📍 Welcome back to No Silver Spoons. It's Sarah Beth, and this is week five of our 12 week Keep going series where I'm talking about what it actually looks like to grow, to lead, and to rebuild when life doesn't follow the plan that you wrote for it. And I'm sharing with you a bunch of stories that I actually lived through what I've been through to get me to this point.

To where I could even talk about it because honestly, many of the stories I'm sharing when they happened and even shortly after they happened, they felt far too embarrassing for me to even share with anyone. And so I found my space here where I love sharing with you exactly what I've been through, even if it's embarrassing, even if I'm ashamed of it, or even if I was ashamed of it at one point in my life.

So far, we have covered what it means to let go to rebuild. And to rise again. But this week I wanted to talk about something a little bit quieter. I wanted to talk about what it looks like when something doesn't always go right. This week is all about the power of staying when it's hard because sometimes the bravest thing that you will ever do isn't actually leaving.

It's staying Now. I'm not talking about staying in chaos. And I'm not talking about staying in abuse or toxicity and this story that you're gonna hear, there is a little bit of that, but I want you to know, I'll never condone that for anyone else's life. I just want you to hear what this story was like for me, and I want you to hear and learn what staying the course looks like in any situation.

What it means to hold your ground, keeping your integrity intact. When the easy thing to do would have been to quit, and I've lived that kind of story. I'll start with this. I'm not naming a company or the people involved because the story isn't about exposing anyone.

It's about what I learned through this story.

When I was hired by this dental group, a three location practice, it actually felt like I had finally caught a break. You see, the company I had been working for before this had started spiraling in a way that I've never seen a company spiral, and it wasn't that I just wanted to leave the company because I didn't like my boss.

It was so much different than that. You see this company I had worked for the CEO had landed in the local news for all the wrong reasons, legal trouble charges. The kind of headlines that actually make you cringe because you are still working there while everyone else is whispering. It was everywhere.

Local news, community, Facebook groups, even patients were talking about it and showing us articles on their phone when they came in for their appointment, asking if is this really the same company?

 You could feel the energy in that office shift overnight. The phones were slowing down, patients stopped scheduling, and the staff started disappearing one by one. No one wanted to be tied to that company's name anymore. It was so tarnished and so embarrassing, and I remember thinking, I can't be the next to go down with this ship.

Not because I didn't care, but because my gut was screaming that something about this entire situation wasn't right. There's a lot of details I really can't share, and I really don't even wanna talk about the town or state that I lived in at the time because it's really that crazy. So I started applying for new positions and that's when I landed the interview that would lead me into the job I thought would be my absolute forever home in dentistry.

They had an ad out for a business manager. It was a new thriving dental group, and when they offered me the position, I remember actually crying tears of relief in my car. I actually remember the exact phone call and where I was at driving down the highway when I got the call. For me, it wasn't just a job, it was like redemption.

My new position wasn't your standard office manager job. It was layered, complex, and challenging in all the right ways. For me. I was managing billing, eligibility phones, scheduling check-ins, checkouts, and even helping with marketing. But before long, I became instrumental in helping the practice expand.

When they opened their second location, which was three hours away, I was there to help them design systems, train their staff, and make sure everything ran smoothly.  The same way that my position currently was held at. It was really about taking the SOPs from the existing location and implementing them into a new one, and I absolutely loved it.

For me, it was super exhilarating to watch things transform and see this practice thrive immediately. I loved being part of something growing, and I still do to this day. It makes me feel alive in a different way, like my skills are actually seen and valued, and I felt that way here and to be honest. The first few months of that new location were magical, and this was really about two years into my time with this dental group.

The energy in that new office. It was contagious. Patients laughed when they walked in. Kids were high fiving me at the front desk. The owner was charismatic and the office manager, who I would later learn was also the owner's life partner often praised me for how I carried myself. She would say things like, I love how put together you always are.

You show up every day like you're walking into a Fortune 500 office. I love that you walk around the desk and you greet our patients. To me, those things were just normal. I loved creating an environment where people felt like they were family. I loved creating a different experience In a dental practice, I've always believed that how you present yourself is a reflection of how you respect your work.

I ironed my scrubs every single morning. I wore clean sneakers. I had a full face of makeup, and I made sure my hair was neat, tidy, orderly. It wasn't vanity, it was discipline, it was pride, and I thrived. The schedule was full, billing was clean, our production was growing. I felt proud walking into that office every day, and I remember the office manager would often talk about me in our huddles and.

After a while, I asked her not to do that because I didn't want people to think that I was better than anyone else. I always wanted to be the example, but I didn't really need the accolades from it. You see, what was shifting in that office by my example, was that people weren't showing up to work with their scrubs wrinkled or their hair disheveled, or eating their breakfast in the middle of a morning huddle, or not meeting the daily goal because we were all in it together.

