Why are professionals burning out while they give the best of themselves to help others? Addressing this question is a key driver for my guest today, Mia Sindolic. After a career as a paediatric dentist, and later after moving continents and having to resume her career as a dental hygienist, her use of self compassion in entrepreneurship is an approach stemming from her specialism of intuitive communication.
My guest today on the Rising Resilient series for the Leveraged Business Podcast is Mia Sindolic (pronounced Shindelitch). When I first met her a year ago for business coaching, she was a woman filled with passion and determination for the vision of her business and the people she wanted to help. Now the founder of a cutting-edge program for dental hygienists, her journey is one of innovation, commitment, self compassion, gratitude, and adaptability.
The quote on Mia’s website bluelighthorizon.org sums this up beautifully. She says: I often wonder if the bridge was always there, or if I was building it as I walked.
Come tune in to our conversation with a remarkable woman I’m also blessed to call not only my client, but my friend. You won’t just get nuggets of wisdom. You’ll be blown away inspired!
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INTRO:
When I first met Mia a year ago for business coaching, she was a woman filled with passion and determination for the vision of her business and the people she wanted to help. Now the founder of a cutting-edge program for dental hygienists, her journey is one of innovation, commitment, and adaptability.
Mia has mastered the art of self compassion in entrepreneurship through intuition communication with her clients and staying ahead in the fast-paced digital world, continuously evolving her strategies to meet changing practitioner demands. As the founder of Blue Light Horizon, her business serves dental health professionals, contributing to education, health care, and wellbeing of patients, dental teams, and the community.
Mia seeks to break the curse of isolation that health professionals face. She’s now created an online coaching course exclusively for dental hygienists. She helps them with communication that takes them from chaos to calm. Based on an intuitive and science backed strategy that empowers patient relationships and makes people calmer, more energetic and more resilient than ever.
Although Mia’s programs are specifically designed and developed for dental hygienists, there is lots to learn for any seasoned professional or business owner who’s feeling a little overwhelmed, jaded or just weary of the day to day.
INTERVIEW:
JAY:
The title is rising resilient. And the subtitle was important because these were some of the words that came out of conversations I’ve had with my clients – and with myself – tackling challenges and changes in your life and business with confidence, compassion and courage.
So all the C’s. And it’s a lot to do with how do you cultivate the strength to survive and thrive in all that we do in work and in life. And it’s a question that, as I said, comes up in the coaching that I do with a lot of entrepreneurs. So I’ve chosen a bunch of amazing women who I think are doing this for themselves as well as helping their clients with it.
And today I have Mia Sindolic [pronounced Shindelitch]. Welcome to the Leverage Business Podcast, Mia. It’s really great to have you here.
MIA:
Oh, it’s my pleasure Jay. I was really honoured when I received the invitation, so I’m happy to be here as well.
JAY:
Awesome. So I’m really excited for our conversation, but what part of the theme, as I just described it, is speaks to you the most, and why?
MIA:
Well, I have to say compassion is number one. Compassion to yourself, and compassion to the outer world, to everyone else. Because I find that there is a weed that comes in always to spoil things here, and that’s resentment. We have some tendency to be resentful, either about our own errors or other people’s errors.
And to me, that’s a great energy sucker. It’s just, you know, wasting time. So, compassion is really important. And on that note, I would say courage and confidence, they are like plants. So, we need to, to deadhead them, to prune, to water, and to really take care of those disciplines. They depend on circumstances.
And being in service, if you want, giving away, sharing life with other people in genuine sense of sharing knowledge, again, compassion. It’s probably the best way to go through life consistently well. So that speaks to me the most, you know, and that sense of adventure that you culture of adventure that you mentioned.
I believe we’re all coming to this world with that sense, but it’s somehow suppressed by different systems of teaching, of learning, circumstances in life, changing situations. And that’s why we have, when we come to our, let’s say, 40s, 50s, 60s, we say, Oh, I know I can do this. Yes, of course, you know it all the time, but now, you know, you got that chest from the attic of your mind and it’s working again.
So, those are my thoughts when you say about compassion, about courage and confidence. It’s not something that we find or reset. We need to take care of those.
JAY:
They’re inside us, is what I’m hearing. And I love your point about culture and adventure because I think sometimes when life feels like a struggle, that sense of adventure, that sense of curiosity that, you know, we borrow from our childhood kind of gets beaten out of us a little bit. So, I love those thoughts in there and, and just some like maybe even daily reminder of those things and your words, I think would be super helpful.
