Interviewee Name: Roger Dacre, Medical Doctor

Company Name: Dr. Roger I Dacre

Website: http://www.doctordacre.com

Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.

I was born in London, England and when I was about six years old my parents moved to Barbados. A year or so later they sent me back to attend boarding school in the UK. I attended medical school in the UK, in London, England and then I emigrated to Canada and did residency or specialty training in family medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. After that I worked for 10 years in my own family practice in Cambridge, Ontario and moved to Toronto about 16 years ago. I opened the practice that I am practicing in now and was practicing there initially alone, and subsequently over the last 10 years with Dr. Lise Paquette.

Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you?

Usually I try to get to the office before 8 o’clock in the morning and I do the electronic and fax paperwork that is needed to be checked before starting to see patients around 8:30 in the morning. I generally see patients between 8:30 and 12:30 pm and I stop for lunch. My ideal day involves taking a 45-minute walk and then I restart seeing patients at 1:30 in the afternoon and I continue to see patients until 5:00 pm or 5:30 pm. The rest of the evening, unless I’m on call, is spent either for personal time or about twice a week I attend either a medical training meeting or medical administrative type meeting.

Avil Beckford: How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?

I embrace the ethos of providing quality care. It’s a very conscious attempt to continue to motivate myself through continuing education. Either learning things that I don’t know or teaching things that I do know to people who wish to learn them. When I’m looking at the same problem for a subsequent time, I try to place it in a context that’s specific to that person to make it different and knew to me as well as to that person.

Avil Beckford: If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

I would try to avoid moving practice after 10 years. When I moved from Cambridge to Toronto, I basically had to start again. It was if it was the first day of work again. Family medicine like many personal service industries is very much based on the trust and relationship between myself and in this case the patient and that just isn’t something that you acquire overnight. You only acquire that over the passage of a number of meetings and the development of the relationship. That is something you can’t buy from someone else, so you have to earn it for yourself.

Avil Beckford: What’s the most important business or other discovery you’ve made in the past year?

It’s kind of a business and personal discovery. I’ve always been proud of the way I treated the staff in my office and I see it as a matter of pride for me that I treat my staff with kindness and respect. I always assumed that this would produce a good outcome. I found that doing that does not always produce a good outcome. There are factors in the staff rather than in me that might indicate that the outcome wouldn’t be good.

Avil Beckford: What’s one of the biggest advances in your industry over the past five years?

It’s difficult to single out one particular thing because this is an industry which is crawling with innovation. It really is. I tried to think of three of the ones that affect me, but there are many in the industry as a whole. They are treatments for anticoagulation, the treatment for obesity with bariatric surgery (you are operating on obese people to help them lose weight), and treatments for diabetes. If you were to look at five years ago and look at now, these three areas are completely different than they were five years ago. I have to completely relearn all areas on a regular basis.

Avil Beckford: What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?

1. I’m in a business which is funded by the government and consequently one of the big risks to us is government whims or changes in government policies as a result of elections and the fact that governments are fighting with how to use limited resources.
2. The second issue is organizational fads. There seem to be an unlimited number of ways to organize the delivery of medical care and none of them seem to be superior to the other ones and you get people either civil servants or government ministers, or academic people all trying to impose their own particular fad on the rest of us.
3. The third thing is regulation which is both good and bad. Regulation in our industry seems to result in shortages of lots of things, and it stifles innovation because anything that’s outside the normal range is suspicious to regulators.

Avil Beckford: What’s unique about the service that you provide?

I can’t claim that the services I provide are unique, but I try to be noticeably outside the norm in terms of my commitment to providing not just good diagnostic care, but efficiency in the way the office is run.

Avil Beckford: What do you observe most people in your field doing badly that you think you do well?

I think that many of them have very poor office organization and pay little attention to customer service. I have colleagues who think it’s a matter of pride about how long people have to wait in their waiting room rather than a matter of shame.

Avil Beckford: Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it. What kind of lessons did you learn in the process?

