Dive into the Epic Life of Eric Recker, the Dentist with a Daring Spirit! Join him on a rollercoaster of achievements as an elite success coach, fearless pilot, captivating speaker, and a mountain-climbing, triathlon-conquering force of nature. But beyond the mountain peaks, he unveils a profound truth: that the real triumphs are found closer to home. As a dedicated husband and father, Eric has discovered that the summit of true success isn’t at the peak of a mountain, but in the everyday moments that make life extraordinary. Running a thriving dental practice, he’s on a mission to help you #WINtheNOW.
In this episode, Eric shares gripping stories and empowering strategies to ignite hope, create a roadmap for success, and inspire belief that the best days lie just ahead. Get ready for a riveting exploration of life, passion, and the incredible journey to authentic fulfillment!
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In this episode, our guest is an absolute rockstar. Eric Recker, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me, Nick. I’m excited to be here.
I am excited to share your story. Let’s dive right in. What would you say is your job title?
A few years ago, it was pretty simple. My job title was dentist and that was something that was pretty much my identity. Through burnout, seasons of real struggles, nearly selling my practice, and walking away, I found out that I needed to reinvent myself. Through that, I decided that the lessons that I had learned on my journey were lessons that I wanted to share with other people.
At this point in my career, I have a partner in my dental practice. I sold half of my dental practice instead of selling all of it, which ended up being an amazing idea. I’m working with a partner and that works great. I see patients on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. The other days, I work on keynote speaking, leadership facilitation, and coaching on mindset, burnout, and trying to help people figure out their purpose and the path forward in life. I don’t have one title so you could say dentist, author, speaker, and coach. Let’s go with that.
How does a dentist focus on burnout and mindset?
One thing that happens with a lot of business owners, not just dentists, is that when we go to school, we are trained to do the thing that we want to do. I was trained to be a dentist and became a reluctant business owner. That wasn’t what I got into it for. I wanted to be a dentist. If you own your practice, all of a sudden, you are not just a dentist, you are the Head of HR, Head of Marketing, Chief Financial Officer, CEO, and all of those different hats that you have to wear.
It can be pretty tough to wear all those hats when you have a team of twenty that is working along with you. That led to burnout for me, trying to be too many things to too many people, trying to do it all. That was part of the journey for me. I didn’t even know that it was burnout at the time, to be quite honest. Understanding, studying, and learning more, I know that’s how I got to burnout. My hope is to help people on their journey so they don’t have to go as far down the road as I did.
Burnout for you was what year, to clarify?
I’ve gone through three significant rounds of burnout. The first one was in a 2000 timeframe and the other one was in 2015 and ‘16. The final round, the one that about took me out, was ramping up as COVID started and that extended into 2021.
‘08, ‘09, and 2020.
There were a few things going on in the world during that time.
Was ‘15 related?
‘15 was that I didn’t learn the lessons I needed to do in 2008 or 2009. I ended up having another associate. My father was another associate dentist in my practice. My father was getting close to retirement. He was another dentist in my practice. I was trying to find my way forward as personnel changed and our office was growing quickly. It was a combination of all of those things.
What about some of the other hats that you’ve worn? When did you get started in those?
In 2020, before COVID hit, my family and I had scheduled an amazing trip. For spring break, we were going to go to Spain. We were going to stay right on the shore of the Mediterranean. We were going to do some day trips to Morocco. We had this amazing once-in-a-lifetime trip planned. I knew that this trip needed to be a big deal because my oldest son was going to be graduating from high school. Some big changes were going to be happening at our house. I had put this trip on a pedestal.
Two days before we were to take off, the world started to shut down. It’s a good thing we didn’t travel to Spain because I don’t know if you remember but Spain was not a good place to be in the early part of COVID. I’m glad we didn’t take the trip but we were stuck with what’s next. The next week, my office was closed down, as many things were for eight weeks.
I found something new that I hadn’t had in a long time and that was discretionary time. I wasn’t sure what to do with that time. I was burned out. In dentistry, we were getting webinars thrown at us like crazy. How do you handle the PPP loans? How do you handle the new infection control stuff? How do you handle new policies and procedures that we’re going to have to do in our office? All of these things, I called it Death by Webinar. A lot of us experienced that.