So Mia, for context tell us a little bit about the work that you do, who you help, how you help them, and then we’ll get into some of the detail in relation to that later.
MIA:
Well, in the past decade, I’m dedicated to working in dental hygiene field. And to me it’s purely preventive field. So we do prevention on many levels, not only for the state of the oral health, but also for the wellbeing of our patients. But there is another aspect is the wellbeing of dental hygienists as the technical level in every dental office or dental clinic. They’re sometimes really burdened by the technical parts and they forget about themselves or their impact they can make in the life of their patients. And that’s conveyed through efficient communication. And I like to call it intuitive communication.
When you stack up your knowledge and your experience and you recognize the patterns and you do approach your patient in a very, very unique way. So I’m helping dental hygienists do that, find their satisfaction again in work, have that impact. And simply by being that useful and that effective in their work, they can also rise in confidence and satisfaction in their own lives.
JAY:
Mia, we’ll dive into your own experiences in more detail in a moment. But first, with your clients that you support, you’ve started to tell us a little bit about how to help them survive and thrive in the industry. Tell me a little bit about how anxiety, stress, and overwhelm shows up for them.
MIA:
Well, it shows in many ways. There is a little bit of a clash. They have a lot of education. It’s at least two- or three-year program that they go through. And it’s very, very exhausting. It’s very detailed in teaching the technical part and somewhat the relationships with patients, and with the other members of the dental team.
They have this clash between the really important education and demand to have continuing education courses throughout the year, every year. And on the other side, they do feel not really respected. As much as they can bring, they don’t feel that important.
So, fatigue instils very, very quickly. Tiredness. Because the appointments become very technical, very timed, very charged and loaded with many tasks. And It’s, it’s physically absolutely exhausting.
Then comes anxiety. It comes first in the form of externalizing the problem. It’s the patients who are this and that. It’s the dentist who is this and that. And they don’t see their own position and role, how to change and how to improve that situation. Depression is something that I see very often.
They’re very lively with their patients, but as soon as the appointment is done, there is no communication with anyone else in the clinic. And of course, there are repercussions on everyday life. There’s tension in, you know, in a family and if there are small young kids and a lot to take care of, it just, they don’t find satisfaction in how much they do compared to how much they’re paid for that.
And the thing is about priorities and the way how to, to do that. So, they usually say, I have no time for your courses. I have no time for your coaching, until they’ve realised that’s exactly the time [that] they need in order to have time for everything else.
JAY:
Otherwise, nothing changes.
MIA:
Nothing changes. It gets only worse. And it ends fairly quickly for a good portion of the population of dental hygienists. After 10 years, they start thinking about pivoting career, changing something, taking more education or going into completely different field, which again ends up in something they did not really want.
JAY:
I’d like to step sideways on this to the extent that our listeners, obviously entrepreneurs, not dental hygienists, but at the same time, as an entrepreneur, you have a lot going on, you know, just as exactly the way you’ve described it, but a different context in the sense that you’re, when you start, particularly you’re wearing every single hat in the business.
MIA:
So you’ve got the technical bit, you’ve got the mindset bit, you’ve got the people in your team. So you’ve got all of it going on as well. So, you know, as entrepreneurs, I think you’re equally juggling your own education and learning with the need to actually do the job and actually work with clients and deliver to clients, etc.
JAY:
So I see a really big parallel there. Thinking about your own clients and yourself and say we’ll come back to that, how would you advise or guide or know when does someone tolerate that kind of stress, anxiety, overwhelm? Because it can stay under the surface and when does it become more chronic?
What were the things that we should look out for all for ourselves as well as in our clients?
MIA:
Well, that’s a real lifetime question, you know, how you deal with stress. And obviously it’s getting more and more entangled these days, you know, there are so many things going on and tools we’re using and the way how everything changes, to me, it looks like it’s accelerating without any intention to slow down.
So, I’ve probably mentioned that before, but let me say here, a tolerance to me is a term that means sufferance. It means you’re just tolerating something expecting magically that it will disappear. I tend not to tolerate things. I tend to understand what’s going on to get to the cause as soon as possible, sometimes in a matter of hours, no matter how low or how down I feel, just to see why did it happen and where did I miss the sign or I’ve done too much or I’ve taken the wrong direction.
So it’s really about me in the position hub because it’s me who is going to change that position. So I’m not opting for tolerance. I’m opting for looking for causes for why did it happen and how did it happen? What shall I do next?
