Myo Life

Transcript

Hey, I'm Carmen, and welcome to Myo Life. That's short for my Outrageous Life, which is exactly the kind of life I get to live since I found the courage to ditch dental hygiene and build a life I'm bonkers about as a myofunctional therapist and entrepreneur. Here you will find all the things myo business and how to build a life that you, too, are bonkers about. I'm very happy you're here. Shall we dive in Well hello, friend, and welcome back to the MyoLife podcast. I'm Carmen, the Director of Bravery at the Myofunctional Therapy Training Academy, and I'm so very glad that you are here. We have a great topic today.
Today, we're going to be pulling the curtain back on something nobody really talks about your first year as a myofunctional therapist. Buckle up, my friend, because this ride is not all filtered Instagram posts and Stripe bank deposit screenshots. It's messy, it's wild, and, yes, I'm pretty sure that I ugly cried a time or two. The other thing, though, is, my friend, it's also magic, so let's dive into the real raw behind the scenes. Look at what this first year actually looks like, and how to make it one that you're proud of. All right, you are going to feel like you do not know enough, and if you're waiting to feel ready. You are going to wait forever. That imposter syndrome, totally normal, my friend. You just dropped out of the hygiene chair and into a whole new identity. I always tell this to my students borrow my confidence until you build your own. You don't need another certification to start. You don't need another class, my friend. What you need is reps. You need to do the work. You need to start talking, start doing, start talking even more, doing more. Start right now. You only need to be a step ahead of the person that you're helping. You don't need to know it all and my friend shocking, you won't know it all. I don't know it all after all these years. Maybe it was because I needed to get out of dental hygiene so bad that I was scrappy, but y'all, I was so unhappy I was having heart palpitations on the way to work. I didn't have a choice but to start before I was ready. You're going to have to start ready, or before you're ready. Also, okay, take ugly and perfect action. Remember when you were a new dental hygienist, you didn't feel ready, but, boy howdy, you started scraping the distal of number three, didn't you? And in no time it was super easy, okay. So of course you remember doing that. You have proof that you can get started without knowing everything. All right, you're also in that first year, my friend.
You are going to change your mind a lot. You'll price things one way and then you're going to adjust. If you don't believe in your price, your product, your people, your uh yourself, or what's possible, then you will always question this. Your knee-jerk reaction will always be to lower your price. But the objection isn't always about price. Quite often it's about something else, like time or if the woman believes that she can actually make the commitment to do the work so that she can get the results. So sometimes the objection isn't even about you. It's about the person believing in themselves.
I take a deep dive into this inside the Profitable Pricing Lab, but let me sum it up here there is no going rate. There is no mayor of my town and no one should be helping you set your prices. You are the captain of your ship, my friend, and you need to set them. You also should not crowdsource them. Your prices will fall somewhere between your resentment level and below. So above your resentment level and below your, I'm going to vomit, just saying the price out loud level. I call this your happy pricing. It will be very different for everybody and many factors go into this and I cover that in the program. But just know, nobody else should be telling you what the going rate is Okay. Another thing that you're going to change your mind on in that first year are your hours, or maybe your ideal day. For those of you who don't know anything about the ideal day, this is part of the calendaring process that I teach is we each identify how we really want our day to look and feel, and then we build our business so that we can have that.
Another change that you'll most likely make in that first year is, you know, changing equipment or adding something, or maybe you're going to change your exam process. It's all going to change multiple times. You're going to say yes to clients who drain you and then you're going to learn that you never want to do that again. We talk about that a little bit more later. You might niche down and then pivot and then niche down again. You guys, it isn't failure, it's evolution. Business is just repeated experiments, and the ones who win are the ones who stay in the lab, and this is where your standard operating procedures or your SOPs come in. They're basically the operating system for your business. So when you change something, you know. When you're doing a lot of changing your mind and stuff in that first year when you change it, be sure to change your SOP so that you actually know what you were doing. And then the other thing is is when you see this evolution, you can see over time what's working and what's not working. So I'm a big fan of getting data like hey, what did I do, why did I do it and what is the result. So this was a big one for me. And even sometimes I catch something in my business that I didn't update my SOPs and I get into it, you know, because I'm not in this content or this process every day and I'm like, oh my gosh, what do I do here? So that will be really helpful. But just know that in that first year you are going to change your mind a lot. Now this one really hits home for me. So comparison will try to steal your joy.