I knew that I needed something more than having that time while my office was closed. I committed to 30 minutes of quiet each day. That was the first thing that I did in the morning. I would get up, get ready for the day, sit in quiet for 30 minutes, be alone with my thoughts, and try to figure out what I wanted to do with my life going forward.
I knew that I had a journey that was significant and that was probably something that a lot of other people were on. I started to try to figure out ways that I could use that journey to help other people along. Coaching and speaking became the logical next step with that. It started ramping up as I started doing some writing. That’s when I was able to start the process of publishing my first book in 2020, into early 2021. That’s the process that led me to start wearing some of these other hats.
You hit it right on the head there. I’m sure many folks were going through similar processes. In the franchising world, that led to business ownership, becoming an owner of your time, your skills, and your cashflow. You own an asset and are driving the ROI on that diversification strategy, which is franchising but also scratches the itch of exiting Corporate America when times are uncertain. It’s always been in the back of that individual’s mind. Here is the opportunity to truly pursue what I want. Sometimes it takes a pandemic stopping your life for you to have some realizations that you’ve probably been having for a while. You’re on the hamster wheel.
You hit it right on the head there on the hamster wheel. My life needed a disruption. I would not have chosen for it to be a global pandemic because I saw what it did to so many people but I wonder if that’s true for your audience as well, Nick. A lot of people had those thoughts in their heads, whether they were at the conscious level or the subconscious level. Sometimes it does take a significant disruption for us to be able to realize some of those opportunities that are right before us.
Ultimately, this led to you writing a book.
It did. It was interesting. I was having a conversation with my practice management consultant for my business. I said to him, “Matt, my head is spinning.” This was about a month after we were back in our offices from the pandemic. It was crazy for us. We had a ton of new regulations. We had to wear hazmat suits when we were treating patients and figured out what life behind an N95 mask looks like and lots of other things like that.
I told him, “Matt, it feels like I am battling the false sense of urgency.” He said, “What do you mean by that?” The way that I described the false sense of urgency is that it’s like a background app that runs in our brains all the time. We all know the apps on our phones, the ones that run in the background. They’re gathering data, chewing up batteries, and doing all those things.
The false sense of urgency is like a background app for our brains. It tells us that we can’t sit still, there’s always more to do, and we have a million things to do but if we sat down and wrote down what we had to do, it wouldn’t be anywhere near that long of a list. It’s a background angst that we have running in our minds. I felt that so much during the pandemic.
I talked to a handful of my friends and they said, “I couldn’t put my finger on what I was feeling but that’s exactly what I was feeling.” Matt, my consultant, said, “You should write a book about that because I think you’re not the only person.” I sat down that day and started writing. Honestly, within about four months after that, I had an initial manuscript. Matt was working full-time trying to manage a new mindset and a whole bunch of different stuff.
That false sense of urgency is something that bothers a lot of us. It always feels like there’s more to do, we’re not good enough, and we’re not making any progress. My goal was to help people come up with some concrete ideas of how to push that sense of urgency back and be able to live better lives where we’re not tormented by that quite as much.
What do you mean by managing a new mindset?
I went from a mindset where I was so burned out to trying to get into a new mindset of, “This is my life. This is what I have. How am I going to make the most of it and not suffer from burnout?” In the process of writing the book, I discovered the concept of Win the Now. That changed everything for me because largely what I had been doing in my life was living it, either stuck in the past or worried about the future.
I was stuck in the past with things that had happened to me in the past, burnout, and all of that stuff. I was worried about the future. When’s the next round of burnout going to hit? When were all the patients I had on my schedule when their problems kept seeming bigger and bigger that I had to try to solve? What Win the Now taught me is that I was missing the only guaranteed thing in our life and that’s the moment right in front of us. I was missing the now. I was not living my life in the present. I was in one place with my mind and one place with my body.
That was the mindset that I was trying to wrap my head around. As I worked on that and put that together with the false sense of urgency, it always is forward-thinking. There’s nothing wrong with forward-thinking but if we’re always forward-thinking and worried about the last thing that we did, we miss out on the present moment. That’s what I was trying to wrap my head around. Win the Now turns out to be the antidote or the solution for the false sense of urgency.
What are some practical ways to implement Win the Now?