Sometimes it means just abandoning the entire project or thought or everything, or just let it go. Be compassionate. Forgive yourself. Just go on. Stress is something we’ll live with, and I believe that those nine months in the womb were exquisitely nice and protected life we had.
And I believe that from day one, from that first breath, we instil in our hearts an anger why that paradise life ended. And everything we do in life, we do go with that anger, but we, most of us, we’re trying in civilized world, we’re trying to build a code, which is nice, which is learning, which is thriving, you know, and stress is encountered there because that anger is coming out like a little volcano here and there.
And there are stages, but life to me, life means dynamism. It means I have to be active, present, and vigilant, if you want, and I’m not shy from emotions. I do live through my tears. I do, you know, I’m disappointed, but that has to have expiration moment. And that’s what I’m also suggesting to others.
I’m really coaching my clients. what it really is for them that kind of stress, not to repeat it, not to relive it, not to amplify it in their minds, but rather to deal with it, to see how realistic it is, and go on.
JAY:
So, what you’re saying is as a coach, you’re holding up a mirror and trying to get into what it really is rather than what we’re feeling,
MIA:
Yes, yes. I think it’s important to give them the tool. That’s what I’m trying to do, to give the tool to my clients so they can decompose the problem every time, just to see what the elements are and what was their input in all that. So sometimes realising that you could have avoided something, but by your own engagement, it helps for the next time, hopefully.
JAY:
Yeah, I love that. And, obviously, next thing is to tell me all about these tools, but I know that you’ve got a stack of them, and this is part of what you work with and help people with on your program.
—-
JAY:
Let’s go into a little bit your own life experience and resilience, you know how you help others is because you’ve learned these techniques for yourself. You’ve done a lot of research into all of this as well. So, you know, how do you, how do you keep yourself separate from what you’re doing with your clients? But I think more importantly, how has your own life experience brought you to do this kind of work?
MIA:
I should say I was a kid who was brought up in adult surroundings. My parents were at a fairly mature age when they had me and my sister, so all their peers already had grandkids when we were young kids, and we grew up in the company of adult people. So, we were talked to from day one, like mature persons.
And probably that intention to understand what adult people are saying around me remained always. So, I was always listening more carefully what they’re saying or trying to understand what they’re saying. And then learning little by little, I’ve developed that kind of intuition. Oh, I know now what they’re going to say. I know what that means.
And that helped me a lot in my work because my career began as a paediatric dentist. I’m a dentist for children and I was teaching that course for 18, almost 19 years at a university level. And especially kids who are preschool from two years old to let’s say six, seven, maybe into first classes, first years of school, they taught me how they speak without speaking, how they show without telling the words. And then I’ve realised that intuition is my main strength in working with people. Because working with people, no matter what you do, and especially if you do something that involves possibly pain, discomfort, just demands that you must be intuitive.
You must be there present a hundred percent. And that’s something I’ve learned from kids. If you’re not present a hundred percent, they’re going to manipulate you out of that appointment. You’re going to just get out crazy or it’s going to be really, really disappointing. But if you’re there for them, a hundred percent, they’re going to reward you with the most of pleasant feelings and gratitude and everything.
And I’ve developed that and applied even with adult patients. And the result is fantastic. Working with my patients is rewarding to the point that I really wanted to help other professionals feel the same and do the same.
My life experience is not really an average life experience. It involved everything – thrive, growth, unbelievable growth professional, personal, beautiful, beautiful start languages spoken, much education, and a lot of socialising. And then everything crashed with the war. The war passed, and we continued on different level of lives, which is practically really nice and organised, but it has different kind of challenges being an immigrant and integrating into another society in full measure, not only as a tourist, you know?
So there is where I found actually the strength of learning and more learning. And that’s how I understood those stages of Thriving. And at the same time, there are, there are some aspects of life which are going down and that’s okay. But my life experience is helping me just giving that notion to my clients that everything will pass. Everything is temporary. Everything is transient. And there is a lot you can do to change the course, at least to change the way how you see things. So that helps a lot.
JAY:
And, presumably you apply that to your business as an entrepreneur. That intuition. I mean, obviously we work together in a coaching capacity. So I see it from the other side, and you’re on the other side, but you know as a business owner, how have you used this kind of attitude and skills and approach on your business on yourself?
MIA:
Well, first I was absolutely certain that there is a lot I have to learn. So it was non-negotiable to sit down and do the homework, just to go plain into education, to learn different field of everything. And then the second thing which I understood, and it’s important, equally important and has relation with intuition, in order to be successful in my business, I really have to stay true to myself. Any kind of imitation can help me very short term. But if I’m not doing it generally of how I feel it’s supposed to be done and delivered, it will not have that, if you want, authentical part, which is attractive to my clients.