Scrolling through social media makes it look like everybody else has it all together. Everybody else has their poop in a group, but those people you know this they're just showing you their highlight reel. They're perfectly filtered when what you don't see is the late night breakdowns, the refund requests, the client no-shows. Stay in your lane, put your blinders on, run your race. Okay, first of all, it's not a race, it's your life. But just don't spend time looking at what everybody else is doing. Okay, the time that you spend looking side to side keeps you from going forward, and this is still an area where I have pretty intense boundaries. I don't know how to say this eloquently, so I'm just going to say it. I know so many fellow therapists that are totally consumed by the business, and I get it. I get it, they love it and I'm not beating them up for that. But, man, they attend webinars most nights and they're part of study groups and they like or comment on every social media post that pertains to anything in our field. They are constantly in my own mode and you guys, this exhausts me just thinking about it, because it sounds terrible. I purposefully have to have boundaries so that I get to live a life. I'm bonkers about.
Going back to comparison and social media. I have a big boundary with this because I don't scroll. First of all, it's a complete waste of time. You already know this. But second of all, the feeling that it gives me. Even after all these years and all the success that I've had. The feeling is not a good one. It's yucky. I immediately feel like I'm not doing enough, or I'm not saying the right thing, or I don't have enough followers, yada, yada, yada. I have to remind myself that I built a multi-million dollar business with a small but mighty following on social media, and these days social media can be very fickle. I know people with big followings who do not earn as much as they would like, and I also know people who have very successful, profitable, profitable businesses who don't even really do social media or do very little of it. So I guess what I'm saying here is to remember the old saying you know that comparison is the thief of joy, and when you're wasting time in the comparison spiral, you are overlooking the amazing, joyful, outrageous life that you are living because you chose to get into this field, whether that's the money or geographic freedom, total control of your calendar or something as simple as my pups laying here on the floor and under my desk.
I like to focus on the joy in my cup and not doing a bunch of comparisons to make myself feel like garbage. I just refuse to do it All right. Another thing that you're going to experience in that first year is that your first clients they're not going to be perfect. Pulse and a purse that was really my first screening tool. If they had a heartbeat and a credit card, I was game, but not anymore. The early clients in that first year or two will teach you what you love, what you don't and what boundaries you need. Every tough session is a gift wrapped in grit.
I've had nightmare clients that I have had to dismiss from therapy because they are just absolutely impossible to work with or they are very non-compliant and at some point they are going to make me look bad. I remember a client that I accepted, basically because I was getting ready to go on vacation and a lot of cash was going to be a nice thing. What I didn't consider was the cost of working with the client, both emotionally and mentally. This particular client had been in my Facebook support group and had really said some pretty weird off-the-wall stuff, so I had my reservations about working with her anyhow. Then I made the terrible decision to work with her and in the end she ended up flying to see Dr Zoggy for a consult. So we were both co-treating her but she wouldn't do what I taught and she just wasn't getting anywhere. I ended up dismissing her from my care because of the non-compliance and she was just really going to make me look like a damn nut job and an incompetent therapist because she was marching to the beat of her own drum. Let me tell you that was an awkward letter to have to write to Dr Zoggy's practice and and just tell him like hey, I'm dismissing this person because they're not doing what they're supposed to. And you know I never wanted his practice to think that that was the type of work that I did. So that was no fun. But just know you will make those mistakes as well.
Now, another thing you're also going to experience in the first year is you know basically just that you're going to be trying to do a lot of hustling and you won't be spending time to set up your systems and you just I think it's really important that you need to know that you don't need to be everywhere, but you do need a good system and I love me a system. Scrappy is fine, but sloppy, oh gosh, it's going to sink you. It's really going to slow you down. Start small. Have templates for emails, set up workflows for onboarding your clients, send up canned or guided responses for frequently asked questions. Document everything You're going to thank yourself later. This kind of goes back to what I said earlier about SOPs. Stay organized and have systems in place from the very beginning. I have a document in my Google Drive that is quite literally called guided responses, and I never give the same canned response to somebody, so I'm not just copying pastings a response to somebody, but I have a guided response. So I have basically the meat and potatoes already in a document so I can copy and paste that into an email and then I personalize it to whatever the email is pertaining to. All right.
Another thing that you're going to experience your first year as a myofunctional therapist is the money. Okay, the money. Um, in the first year might be slow, it is okay, the money will come. You got to stay in the game and you have to stay focused. You're building trust with your community, yes, but you're also building trust with yourself. Okay, every free assessment, every DM conversation that you have, every exam that you complete, it's all practice. And when that first client pays in full and they say thank you, or when you do that first final exit and they say this changed my life, you're going to cry. I did. Many of my clients, time and time again, have just made me really proud of myself and it reminds me of like this is why I do it.