Win the Now came to me because when I found myself, I would often come home from my day and my wife would say, “Eric, how was your day?” I would say, “This bad thing happened.” I would reduce my day to one thing that had happened. I don’t know if you’ve ever done that but it’s easy to look at our day and say it was bad because this happened. However, the reality is there were plenty of good things that happened during the day as well.
A practical way to incorporate Win the Now into your life is to think of what the different nows are in your life. If you look at your schedule for the day, maybe you have four meetings. Maybe you’re at your franchise for a couple of hours a day or longer than that. Maybe you have to have a conversation with one of your team members. You take each of those different nows and figure out what a win looks like. For us, a win looks like a great conversation between the two of us and a good value added to your readers. A win might look like practical action steps that people can take going forward.
We try to find wins in those present moments. There will be times when we have losses, a presentation won’t land quite as much as you want it to, or a conversation doesn’t go as well as you hope that it would. If that happens, it’s easy to let that ruin the rest of our day. Instead, what I try to do when we take those losses is what can we learn from that? How can we move forward with that loss? Was it a preparation thing? Was it more on the other person who wasn’t prepared for the meeting?
We might not be able to do it in real time. We might have to process it later but once we can learn from that loss, we turn that loss more into a win. We step back into the next moment, which is the next now. If we find ourselves grabbing more wins, we start to feel like there’s some momentum going. I’ve asked a ton of people. I don’t know anybody who prefers a loss to a win. We try to get those win streaks going and get momentum going so that we can move forward in our lives. That concept always reminds us to draw back to the present moment.
That’s such a great way of illustrating a high-performance mentality.
It is. I haven’t had a lot of critics towards this but I have had people who have told me that it’s too competitive and that you’re too focused on winning all the time. I said, “That’s not what it’s about.” We have to find ways to bring ourselves back into the moment. As I’ve talked a little bit more with the people who have been critical of it, one of the problems they’ve had is they’re too quick to retreat to their technology and screens. They wanted me to justify that was a good way to go about life. The reality is phones are probably the number one thing that keeps us from grabbing wins in the present moment.
It’s a skill and a discipline. Realizing Win the Now is a state of mind. That’s a discipline. That’s a skill that grows the more you’re disciplined about doing it.
You’re 100% right. It’s not something that I got right the first time or something I got right the twentieth time. I’m still working on it, still working on ways that I can be present in my life. I’m a huge fan of action steps. What can your readers take away from this and implement right away? Technology is great. If it wasn’t for technology, we wouldn’t be able to have this conversation this way.
There are a lot of wonderful things that technology can give us but one thing that has changed a lot is we used to have some idle space for our brains. If we would pull up to our car at a traffic light stoplight, it would be red. We’d have a couple of minutes to be there and look at the world around us, observe what’s going on, not stimulate our brains so much, and just be in the moment.
I don’t know about you but when we get to those points, it’s pretty tempting to pull our phone out and check something real quick, check our email, check something on social media, and do all those things. What we’ve done is eliminate that idle space in our brains. We’ve cut out those times when our brain could catch up with itself in those moments.
One of the things that I try to coach people on is when your phone is in your pocket, ask a very simple question when you reach for it, “Why am I picking this up?” In asking that question, it will allow us to not always grab it for the sake of grabbing it. We do that all the time as much as a two-year-old. When they’re fussy, their parents give them a pacifier.
When we get a little uncomfortable with how life is going, instead of facing what’s going on, we pick up our devices and it becomes our adult pacifier. What that’s doing is making us not be able to cope with our anxieties and concerns because all we do is kick them down the road a little farther and they get to be a bigger deal.
Your emotions in general. Being present and in the now, it could even be standing in a waiting room. Instead of engaging folks around, you retreat to sitting down and jumping on your phone as opposed to the emotions and the headspace that’s required to engage other folks. Also, being an introvert thing versus an extrovert thing plays a factor. It makes it so much easier to do that regardless, default to a device as opposed to being present.
I understand the difference between introverts and extroverts. I’m somebody who gathers a lot of energy from people but I do need my time to let my brain idle and be quiet as well. Relationships are so important in our lives. Oftentimes, we use being an introvert as an excuse to be on our phones when the possibility of connecting with someone and having a chance to be the good part of their story is much better for us, our brain, and our emotional well-being than retreating to those phones. I agree with you 100% on that one.