And even finding myself in unknown waters, it doesn’t feel that uncomfortable. You know, sailing, just let go of all judgments and assumptions and what other people say. Just pick the facts that suit to your business. And, you know, I was disappointed I’m going so, so slow. I’m, I’m so slow in my entrepreneurship, but no, this is the pace it’s efficient right now for me. It might go quicker one day, but it’s helping me a lot because I’m really stacking bricks one by one and it’s getting to have its form.
So, I’m calming myself regularly every day.
JAY:
Oh, it’s interesting because going back to coaching mode in a sense, actually your first 90-day ‘sprint’, you were working, I think at the time, six days a week in clinic. So, you were going slowly, but actually faster than people that were doing this full time. I think I played that back to you a few, a few times. Yeah, you, you hit not, not you personally, but generally when we’re building a business and we’re doing something new, you hit periods where you’re a little bit stuck, you need to kind of spend some time with it. And then off you go again. And, that resilience is one of the things that I really noticed about you is that ability to push through. And I don’t mean push in a forceful way, I mean, just that kind of sit with it, deal with it, stay calm, work through it and pick yourself up and kind of get on with it.
Even if you’ve taken some space that you’ll keep going. And so I really love what you said about that calmness, because one of our last questions is about your positive superpower for rising resilient and I think that calm in the moment and taking the space is definitely, definitely one of yours when you come back to that if you disagree with me.
You talked about tools, and I know you’ve got lots of them. So tell me a little bit about the use of those kind of tools and techniques, and how long it really takes to change people’s habits the go to ways that we get stressed and overwhelmed and move towards a more resilient type of habit. How long would you say it takes for those sort of things to start sticking if you work at them and practice them?
MIA:
Well first, what I find important when I start working with clients is to make sure with them that they are ready to learn. Because it’s difficult. Trust me. It’s a very rich profession. And many of us have or had the non-disputable impression that we know all, we’ve seen all, and there’s nothing unclear about working with people. What I find is just eliminating that “self”element. Because it’s never about us. It’s never personal. Every interaction is actually about the patient.
So as soon as I’m positioning myself, putting myself on a distance, on a critical distance, I somehow built my ‘Teflon’ coat. Against anything that’s coming from my patient, because I have to bear in mind, and that’s tool number one, we don’t know our clients and the fact that they’re behaving or talking or demanding today something, it doesn’t mean it’s a constant. It means it’s something beyond our control.
As soon as I’m coming into the field of beyond of my control, I’m not worrying about that. I can control only my own feelings. I can control only my own behaviour. So that’s the tool I’m serving them. Bring yourself to the distance, put yourself on the baseline, and just observe and listen.
And I had beautiful, beautiful feedback from one of my long-time friends who is super experienced and very good in work. Excellent. And after only the first module where I was suggesting some models of anxiety in our environment, she called me, she couldn’t contain. She said, wow, seven years I’ve been fighting with this patient who is so rude and so insulting and so offensive and never saying thank you.
And you explained tonight to me in two sentences, what is it all about. I feel so relieved, like so much load is gone off my shoulders. And I was really happy to hear that because it is like that. It’s not about you – in a good sense- it’s really about people who are there in inferior situations.
So those are the tools. Make a distance, be the expert, learn what’s going on. Be curious, be in a learning mode and not in a judging mode because judging mode, it’s huge energy and the worst of it is it takes energy from yourself. And that’s something what I listen well and observe because people will tell you more than you’re asking for.
JAY:
Yeah. Brilliant. With a few prompts of ‘can you tell me more about that’ or ‘explain that a little bit more’? Yeah.
MIA:
Yes, and you look for the words that repeat often or the impressions or the memories that come back. So, if you hear it in one take more than twice, three times, you know, that’s the point where you should follow with your intuition to see why is that happening, or how can you modify, how can you “uncondition”, we say, how can you remove the conditions that bring that stress and anxiety in that place, in that particular place.
JAY:
Yeah, one framing I always found very very useful was when you tell a situation, and you realise that’s the story you’re telling yourself so create a different story, and you’ve given us I think some ways to do that in terms of it’s not about you, it’s what’s going on with others. And being curious and empathetic as well. You never know what’s going on in someone else’s life when they react a particular way. But we take that on ourselves. And so, tell us a different story around the relationship of the emotion that’s being shared in those moments.