I had a critical employee who left suddenly. We were left with having to recreate the skills that were needed for that role. In small businesses I think that sometimes you can have part of the process knowledge of the business in the hands of just one employee, and if that employee is gone you have to learn it all from scratch and sometimes that’s difficult. When this employee left we realized that we had invested too much in one position in terms of the process knowledge of our practice. We have replaced that role with two people doing part-time work, and my partner and I have decided to take a more active role in running certain parts of the business for the future.

There was a lot to learn from that. We realized that we needed to have little manuals. We already had manuals to describe all the little functions that are needed, but we realized that we needed to be more careful and that those manuals were kept up-to-date, and that we had multiple staff members who are able to perform the different functions.

Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.

In a way, it’s a bizarre story in that I don’t remember who gave me in what I consider in retrospect to be my big break. But I was at a social function, and I had just failed to get into medical school, and one of the people at this social function was describing the name of one of the teaching hospitals in England, which had a particular interest in people who were applying for the second time to medical school. I used that information to put that particular medical school at the top of my list of five places that you are allowed to apply to at once. And I actually got into that particular medical school the following year. I don’t know who it was, and it gave me the opportunity to get what I considered to be my big break, which was my chance to learn medicine.

Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?

It’s similar to the other question in that my failure to get into medical school the first time, I consider to be my biggest failure. I had been predicting that I would get in and it was a big surprise that I didn’t. What it taught me is that I’m responsible for my own successes and I need to believe in myself and in my ability to pick myself up when I’ve had a reverse and make the thing happen.

Avil Beckford: What has been your biggest disappointment in your life – and what are you doing to prevent its reoccurrence?

Probably my biggest disappointment at the moment is the way I’ve been handling my employees and certainly I know when I had a small practice there used to be a blurred line between the boss and staff relationship and friend relationship and as the office got bigger, we’ve made an effort to keep it more professional, not unfriendly, but just not the same way. I always thought that good behaviour would be rewarded with gratitude and I realize looking back at everything that went on this year and three years ago when a similar thing happened that it is my lack of inattention to the signs that this is happening. I’m trying to learn to be more objective in the way I look at the relationships with my staff. We have not taken the annual review as serious as we should and so we are going to put a lot more effort into doing that in a more professional way in the future.

Avil Beckford: What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?

There were two really. One was the decision to emigrate to Canada from the UK and the other was to move from Cambridge, Ontario a small town of 120,000 to Toronto. They have had a very big impact on my life because they completely transformed the environment in which I practice medicine.

Avil Beckford: What are three events that helped to shape your life?

1. The most significant was qualifying as a doctor.
2. The second was choosing and qualifying as a family physician as opposed to some other type of doctor.
3. The third one was a personal one, which was coming out as a gay man.

Avil Beckford: What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?

I think it’s a dynamic accomplishment in the sense that it’s the accomplishment of bringing freshness to my practice of medicine.

Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?

Looking back on my life I didn’t realize that the first three of the mentors I would describe were mentors but they were. The first was one of my teachers in primary school, I say primary and middle school. His name was Mr. Arthur and I think he taught me that it was okay to be inquisitive, and it was okay to be an individualist outside of the mainstream. So that was a very important lesson to learn. The next mentor I had was Keith Warshaw who was my tutor in high school and he taught me that the world works in a certain way and you have to look at how it works and you can’t break the rules without realizing there will be consequences. He wasn’t saying the rules were right or wrong, he was saying they are there and you have to pay attention to them. I then had a mentor in medical school and she really taught me that it’s really important to do the work that needs to done rather than to think that you can take short cuts to it. And finally Dr. May Cowan, who was my professor at McMaster University who I still turn to for advice even today, and she just taught me so many things about how to be a good family doctor.

Avil Beckford: What’s one core message you received from your mentors?

The message was that quality and achievement comes from honest work.

Avil Beckford: An invisible mentor is a unique leader you can learn things from by observing them from afar, in the capacity of an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?