Okay, many of you have been in my community for years and or maybe you've taken one of my training programs and you get discouraged when you don't have a six figure year right out of the gate, when people don't come flocking just because you hung up your open shingle or added myofunctional therapist to your Google email signature. My friend, that didn't happen to me either. You have to give, give, give, educate, educate, educate before you can ever expect to receive. So stay focused and patient. So many of my students get in their own way because they take their foot off the gas because they're not rolling in $10,000 months right out of the gate. Wouldn't it shock you to know that it can take someone a year or longer to actually make the decision to move forward with therapy? Okay, it's true, I've had clients, you know, two, three years later that will email me and tell me they're finally ready to get started. And you know, I go back into my, look at my notes and they just um, they, for whatever reason, sometimes they have to save the money, sometimes they're moving, you know, some of them have to go through um, airway orth. You know a lot of different things, but stay focused, don't take your foot off the gas.
All right, and I think another important thing to talk about kind of the last thing I have outlined here for what is important that first year, what you might experience that first year that you're in business, is that it's really important to celebrate more than just clients Okay, um, when you finally make that first post, my friend to celebrate it, when you have that first no show. This, you know, sometimes we look at this negatively, but it is still progress because those no shows are going to help you shape your business policies and boundaries. I used to do free assessments and I no longer do them because I got tired of people wasting my time, you know, taking up a spot in my calendar and then no-showing, and it hasn't hurt my business at all. Another thing you can celebrate is that moment that you say no to a red flag client, so the one I was telling you above that I should have said no to yeah. So you should celebrate when you are um of the right mindset to say this person is not a good match for me, okay. So when you, when you get to that point, that is a major win. You are becoming the therapist, the business owner, the woman who runs her life. So track it all, celebrate it all.
At the end of every day, when I lay my head on the pillow, I run through the wins of my day, both personal and business, like, yay, I got my workout done. Or I slated in the kitchen with my delicious new recipe, yay. Or I slated in the kitchen with my delicious new recipe, yay. Or I batched six podcast episodes, because you know I like me some batching. Or maybe I figured out a new tech platform or a feature. Like that's a double yay.
It's not only about money rolling into the bank. There is so much more to celebrate, so get in the habit of looking for the little things to celebrate. I also have to add in here that if you set your goals properly which, of course, you gotta know, I teach you how to do that in the program you will usually be celebrating small wins, because it might be a dozen little goals that add up to the big goals, to the BHAGs, which a BHAG is a big, hairy, audacious goal. So remember that Often we can easily celebrate the big goal of reaching your first 100K year, but you never even considered or celebrated the thousand little other things that you had to do to get there, or celebrated the thousand little other things that you had to do to get there.
All right, my friend, let's get ready to land this plane. All right, your first year in myofunctional therapy isn't about perfection, it's about permission. You'll feel like you don't know enough. I hope that I reassured you that you do. You're going to change your mind all the time, and that's totally normal and it's okay and you're going to grow faster than you thought possible if you just keep going. There's a lot of growth involved in this, both and professionally. So it's not just about those dollars in the bank, my friend. Forward is the direction and I really don't care what pace it is, as long as you're going forward. A mile is still a mile, whether you run it in 10 or whether you run it in 5k.
So if this episode has got you feeling fired up or motivated, do this next. Head on over to your calendar and block time right now to map out your next 30 days. What are you going to test? Remember, you're staying in the lab, the business lab. What do you need to clean up? Who are you going to serve? And hey, if you need help with the roadmap, if you need help with figuring all that stuff out, maybe the Ditch Hygiene Academy or the Myo Business Accelerator is what you need.
So how do you know which one? Well, I like to say that the Ditch Hygiene Academy is. It's a massive program. You guys. We recorded it over 40 weeks. There's over 100 hours in it. Okay. Program. You guys, we recorded it over 40 weeks. There's over a hundred hours in it. Okay. So that includes the Mayo instruction as well as all the business support that you need. So if you feel like you're very ill prepared for the industry, then you probably need this program Now. If you feel really strong in your Mayo skills and you just need help growing your practice, then the MBA program is for you. So we will be opening this program soon.
So if you want to be on the list to get notified, just send me a fan mail message by using the link at the top of the episode description, wherever you are listening to this. So the link is going to say let's connect, text me, okay. So click on that and just send me the fan mail. I will get it and then I will have your information in that message. Make sure I know who you are and how to get ahold of you. And last, I have a favor If this episode helped you out, hit, subscribe, follow, rate it and share the my All Life podcast with a fellow therapist. It's one of the best ways that I can reach and support others who are just trying to figure this all out. And hey, guess what? If it's not your vibe, you can always unsubscribe. So until next time, go build a life you're bonkers about, and I'll be back soon with more Myofunctional Business Goodness.