It’s a great tip. Be disciplined about the technology and allow your head space some catching up time, which is critical.
It’s not that long ago in history. That was the only choice we had. In the scope of all of history, we’ve had our phones to do that. What was the Blackberry starting to get common in the early 2000s? That was about the first time that we had to do that. The first phones we had, we could do that but there wasn’t any social media on them. There wasn’t much for games and different stuff. Now, we have a million rabbit holes we can go down on our phones and that can happen almost instantly when we pick them up.
Eric, I’m curious. 2020 sparked different pursuits in your life, demonstrated through your skills and your life experience. You authored a book. I’m genuinely interested. What is that book and what is it about?
It’s a follow-up of what I was talking about with the false sense of urgency. That’s the title of the book, The False Sense of Urgency and How to #WINtheNOW. It’s a step-by-step guide that talks through, “Here’s what the False Sense of Urgency is. Here’s how it affects a lot of people. Here are some things that we’re doing that aren’t helping us out a little bit.”
There are a lot of good tips in there about how to do life well and some things that you can try. There’s a chapter in there about sleep. There’s a chapter in there about quiet. There’s a chapter in there about relationships. There’s a chapter towards the end about Win the Now. The stuff that I’ve gone through in my life would be a waste if I kept it to myself.
If I can share it with other people and hopefully shorten the distance for other people from where they are to where they could be, then that makes it all worth it. That was the goal of writing the book. It’s amazing. They say that you write a book for the you that you once were. It’s true. I see a lot of people who are in that type of situation. I’m happy to try to be a good part of their story.
That’s very inspiring and most certainly noble. Where do you think your days of being a dentist play into who you’re becoming?
I was talking to a group about this. Years ago, I had a crisis of purpose. I had been on a couple of mission trips where we had done so much dentistry. I felt like that’s what I needed to do. I needed to do dentistry for underserved populations outside of the country. I came back from that mission trip and told my wife, “We’re living way too comfortably. We need to downsize our house and sell one of our vehicles. We need to live as lean as we can so that I can walk away from my job and do mission dentistry.” The bummer is that she hadn’t been on that trip. She hadn’t had the same experience that I had.
It was pretty shell-shocking for her. She was not at all interested in that. I don’t blame her because it would not have been the right decision. I was mopey for a while. I was feeling a little bit depressed about that because I didn’t understand why I was in my office. I met with my mentor who happened to be the pastor at my church and he said to me, “Eric, how many conversations do you get to have a day?” I said, “I don’t know, between my patients and my team, maybe I talk to 40 people in a day.” He said, “I’m the pastor of a big church and I don’t get to talk to nearly that many people in a day. Here’s your congregation. Go impact them.”
My crisis of purpose stopped at that moment. I knew that my job was to love my team well, treat my team well, and treat my patients well with empathy, love, and dignity. Through that, I learned my love for people and relationships. From there, that’s a logical progression into coaching. It’s meeting people where they are and helping them get unstuck.
Without knowing it, my dental practice has been a lab for me to be able to learn how to relate well to people, help people through the stuff that they’re going through, teach leadership to other people who work on my team, and move forward. I never would’ve thought that the two would go hand in hand but they go hand in hand. Another thing that I can do is if I have concepts that I want to teach to groups, I can teach them to my team first and get feedback on them. It’s neat how it all works together.
It’s all about the people. Whether it’s dentistry or what you’re doing, impacting and influencing, or serving people well, you’re a noble individual. That’s what makes you a talented and interesting person. I’m curious, years from now, what does success look like to you?
Success looks like impact. That is the word that I’m trying to focus on. Success looks like getting in front of groups so I can have an impact on them. Success looks like coaching somebody who might be able to turn their life around, turn their business around, or step into a business that they never would’ve thought was possible before we started working together through social media posts, speaking, coaching, or whatever it is. I have another book that I’m working on. Through those things, my hope is that years from now, I will have looked back on the last few years of my life and said that it was a time of impact. If that happens, then I will be very happy with where I’m at.
Do you have any specific type of impact that would parallel that success?