I would say to people, you need to decide what you want to do and aim to learn and practice this with integrity.

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

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The post The Invisible Mentor Interviews Roger Dacre, Medical Doctor appeared first on The Invisible Mentor.

Interviewee Name: Roger Dacre, Medical Doctor

Company Name: Dr. Roger I Dacre

Website: http://www.doctordacre.com

Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Dr. Roger Dacre: I was born in London, England and when I was about six years old my parents moved to Barbados. A year or so later they sent me back to attend boarding school in the UK. I attended medical school in the UK, in London, England and then I emigrated to Canada and did residency or specialty training in family medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. After that I worked for 10 years in my own family practice in Cambridge, Ontario and moved to Toronto about 16 years ago. I opened the practice that I am practicing in now and was practicing there initially alone, and subsequently over the last 10 years with Dr. Lise Paquette.

Avil Beckford: How do you integrate your personal and professional life?

Dr. Roger Dacre: I have a good group of friends and a supportive partner. That partner recognizes that my medical practice is important to my life, but the time is also important. I’m fortunate in that my partner, my friends and in many ways my patients seem to recognize that there are more parts to my life than just dealing with them.

Avil Beckford: What are five life lessons that you have learned so far?

Dr. Roger Dacre:

• Be true to myself.
• Find meaning for your life.
• Find and work to support yourself.
• Look for and cherish friends.

Avil Beckford: When you have some down time, how do you spend it?

Dr. Roger Dacre: I’m a very avid theatre goer. I love movies. I like going to restaurants and I love going for walks, and I do a lot of traveling.

Avil Beckford: What process do you use to generate great ideas?

Dr. Roger Dacre: I think this is one of the things that Ruth Bowden taught me, she said, “You can allow yourself to just sit and think, relaxing.” I usually listen to music when I’m doing this, but there are other ways to allow yourself to process and to generate ideas that will allow you to see things in a different way. You see something working the opposite way than we do here in Canada or they do it in the UK and it works, so often it’s having a fresh way of looking at things that helps me to generate great ideas.

Avil Beckford: What’s your favourite quotation and why?

Dr. Roger Dacre: “You have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” which as you know comes from the American Constitution. I like this because it summarizes what is a right and what is something you need to go out and earn for yourself even though you should be free to do it. It’s not saying you have the right to happiness, it’s saying you have the right to try and find happiness. That summarizes how I look at life. I expect to be given the right to live my life and to be free, but I don’t expect more than that from the world. I expect to have to earn the rest from the world.

Avil Beckford: How do you define success?

Dr. Roger Dacre: Living a life that actualizes your full potential. That would be success to me, so you could be successful in any job. It just depends on your skills and other things.

Avil Beckford: In your opinion what’s the formula for success?

Dr. Roger Dacre: It’s not a secret. I think that integrity and hard work are the formula for success in any part of the world where you have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Avil Beckford: What are the steps you took to succeed in your field?

Dr. Roger Dacre: Attending all the lectures and going to all the things at university was an important part. I find that I learn a lot from practicing physicians, as well as books. And for my own practice of medicine, running into a problem is often a learning experience for be and can end up being a very enriching experience for me and hopefully the patient.

Avil Beckford: What advice do you have for someone just starting out in your field?

Dr. Roger Dacre: Start out how you mean to continue. I think you should use the same ethics and the same work practice, right from the beginning of your career and not feel that these are some things you graduate to later. When I started my practice in Cambridge, Ontario the seventh and eighth patient that came to me were drug addicts and I refused to take them on as patients. When I was telling my parents about it, they said, “Why do you have to turn anyone down at this time can’t you wait until later?” And I said, “When do you suddenly get ethics, how many patients?” And of course they couldn’t give me a number, because you either have ethics from the start or you don’t.

Avil Beckford: If trusted friends could introduce you to five people that you’ve always wanted to meet (dad or alive), who would you choose? And what would you say to them?

