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Show Notes

Rana Al-Falaki opens by telling Payman what she’s still struggling with, even now: the gap between how put-together she looks from the outside and how much she still has to fight to let people see the rest of it. She joins him as a specialist periodontist and laser research pioneer who built two award-winning practices, sold them, and then rebuilt her entire career as a performance coach after her body forced the issue.

The backstory is a lot. Her mother died of breast cancer when Rana was 24, a death she now ties directly to a lifetime of people-pleasing and swallowed stress. In her mid-twenties she moved in with a man who became physically and emotionally abusive, a relationship she couldn’t find the strength to leave for years. By her late thirties, buried under a GDC complaint, a divorce and the demands of running two practices, her body gave out: a diagnosis of POTS, a condition that had already left other sufferers unable to walk, arrived at almost the same time as a quiet choice about which label she was going to wear.

There’s real clinical substance threaded through all of it too. Rana explains how she talked her way into becoming one of the first periodontists in the UK using erbium lasers for bone regeneration, entirely on instinct and with no studies to back her up, and how she eventually got the research published against a field she describes as deeply resistant to new ideas. She’s just as direct about what it actually takes to build a referral practice patients and dentists both trust, and why building Breathe, a free wellbeing platform for the dental profession, became personal after a friend who introduced her to lasers died from an infection that followed a drinking spiral after his own GDC complaint.

In This Episode

00:00:50 – Introduction

00:02:40 – What she still struggles with

00:05:00 – Spirituality and belief

00:15:00 – Why she became a dentist

00:21:30 – Losing her mother

00:34:30 – Grief, addiction and abuse

00:43:00 – Pitfalls of high performers

00:50:40 – Burnout and chronic illness

00:57:30 – Getting into lasers

01:12:20 – Building a referral practice

01:17:40 – Marriage and divorce

01:24:45 – The Nail It coaching system

01:32:40 – Launching Breathe

01:35:55 – Blackbox thinking

01:41:25 – Favourite lectures

01:46:15 – Fantasy dinner party

About Rana Al-Falaki

Rana Al-Falaki is a specialist periodontist and laser research pioneer who built and later sold two award-winning periodontal practices in London. She is now a leadership and performance coach, the creator of the Nail It coaching system, and co-founder of Breathe, a free wellbeing platform for the dental profession.