You see, when I go into an office, it's all about making sure that the tone is set, that everybody in the office is on the same page, and the page that we're on is all about growing, expanding, and becoming the very best we could be. I was always known for wiping everything down every morning and every night, making sure that snacks and drinks and coffee stations were always organized perfectly.

Everything faced the right way, everything stocked the right way. I wanted people to know when they came in that they could take a snack if the kids were coming in after school, that they could enjoy a cup of coffee or a beverage from the refrigerator. Our restrooms were clean. We cleaned the toilets every day, twice a day.

It was our job to make sure that we really acknowledged that this space was meant for our favorite people, our famous people. I have a training seminar that I have created after this job that I actually conduct for dental practices all the time, and it's my favorite to do this in person.

So if you are wanting to transform your dental practice and really get your team on this same wavelength. I go through and we talk about creating an environment for your famous person, and I love talking about it. So if you ever wanna know about it, please schedule a call with me and I would love to just share with you what that training looks like and even come on site to, uh, teach you about what it looks like to look at your practice through the lens of a patient.

But anyways, back to the story. This practice was an amazing place for me and I loved it, and truly I did thrive. But unfortunately, I'll never forget the moment that everything changed for me. It wasn't some dramatic moment. It wasn't even a confrontational situation. It was just one question. And at the time, part of my role, it had involved traveling to this next dental practice that was three hours away.

So not only some days a week did I work at the initial practice I started at, but I was also in certain days traveling for the company to another office, and it ended up being three hours each way. So that was six hours of driving every single day, plus an eight hour workday. And I did it willingly because I believed in the company and what we were building.

But one day, after many, many months of that schedule, exhaustion was really starting to catch up with me. I was leaving my house well before sunrise because our first patient was typically at six o'clock in the morning, and I was returning far after dark. My husband and daughter barely saw me, and so I asked kindly and respectfully if I could have a conversation with the office manager, and she absolutely was willing to talk to me.

She loved. Talking with us each as employees. She was very close with all of us. Her energy was magnetic. There was just something about her that was welcoming and kind and generous. And so I felt comfortable going to her to have this conversation. And she sat down and I said, I was wondering if it would be possible to be compensated for travel time or at least mileage.

And I remember saying, Hey, I'm happy to keep doing the travel. I just want to feel valued for the time that it takes for me to do that because it takes away from time with my family and I love this business. But even though I'm away from my family, I still feel like I should be compensated. It would make it feel a little bit easier to do if I didn't feel like I was just away from them and there was no compensation.

For me, it wasn't about greed. It was about being fair to both myself and the office, and I explained how I loved what I did. I went through everything and all of the ways that I had changed that practice, really showing my value and proof that I should keep doing it, but that it had been such an extended period of time I was doing this without compensation, that it only fair that I ask for it, that single question.

The one that, to me, felt reasonable would become the very thing that actually changed everything. Almost overnight, I noticed a difference. My travel stopped completely. She did not want me to attend that practice. Talk about that practice work. At that practice, I was only to go to the location that was closest to my home.

The energy towards me was completely cold, and then it became personal. That same office manager who used to compliment me started picking me apart piece by piece. She told me I wasn't the image they wanted at the front anymore. She said, you'd look better if you lost weight. She handed me a piece of paper.

It was actually a stack of sticky notes, and she asked me to start logging what I ate every day and share that with her. She wanted me to stay at 1200 calories per day. At first, I thought she was joking, but she wasn't. She said that I needed to look more like the kind of woman that their patients' moms would want to see.

I can't even describe the humiliation of standing there, holding back tears, realizing my worth to her was now based on my waistline. She even started training me again, but it wasn't training, it was mockery, dressed up as mentorship.

She would walk me through the office and point out everything I was supposedly doing wrong. You shouldn't wear that color scrubs. It doesn't fit our brand. You're not smiling as much as you used to. You're not polished enough for this level of patient. It had nothing to do with performance, nothing to do with the patient experience or patient care.

And little by little I could feel her trying to break me down quietly, methodically, and cruelly. She started leaving me out of meetings that I'd always been a part of. She stopped inviting me to community events for the dental practice for, and when the team would go out for coffee or lunch, I would find out after the fact from someone else, and I wasn't even invited.

It was isolation disguised as professionalism. And I'll be honest, I internalized it. I started asking myself what I had done wrong. Was I too ambitious? Did I come across arrogant? Did my question about compensation? Really offend her that much. But I kept showing up every day. I pressed my scrubs.

I put on a full face of makeup. My shoes were always clean. The waiting area was always picked up and wiped down. All of the snacks were faced perfectly. My smile was on. I was genuinely happy because I loved working there, but every day that I showed up just like this, I did so because I wasn't working for her anymore.