Dr. Roger Dacre: I decided I was only going to choose living people.

The Queen of England: I would like to find out from her how she’s managed to work so hard and for so long and to reconcile that with her sense of self. She’s been the victim of criticism and various other things and she seems to have done this with a peacefulness that I find very admirable.

Margaret Thatcher: She is a person who has a huge conviction and she fought against much larger forces than herself and remained true to her convictions. That’s something that you can’t say about many politicians.

Nelson Mandela: When he came to power he could have been filled of hatred, anger and negativity and he showed us how living a positive life and forgiving people is beneficial to the victims and perpetrators.

Bill Bryson: He is a writer. He manages to inject such a fascination into so many facets of life

Richard Dawkins: He is a scientist who has written many books for people who are non-scientists. I admire him for looking for simplicity in complex situations because I think in the end it’s the simplicity that impresses me rather than the complexity.

Avil Beckford: Which one book had a profound impact on your life? What was it about this book that impacted you so deeply?

Dr. Roger Dacre: The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand was probably the most profound book that I read and I think it’s about believing in yourself and your work, and that this is a legitimate way to live your life.

Avil Beckford: If you were stranded on a deserted island, what are five books that you would like to have with you and why? Summarize the book in two sentences.

Dr. Roger Dacre:

1. The first of the books would be The FountainheadImage may be NSFW.
   Clik here to view. for the reason I’ve just given.
2. I’d also like to have Atlas ShruggedImage may be NSFW.
   Clik here to view. by Ayn Rand which is all about not allowing yourself to be used by other people for ends rather than your own. I think that’s a useful idea to have.
3. There is another book, A Short History of Nearly EverythingImage may be NSFW.
   Clik here to view. by Bill Bryson which I really enjoyed.

Avil Beckford: What one music CD and movie would you like to have with you (on the deserted island) and why?

Dr. Roger Dacre: I’d like to have Elton John’s Greatest Hits because they have always spoken to me. He was starting his fame when I was a teenager and he has continued to produce music all through my life so far and I have enjoyed almost all of his music.

I didn’t bring as many books because I wanted to bring more movies. I like the movie Brief Encounter, which is a movie about an unconsummated love affair, the longing of love that’s not consummated. It’s just one of those things that always spoke to me. I love the movie A Man for all Seasons which is about a principled man who loses his life because he wouldn’t become corrupt. I would also take Lion in Winter, which is another movie about someone who is brave in the face of almost certain defeat. And I would take two gay-themed movies. One is called Beautiful Thing which is about a young boy who discovers he is gay and how his mother does not reject him, and the final one is The Wedding Banquet which is actually a Chinese movie and again it’s about parents who are accepting of their gay son even though he didn’t have the courage to tell them about it. It’s an amusing yet telling story.

Avil Beckford: What excites you about life?

Dr. Roger Dacre: New experiences shared with friends. New experiences in new countries. New experiences in the theatre. New experiences in a restaurant, that sort of thing excites me about life.

Avil Beckford: How do you nurture your soul?

Dr. Roger Dacre: I like music, I love beautiful places, and I enjoy the love of my partner and friends.

Avil Beckford: If you had a personal genie and she gave you one wish, what would you wish for?

Dr. Roger Dacre: I’d wish for great personal, physical and mental health.

Avil Beckford: Complete the following, I am happy when…..

Dr. Roger Dacre: In the company of friends and family enjoying a shared experience. I’m happiest at work when I’m efficacious.

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below.

Book links are affiliate links.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.Kindle

The post The Invisible Mentor Interviews Roger Dacre, Medical Doctor Part Two appeared first on The Invisible Mentor.

Interviewee Name: Roger Dacre, Medical DoctorImage may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Company Name: Dr. Roger I Dacre

Website: http://www.doctordacre.com

Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.

