence of not being aligned to the truest self that you are. That's where all of the negative things that come into our world happen. And it's not to say that negative things aren't going to happen in your life. But when we can actually align ourselves to these four pillars that we just went through and show up that way, we don't have to face the consequences of getting sick from high stress, from picking the wrong partner because we are trying to feel good enough in our relationships. We can have the hard conversation with our office manager when they're not showing up the way that we want because we feel worthy enough to have people show up for us. So, when we can close that pain gap, the consequences of the stress in our lives tend to reduce.” (15:47—17:10)

“As a dentist, you have an enormous amount of pressure on your shoulders. You're working in small spaces all the time. You're managing a team. You're running a business. And so, all of that can add up to be extremely stressful. And I think sometimes, a lot of doctors and a lot of high performers — really, this is the high-performance bucket of people — they think that, ‘What got me here will get me to that next level of success,’ which is achieve more, do more, say yes to more, perform better. But that causes us, again, to go on this hamster wheel that results in depression, burnout, lack of joy in our own lives, wondering like, ‘How am I feeling so bad when I worked so hard to get where I am today?’ And really, what we're faced with is just misalignment. We're misaligned. We're chasing the wrong thing. When we can slow down and recognize, again, go back through that pathway and be able to really get aligned to where we want to go, that's when things start to change.” (18:55—19:54)

“One of the key factors that will bring you into burnout is, one, that pain gap is who you really are and what you really need, you're not expressing it. You're not asking for it. You're not being it. And so, it's this exhausting state to live in where you're always putting a mask on, and you're always overperforming, and you're always trying hard to kind of be in your life and be in your day and uphold the identity that you're trying to create. And so, that exhaustion and that consistent overworking, overperforming, will ultimately lead to burnout.” (22:29—23:06)

“With burnout, I think we've all been there. But when we're there, we do not want to talk about it. We do not want to admit it. Sometimes, we don't even want to ask for help because we feel embarrassed. We feel ashamed. ‘I shouldn't be tired. I shouldn't be exhausted,’ and putting all of that blame on yourself really perpetuates it. And so, I would say if you're feeling, in your life right now, a lack of inspiration, a lack of motivation, if you're like, ‘I'm just not myself,’ that's one of the first signs to really ask yourself, ‘How am I feeling? What is in that pain gap? Who I am and what I need, what am I not asking for in my life?’ That will give you some clues and some guidance.” (23:08—23:51)

“The second thing is not waiting until you are completely, catastrophically burnt out to make a change. And I admittedly am the type of person that likes to toe the line. Sometimes, I'm like, ‘I can do it. I can make it happen.’ But that achievement view or that achievement model doesn't work when we're feeling burnt out, and it doesn't last.” (23:52—24:17)

“The conversation is changing in our world where we're not pretending that everything is perfect and showing our highlight reel on social media. When someone asks you how you're doing, you just say, ‘Busy, but good,’ that's the old model. But I think people are getting really tired of it, and I think what people really need right now is for somebody to say like, ‘How are you, really?’ Or, ‘I've been through that too,’ or, ‘I'm struggling right now, and I don't know what to do,’ and for people that are in leadership positions or seem to have their life together on social media can be honest about life's reality and the struggles. I think that's where connection actually starts to come back. I think that's where people actually can get the support that they need and feel safe to be who they are because we're not comparing ourselves to something that isn't real.” (24:52—25:44)

“AI, I believe, is going to be a powerful tool for our future. I really believe it's going to create incredible things in the world. I think it's going to have our human beings, our humanity, be valued even more. And so, when I think about AI — definitely don't be scared of it. Use it as a tool. There's only one thing scarier than AI, is not knowing it, or not understanding it. You must. You just have to know what this tool is going to do. However many years ago when the internet came out, people were like, ‘I'm scared of it. I'm not going to use it.’ Don't do that with AI.” (28:08—28:47)

“Have the courage to be yourself, to show up as you are, and to honor yourself because that really is where your greatest zone of genius is going to come from.” (30:46—30:58)

Snippets:

0:00 Introduction.

2:04 Allison’s background.

3:55 Why this is an important topic.

6:02 Know yourself and accept yourself.

9:40 Honor yourself.

12:36 How to not repeat mistakes.

13:34 Love your journey.

15:37 The consequences of not honoring yourself.

17:10 Why this concept is difficult for dentists.

21:22 Dealing with burnout.

24:31 Real versus reel.

27:14 Don't be afraid of AI.

30:30 Final thoughts.

31:57 More about Clear Coaching and how to get in touch.

Allison Lacoursiere, RDA, OA, CPC, ELI-MP Bio:

Innovator Allison Lacoursiere, RDA, OA, CPC, ELI-MP, is the creator of the Clear Aligner Systemization methodology. Allison helps dentists and teams streamline efficiencies to increase both patient and practice satisfaction and health.

A native Canadian, Allison moved to Bermuda at the age of 19 to work as a dental assistant and to seek adventure and try something new. She incorporated a system in that practice which generated $80K a month in clear aligner production.

With over a decade of dental practice experience, Allison is a sought-after mentor and speaker. She helps dental teams improve culture, increase production, and grow into their full potential. She is certified through International Professional Excellence in Coaching and is a member of the International Coaches Federation. Allison is a member of Toastmasters International and has trained with Dale Carnegie Speaking Institution. She is a Certified Transformational Trainer through LionSpeak.

Allison is passionate about fitness and wellness. She is an active team member and competitor on the Bermuda National Beach Volleyball Team. Allison is also a certified personal trainer and yoga instructor. Her passion lies in empowering individuals to achieve their ultimate potential and life satisfaction. 
ACT Dental Team

ACT Dental Team

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