MIA:
Yes, absolutely. And I know I’ve been thinking a lot where that attitude is coming from. It’s really something super ancient from the times where ordinary people were becoming educated and becoming physicians. And later on, dentists just took over that flag, you know. Not everyone’s Leonardo da Vinci or Isaac Newton or Einstein, you know, those people independently were thinking and inventing.
The majority of us are ordinary in a very healthy way. We’re average and we have access to knowledge. So back in a time, there were eponymous authorities – people giving their name to something. I say so, and it’s so because I say so. And somehow it keeps living till nowadays.
And that’s something I’m trying to change. It’s not that way. It’s about educating, giving good information trying to find based on intuition what your client, including my clients in coaching, what they’re wanting to learn, what they are able to learn and where you have that let go.
Just one thought, maybe it could be useful is that as we grow older, we do become really acutely aware of time. And maybe that’s why letting go fear or resentment and all those annoying feelings and states is the primary thing we do, or we try. We try to do. And that’s also asking you to rise above the culture you’re living in. Sometimes the culture is, you know, having its own influence, but you are definitely on your own. So that’s, in the same time, it’s very beautiful. And it is the fact.
JAY:
That’s very true. And I’ve noticed that personally myself as well is I think I was very much more highly strung when I was younger than I am now. And now, yeah, it’s much easier to go, well, it’s not really that important. It doesn’t really impact me and yeah, if someone says something annoying, I let it go a lot quicker. Because I think otherwise that stuff gets inside you and it stays there, and it kind of just creates that resentment you talked about right at the beginning.
And so, the compassion for ourselves, but also what I’m hearing from this is compassion for the person who said the annoying thing that’s kind of got to you but you’re going to let it go because like well you don’t know what’s going on with them right now. I do a lot more of that I think personally that has also helped, but yeah, I would say start earlier, start doing that earlier.
MIA:
You can start only when you can start. I mean, that’s a thought. If I could change things now, if I could go back and change things, I’ll probably not change anything. Because I’ve grown this way because of all the steps I’ve been through. That’s true. It’s good. I’m grateful.
JAY:
You know, that classic question of like, if you could go back in time and, you know, give advice to your younger self, what would it be? So I was thinking more in that sense of, you know, don’t hold things in so much, don’t take them so personally, just let things go. So I was leading to that, but yeah, I agree. I agree.
Do you want to add to your positive superpower for resilience?
JAY:
My superpower, ha! Well, I’d say that after this first half of my life, I have some plans of going into the next century. But after this first half based on actually a very good life experience. And professional experience. I would say letting go of fear. Fear is instinct to me more than a feeling. And there were some very practical moments when I was letting go of fear, some more dramatical in life and some less dramatical.
For example, when I was flying over the ocean, I believe some 20 times now with my kids and when we’ll go into turbulence, you know, and everyone is, yeah, what’s going to happen to this plane? And I was always thinking, what will help me now? I’m with two of my lives, you know, under my arms. So it will help if I, don’t fear if I don’t feel panic and I know exactly where’s the front exit, the back exit, and they’re with me and I’m calm and there are chances I’m going to survive much better if I’m calm than if I’m not.
So that transcended somehow to all the aspects of my life.
JAY:
Wow. No fear.
MIA:
No fear because learn, be curious, live. Even if it stops now, it was great.
Yeah, it goes back to those, to those tools that you said before, ways to, to avoid having fear take over. And resilience comes out of there because otherwise that just kind of eats away at you and that’s where you go towards health problems and burnout, etc.
JAY:
So, rising above that fear allows you to stay and rise resilient. I love that very much.
There’s probably a ton of other stuff that we could talk about. And we’ve meandered around a bit. But this is brilliant. It was really lovely to hear your perspective from your own experience and also how you help clients. Because I know you’re running such an amazing program on intuitive communication and really changing the lives of people who are not feeling that resilient at the moment. They’re feeling very overwhelmed. And then they come out of your programs smiling with joy and full of things that they can apply to their day to day.
I’m in awe of that. It’s an honour to work with you as your coach and thank you for being here. And it’s nice for you to be able to share some of your wisdom outside of dental hygienists because we can all benefit from your learning. Thank you.
MIA:
Oh, it’s been wonderful. It’s been wonderful.
JAY:
Thank you so much. Mia. It’s always great to talk with you and I really respect and admire what you’ve achieved so far. I can’t wait to see what the next year brings us. Thank you.
MIA:
Again, I’m so happy. This is I should say my first serious and intentional and dreamed of being a guest in a podcast. I’m so honoured and thank you. Thank you so much.