I was born in London, England and when I was about six years old my parents moved to Barbados. A year or so later they sent me back to attend boarding school in the UK. I attended medical school in the UK, in London, England and then I emigrated to Canada and did residency or specialty training in family medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

After that I worked for 10 years in my own family practice in Cambridge, Ontario and moved to Toronto about 16 years ago. I opened the practice that I am practicing in now and was practicing there initially alone, and subsequently over the last 10 years with Dr. Lise Paquette.

Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you?

Usually I try to get to the office before 8 o’clock in the morning and I do the electronic and fax paperwork that is needed to be checked before starting to see patients around 8:30 in the morning. I generally see patients between 8:30 and 12:30 pm and I stop for lunch. My ideal day involves taking a 45-minute walk and then I restart seeing patients at 1:30 in the afternoon and I continue to see patients until 5:00 pm or 5:30 pm. The rest of the evening, unless I’m on call, is spent either for personal time or about twice a week I attend either a medical training meeting or medical administrative type meeting.

Avil Beckford: How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?

I embrace the ethos of providing quality care. It’s a very conscious attempt to continue to motivate myself through continuing education. Either learning things that I don’t know or teaching things that I do know to people who wish to learn them. When I’m looking at the same problem for a subsequent time, I try to place it in a context that’s specific to that person to make it different and knew to me as well as to that person.

Avil Beckford: If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

I would try to avoid moving practice after 10 years. When I moved from Cambridge to Toronto, I basically had to start again. It was if it was the first day of work again. Family medicine like many personal service industries is very much based on the trust and relationship between myself and in this case the patient and that just isn’t something that you acquire overnight. You only acquire that over the passage of a number of meetings and the development of the relationship. That is something you can’t buy from someone else, so you have to earn it for yourself.

Avil Beckford: What’s the most important business or other discovery you’ve made in the past year?

It’s kind of a business and personal discovery. I’ve always been proud of the way I treated the staff in my office and I see it as a matter of pride for me that I treat my staff with kindness and respect. I always assumed that this would produce a good outcome. I found that doing that does not always produce a good outcome. There are factors in the staff rather than in me that might indicate that the outcome wouldn’t be good.

Avil Beckford: What’s one of the biggest advances in your industry over the past five years?

It’s difficult to single out one particular thing because this is an industry which is crawling with innovation. It really is. I tried to think of three of the ones that affect me, but there are many in the industry as a whole. They are treatments for anticoagulation, the treatment for obesity with bariatric surgery (you are operating on obese people to help them lose weight), and treatments for diabetes. If you were to look at five years ago and look at now, these three areas are completely different than they were five years ago. I have to completely relearn all areas on a regular basis.

Avil Beckford: What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?

1. I’m in a business which is funded by the government and consequently one of the big risks to us is government whims or changes in government policies as a result of elections and the fact that governments are fighting with how to use limited resources.
2. The second issue is organizational fads. There seem to be an unlimited number of ways to organize the delivery of medical care and none of them seem to be superior to the other ones and you get people either civil servants or government ministers, or academic people all trying to impose their own particular fad on the rest of us.
3. The third thing is regulation which is both good and bad. Regulation in our industry seems to result in shortages of lots of things, and it stifles innovation because anything that’s outside the normal range is suspicious to regulators.

Avil Beckford: What’s unique about the service that you provide?

I can’t claim that the services I provide are unique, but I try to be noticeably outside the norm in terms of my commitment to providing not just good diagnostic care, but efficiency in the way the office is run.

Avil Beckford: What do you observe most people in your field doing badly that you think you do well?

I think that many of them have very poor office organization and pay little attention to customer service. I have colleagues who think it’s a matter of pride about how long people have to wait in their waiting room rather than a matter of shame.

Avil Beckford: Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it. What kind of lessons did you learn in the process?

I had a critical employee who left suddenly. We were left with having to recreate the skills that were needed for that role. In small businesses I think that sometimes you can have part of the process knowledge of the business in the hands of just one employee, and if that employee is gone you have to learn it all from scratch and sometimes that’s difficult.

