The surgeon said “open wide.” Sixty seconds later, the tooth was out.
Two stitches. Done.
$535.
If you’ve been following my newsletters, you’ll know this wisdom tooth had been causing me grief for three years. Multiple fillings. Two cysts. Cancelled appointments. A lot of telling myself “it’s not that bad.”
Then last Friday, I finally sat in the chair.
And the thing I’d been dreading for three years took less time (and was less painful) than ordering a coffee.
By Saturday morning it was as if nothing had happened. No pain. No drama. No recovery period worth mentioning.
Now you might look at that and think $535 for sixty seconds of work is steep.
But that’s the wrong calculation.
I wasn’t paying for sixty seconds. I was paying for the years that surgeon spent perfecting his craft to make it look easy. And I was paying for the result. Which was exactly what I wanted.
Here’s what stayed with me afterwards.
The reason I avoided the chair for three years wasn’t because the pain wasn’t real. It was. The reason was I had a picture in my head of what the process would feel like. Childhood memories of a dentist who pulled teeth like he was in a hurry to get somewhere. I’d projected that old experience onto this decision and it kept me stuck.
The fear of implementation was worse than the problem itself.
I see this pattern constantly in sales conversations.
Your prospect knows they have a problem. They might even know you can fix it. But they’re not thinking about the result. They’re thinking about what they’ll have to go through to get there.
How disruptive will this be? How much of my team’s time will it consume? Will it create more chaos before it creates order?
That fear of the process is often bigger than the fear of staying stuck.
Which means part of your job is to make the path visible. Show them what implementation actually looks like. Walk them through it. Use examples from clients who’ve been through it and came out the other side faster than they expected.
When someone can see that the process won’t be painful, the decision gets easier.
Because most of us don’t avoid action because we’re lazy or indifferent. We avoid it because we’re imagining the worst version of what “yes” looks like.
Show them a better version. A real one.
That’s often all it takes.