 I was working for my family and for the patients who trusted me and loved me and cared about me, and enjoyed talking with me every day. Then came the morning that sealed everything. A freak ice storm hit our town, and if you've ever lived in the area that we lived in, you know that they're not built for ice.

No plows, no salt trucks, just total chaos if there happens to be an ice storm. The roads were solid. Sheets of ice schools were shutting down, and my commute was 45 minutes of winding back roads to get to this dental practice. I called the office manager early that morning and I let her know that I didn't feel safe driving in the weather and that many schools were closing and my daughter was school was closing, and that I would make up the hours on a weekend or Friday afternoon, but I didn't wanna risk my safety.

There was silence then a sigh, and she said, Sarah Beth, everyone's counting on you. If you don't show up, you're letting all of us down, so we're gonna have to work extra hours and extra hard. Because you aren't showing up and everyone else is showing up. You know when school's out, everyone wants to bring their kids in, and I remember gripping my phone and saying quietly, I'm not comfortable driving in these conditions.

It isn't that I wanna let you down. I'm just not comfortable. Her tone sharpened and she sent a text after text after text. She was belittling me, calling me unreliable, saying I was abandoning the team. Okay. By noon, one final message came through. Don't bother coming back. That was it. Years of work, loyalty excellence, all undone because I wasn't willing to risk it.

For one icy commute, I sat in my living room that afternoon, still in my scrubs, staring at my phone. It was one of those moments where you don't even have tears left. Just shock. Because I had poured everything into four and a half years at that company. I loved that practice. I believed in what they stood for, and it was just gone just like that.

And I'll be honest, I, I broke down, but not out of anger, out of actual grief because I wasn't just upset because of the loss of a job. It was a loss of belonging for me. I loved that practice. I had been so loyal. I had stayed a year and a half after that very first conversation about my compensation. I protected that brand like it was my own, and in the end, I wasn't seen.

 After all of that, I learned a few things and here's what I  📍 learned.  You will be mistreated in life sometimes, not because you've done something wrong, but because you've done something right. You will trigger people who aren't ready to see excellence in someone else. And when that happens, you have two choices to become like them or to become better because of them.

I chose honor, not silence, but honor. I didn't retaliate, I didn't gossip. I didn't try to destroy their name because I wanted to walk away knowing that even if they questioned my character, I never questioned my own. And that's what staying when it's hard means, it means staying loyal to your integrity, even when the people around you have lost theirs.

Here's what actually is happening in your brain during those moments, because as you know, I love to find the science and the meaning behind everything as we're thinking it, and I always wanna find a way that I can keep going and get through things. And sometimes it takes me learning a little bit about how the brain works in order for me to grasp what I'm going through or how I'm feeling.

When you face mistreatment your amygdala in your brain, that part, that handles fear, it flares up, it sends danger signals. You're being attacked, you're being rejected, you are unsafe. And most people react.

They fight back, they lash out or they shut down. But when you pause, when you take a breath, when you ground yourself and respond with composure, you actually activate your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that governs logic, reasoning, and emotional control. By staying calm, you are literally retraining your brain to know that you are safe, even when someone is trying to shake you.

And that's how resilience is built. One grounded moment at a time. One, keep going, moment at a time. If you are the one being mistreated, I'm going to challenge you to stay honorable. Don't shrink yourself to make others comfortable. Don't let bitterness convince you that you need revenge to heal. Your peace will be your proof if you're the leader when someone comes to you with a concern.

Don't punish them for it. Don't assume disloyalty, don't weaponize your authority. Listen, because that conversation could either strengthen your culture or completely destroy it in every episode. My favorite part is creating a, that's good moment. Reminding you what this episode was all about, recapping the key point that I really want you to leave with, and that's this.

You cannot control how others treat you, but you can always control how you carry yourself through it. The power of staying when it's hard isn't about endurance. It is about identity. You stay because your integrity is anchored deeper than their behavior. You stay because honor matters more than ego, and that's leadership, and that's also growth.

This week's digital download is something simple, but it's something powerful every week. For the Keep Going series, I have a digital download just for you and for any listeners. It's just $5 when you use the coupon code that you'll find in the show note. Inside this week's digital download, you'll find phone screens and mini printable cards with reminders, affirmations, and quotes for days when you feel dishonored, when you feel unseen or undervalued, each one is designed to bring you back to your truth, that your value isn't negotiable.

You can use them as wallpapers mirror reminders, or in your planner, they're quiet. Beautiful reminders that even when others fall short, you can still rise above and keep going. Grab yours at the link in the show notes and let them remind you that Grace is your greatest strength. I'm Sarah Beth Herman, and this was week five of No Silver Spoons, the Keep Going Series.

Wherever you are, whatever you're walking through, I want you to remember this. Staying doesn't mean you're weak. It means you're wise enough to know that your story doesn't end here. And for that, I'm going to encourage you to keep going. I'll catch 📍 you on the next episode.