When this employee left we realized that we had invested too much in one position in terms of the process knowledge of our practice. We have replaced that role with two people doing part-time work, and my partner and I have decided to take a more active role in running certain parts of the business for the future.

There was a lot to learn from that. We realized that we needed to have little manuals. We already had manuals to describe all the little functions that are needed, but we realized that we needed to be more careful and that those manuals were kept up-to-date, and that we had multiple staff members who are able to perform the different functions.

Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.

In a way, it’s a bizarre story in that I don’t remember who gave me in what I consider in retrospect to be my big break. But I was at a social function, and I had just failed to get into medical school, and one of the people at this social function was describing the name of one of the teaching hospitals in England, which had a particular interest in people who were applying for the second time to medical school.

I used that information to put that particular medical school at the top of my list of five places that you are allowed to apply to at once. And I actually got into that particular medical school the following year. I don’t know who it was, and it gave me the opportunity to get what I considered to be my big break, which was my chance to learn medicine.

Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?

It’s similar to the other question in that my failure to get into medical school the first time, I consider to be my biggest failure. I had been predicting that I would get in and it was a big surprise that I didn’t. What it taught me is that I’m responsible for my own successes and I need to believe in myself and in my ability to pick myself up when I’ve had a reverse and make the thing happen.

Avil Beckford: What has been your biggest disappointment in your life – and what are you doing to prevent its reoccurrence?

Probably my biggest disappointment at the moment is the way I’ve been handling my employees and certainly I know when I had a small practice there used to be a blurred line between the boss and staff relationship and friend relationship and as the office got bigger, we’ve made an effort to keep it more professional, not unfriendly, but just not the same way.

I always thought that good behaviour would be rewarded with gratitude and I realize looking back at everything that went on this year and three years ago when a similar thing happened that it is my lack of inattention to the signs that this is happening. I’m trying to learn to be more objective in the way I look at the relationships with my staff. We have not taken the annual review as serious as we should and so we are going to put a lot more effort into doing that in a more professional way in the future.

Avil Beckford: What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?

There were two really. One was the decision to emigrate to Canada from the UK and the other was to move from Cambridge, Ontario a small town of 120,000 to Toronto. They have had a very big impact on my life because they completely transformed the environment in which I practice medicine.

Avil Beckford: What are three events that helped to shape your life?

1. The most significant was qualifying as a doctor.
2. The second was choosing and qualifying as a family physician as opposed to some other type of doctor.
3. The third one was a personal one, which was coming out as a gay man.

Avil Beckford: What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?

I think it’s a dynamic accomplishment in the sense that it’s the accomplishment of bringing freshness to my practice of medicine.

Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?

Looking back on my life I didn’t realize that the first three of the mentors I would describe were mentors but they were. The first was one of my teachers in primary school, I say primary and middle school. His name was Mr. Arthur and I think he taught me that it was okay to be inquisitive, and it was okay to be an individualist outside of the mainstream. So that was a very important lesson to learn.

The next mentor I had was Keith Warshaw who was my tutor in high school and he taught me that the world works in a certain way and you have to look at how it works and you can’t break the rules without realizing there will be consequences. He wasn’t saying the rules were right or wrong, he was saying they are there and you have to pay attention to them. I then had a mentor in medical school and she really taught me that it’s really important to do the work that needs to done rather than to think that you can take short cuts to it.

And finally Dr. May Cowan, who was my professor at McMaster University who I still turn to for advice even today, and she just taught me so many things about how to be a good family doctor.

Avil Beckford: What’s one core message you received from your mentors?

The message was that quality and achievement comes from honest work.

Avil Beckford: An invisible mentor is a unique leader you can learn things from by observing them from afar, in the capacity of an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?

I would say to people, you need to decide what you want to do and aim to learn and practice this with integrity.

By the way, these are the books that Dr Dacre referred to in the interview.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.The FountainheadImage may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.Atlas ShruggedImage may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.A Short History of Nearly EverythingImage may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

This article contains Amazon affiliate links, which means if you click on a link and buy any of the books from Amazon, the company will pay me a small commission.