It would be being able to get in front of more audiences and getting more opportunities. I have a great message to share. The audiences that I have shared it in front of, it’s been great. The feedback has been awesome. It’s been life-changing. The type of impact I would like to have is when I hear that people are using the concepts that we talked about daily in their lives and they’re teaching their people how to use the same concepts.
I gave a talk to a group of 150 people about mindset, self-care, and strategies for when we get empty and burned out. I had somebody reach out to me a month later and say that their team is doing check-ins every day or every other day based on some of the concepts that we talked about. To me, that’s an impact that lasts beyond the day of the presentation. That’s what my hope is.
What are some of those refueling steps?
Without getting too far into it, our lives are a flow of energy. We have energy that flows into us and we have energy that flows out of us. What happens when we’re burned out is that we are empty. What we’ve been doing is pouring out too much of what we have and not taking the time to refill and refuel. This has been the same equation for me each time I’ve been burned out. It’s very simple. I was over-committed. I had too much on my plate and I wasn’t taking care of myself.
A couple of the basic things that I talk to people about for refueling, one of them is simple. It’s quiet. It’s finding time in your life to be quiet. As soon as I say that, I get a whole bunch of pushback from people but being quiet is so important for our brain health and for us to be able to build back our reserve of energy. Another one is doing everything that we can to get good quality sleep. It’s not lying in bed, checking our phones, or eating a huge meal right before we go to sleep. Maybe a few things along the lines of that for sleep. Another one would be having good-quality relationships. When we have people that we can go on the journey with, then that’s huge for refueling.
A final one is we need to look at some of our commitments. Sometimes some of the things that we are committed to, we don’t have the bandwidth for. Especially as a business owner, we’re wearing a lot of hats. We have to be careful of how many things we’re committed to. In those commitments, how much are they draining of us? How much are they taking of our reserves? The more we give, the more we have to take time to fill back up. That’s what the concept is.
That is a message that is so critical post-2020. It is very relevant to anybody who reads that message. That’s where you are being called to impact. I wish you much success. Right from the onset of the interview, I could tell that you are an individual of noble intent and that is inspiring. Thank you for your message and the direction that you’re going with this season, this chapter of your life. If anybody would like to learn more or get in touch with you, how can they do that?
The easiest place is through my website and it’s my name, EricRecker.com. On there, there’s information about speaking that I do, coaching, and the book that I wrote. I do a weekly blog and send out a newsletter. People are interested in that. One thing that I do offer free of charge is called the 5-Day Knock Back Burnout Challenge. It’s free.
All I need is your email on there and we’ll send you a series of emails for some real tangible tips of how you can push back the hold of burnout in your life if you feel like you’re experiencing that. At the bottom of my website, there are links to my different social media channels. I would love to have a conversation. There are links to connect to me on there, and that’s where to find me.
Speaking of chapters in life and your career, you go through a series of burnout. That is normal. It’s a part of the journey. Eric, it’s such a noble place to put your skills. I’m very glad that you’re putting them in this area because being an entrepreneur, navigating ’08 and 2020 and so many changes in the economy with clients, the labor force, and the cost of goods, it all impacts what is normal.
As an entrepreneur, you have to protect your head span. A big part of that is refueling and practicing disciplines that allow you to Win the Now and navigate burnout, which is normal. I hope you all enjoyed this episode as much as I did. Eric, thank you so much for your time and your message. Please subscribe to the channel. It’s how we’re able to continue to grow and bring individuals on like Eric who can help us level up in practical and big ways so that we can hit our goals in life. Smash the like button, add to our conversation, and drop a comment. As always, level up.
Eric Recker is a dentist, elite success coach, pilot, speaker, author, mountain climber, and recovering triathlete, and his favorite roles are as husband and father. He’s pushed his life to the limit and discovered that what he was searching for wasn’t at the top of the mountain. In fact, true success was a lot closer than he thought!
Today, in addition to running a thriving dental practice he loves… Eric is committed to helping people learn to #WINtheNOW and discover the life they were meant to live through his talks and coaching. Eric loves to offer stories and strategies that equip people to live with hope, to have a plan, and believe that good days are ahead.
“He still loves being a dentist after 20 years. He leads an amazing team and love to impact my people and my patients. He has seen needs in my team and patients and wants to help. He is a lifelong learner, and he can’t help but turn around and teach!”