The post The Invisible Mentor Interviews Roger Dacre, Medical Doctor appeared first on The Invisible Mentor.

Interviewee Name: Roger Dacre, Medical DoctorImage may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Company Name: Dr. Roger I Dacre

Website: http://www.doctordacre.com

Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Dr. Roger Dacre: I was born in London, England and when I was about six years old my parents moved to Barbados. A year or so later they sent me back to attend boarding school in the UK. I attended medical school in the UK, in London, England and then I emigrated to Canada and did residency or specialty training in family medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

After that I worked for 10 years in my own family practice in Cambridge, Ontario and moved to Toronto about 16 years ago. I opened the practice that I am practicing in now and was practicing there initially alone, and subsequently over the last 10 years with Dr. Lise Paquette.

Avil Beckford: How do you integrate your personal and professional life?

Dr. Roger Dacre: I have a good group of friends and a supportive partner. That partner recognizes that my medical practice is important to my life, but the time is also important. I’m fortunate in that my partner, my friends and in many ways my patients seem to recognize that there are more parts to my life than just dealing with them.

Avil Beckford: What are five life lessons that you have learned so far?

Dr. Roger Dacre:

• Be true to myself.
• Find meaning for your life.
• Find and work to support yourself.
• Look for and cherish friends.

Avil Beckford: When you have some down time, how do you spend it?

Dr. Roger Dacre: I’m a very avid theatre goer. I love movies. I like going to restaurants and I love going for walks, and I do a lot of traveling.

Avil Beckford: What process do you use to generate great ideas?

Dr. Roger Dacre: I think this is one of the things that Ruth Bowden taught me, she said, “You can allow yourself to just sit and think, relaxing.” I usually listen to music when I’m doing this, but there are other ways to allow yourself to process and to generate ideas that will allow you to see things in a different way. You see something working the opposite way than we do here in Canada or they do it in the UK and it works, so often it’s having a fresh way of looking at things that helps me to generate great ideas.

Avil Beckford: What’s your favourite quotation and why?

Dr. Roger Dacre: “You have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” which as you know comes from the American Constitution. I like this because it summarizes what is a right and what is something you need to go out and earn for yourself even though you should be free to do it. It’s not saying you have the right to happiness, it’s saying you have the right to try and find happiness. That summarizes how I look at life. I expect to be given the right to live my life and to be free, but I don’t expect more than that from the world. I expect to have to earn the rest from the world.

Avil Beckford: How do you define success?

Dr. Roger Dacre: Living a life that actualizes your full potential. That would be success to me, so you could be successful in any job. It just depends on your skills and other things.

Avil Beckford: In your opinion what’s the formula for success?

Dr. Roger Dacre: It’s not a secret. I think that integrity and hard work are the formula for success in any part of the world where you have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Avil Beckford: What are the steps you took to succeed in your field?

Dr. Roger Dacre: Attending all the lectures and going to all the things at university was an important part. I find that I learn a lot from practicing physicians, as well as books. And for my own practice of medicine, running into a problem is often a learning experience for be and can end up being a very enriching experience for me and hopefully the patient.

Avil Beckford: What advice do you have for someone just starting out in your field?

Dr. Roger Dacre: Start out how you mean to continue. I think you should use the same ethics and the same work practice, right from the beginning of your career and not feel that these are some things you graduate to later. When I started my practice in Cambridge, Ontario the seventh and eighth patient that came to me were drug addicts and I refused to take them on as patients. When I was telling my parents about it, they said, “Why do you have to turn anyone down at this time can’t you wait until later?” And I said, “When do you suddenly get ethics, how many patients?” And of course they couldn’t give me a number, because you either have ethics from the start or you don’t.

Avil Beckford: If trusted friends could introduce you to five people that you’ve always wanted to meet (dad or alive), who would you choose? And what would you say to them?

Dr. Roger Dacre: I decided I was only going to choose living people.

The Queen of England: I would like to find out from her how she’s managed to work so hard and for so long and to reconcile that with her sense of self. She’s been the victim of criticism and various other things and she seems to have done this with a peacefulness that I find very admirable.

Margaret Thatcher: She is a person who has a huge conviction and she fought against much larger forces than herself and remained true to her convictions. That’s something that you can’t say about many politicians.

Nelson Mandela: When he came to power he could have been filled of hatred, anger and negativity and he showed us how living a positive life and forgiving people is beneficial to the victims and perpetrators.

Bill Bryson: He is a writer. He manages to inject such a fascination into so many facets of life

Richard Dawkins: He is a scientist who has written many books for people who are non-scientists. I admire him for looking for simplicity in complex situations because I think in the end it’s the simplicity that impresses me rather than the complexity.

Avil Beckford: Which one book had a profound impact on your life? What was it about this book that impacted you so deeply?

Dr. Roger Dacre: The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand was probably the most profound book that I read and I think it’s about believing in yourself and your work, and that this is a legitimate way to live your life.

Avil Beckford: If you were stranded on a deserted island, what are five books that you would like to have with you and why? Summarize the book in two sentences.

Dr. Roger Dacre:

1. The first of the books would be The FountainheadImage may be NSFW.
   Clik here to view. for the reason I’ve just given.
2. I’d also like to have Atlas ShruggedImage may be NSFW.
   Clik here to view. by Ayn Rand which is all about not allowing yourself to be used by other people for ends rather than your own. I think that’s a useful idea to have.
3. There is another book, A Short History of Nearly EverythingImage may be NSFW.
   Clik here to view. by Bill Bryson which I really enjoyed.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.The FountainheadImage may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.Atlas ShruggedImage may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.A Short History of Nearly EverythingImage may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Avil Beckford: What one music CD and movie would you like to have with you (on the deserted island) and why?

Dr. Roger Dacre: I’d like to have Elton John’s Greatest Hits because they have always spoken to me. He was starting his fame when I was a teenager and he has continued to produce music all through my life so far and I have enjoyed almost all of his music.

I didn’t bring as many books because I wanted to bring more movies. I like the movie Brief Encounter, which is a movie about an unconsummated love affair, the longing of love that’s not consummated. It’s just one of those things that always spoke to me. I love the movie A Man for all Seasons which is about a principled man who loses his life because he wouldn’t become corrupt. I would also take Lion in Winter, which is another movie about someone who is brave in the face of almost certain defeat.

And I would take two gay-themed movies. One is called Beautiful Thing which is about a young boy who discovers he is gay and how his mother does not reject him, and the final one is The Wedding Banquet which is actually a Chinese movie and again it’s about parents who are accepting of their gay son even though he didn’t have the courage to tell them about it. It’s an amusing yet telling story.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.Best of Elton John – Greatest Hits Go ClassicImage may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.Brief EncounterImage may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.A Man For All SeasonsImage may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.The Lion In WinterImage may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.Beautiful ThingImage may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.The Wedding BanquetImage may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Avil Beckford: What excites you about life?

Dr. Roger Dacre: New experiences shared with friends. New experiences in new countries. New experiences in the theatre. New experiences in a restaurant, that sort of thing excites me about life.

Avil Beckford: How do you nurture your soul?

Dr. Roger Dacre: I like music, I love beautiful places, and I enjoy the love of my partner and friends.

Avil Beckford: If you had a personal genie and she gave you one wish, what would you wish for?

Dr. Roger Dacre: I’d wish for great personal, physical and mental health.

Avil Beckford: Complete the following, I am happy when…..

Dr. Roger Dacre: In the company of friends and family enjoying a shared experience. I’m happiest at work when I’m efficacious.

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below.

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The post The Invisible Mentor Interviews Roger Dacre, Medical Doctor Part Two appeared first on The Invisible Mentor.