Myo Life
Myo Life is a podcast for bored, burned out dental hygienists (and myofunctional therapists) who are ready to work less, earn more, have total control of their calendar, enjoy geographic freedom and most of all - make a bigger impact for their patients - while ditching the long hours, constant aches and dreaded Monday's. You will learn simple and effective strategies and tools to start and grow your profitable myofunctional therapy practice. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss a thing!
Myo Life
#4: From Overworked to Overjoyed: A Dental Hygienist’s Guide to the Perfect Week
Are you ready to design a life you’re bonkers about? In this episode of Myo Life, Carmen shares her step-by-step guide to creating your ideal week, inspired by Michael Hyatt’s productivity principles and Jenny Blake’s transformative book Pivot.
Learn how to align your schedule with your values, set firm boundaries, and leverage your “freedom number” to transition from dental hygiene to a thriving myofunctional therapy business. Whether you’re dreaming of working fewer hours, earning more, or finally having total control of your calendar, this episode is packed with actionable insights to help you get there.
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 Myo functional 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. Welcome back, friend, to another exciting episode. I hope this finds you building a life that you are absolutely bonkers about. Today we are going to be talking about building your ideal week. So first I learned about building my, or creating my ideal week from a couple different things. So first of all, Michael Hyatt taught me about designing my ideal week, so you can see here on my calendar that that is what I have done. So this is in an ideal situation, okay. So looking at this example here, on a Monday I want to protect my piece from six to nine. Then I go work out and then I do. I start my week and then I do metrics and marketing. I go out for a walk in the afternoon, so I kind of have everything laid out. So I learned this part from him. One thing that he does teach is onstage, offstage, backstage. So backstage is kind of like the, the task, business tasks, so I don't like to spend a lot of time there. I want to be working on intentional needle moving product uh projects. If I am not with clients, okay Um projects. If I am not with clients, okay Um. So that's kind of the backstage. On stage is when I am either, you know, recording these episodes, um, working with clients, that kind of stuff, and then off stage obviously is when I'm not working. So, like you can see in this example, um, on Wednesdays is my personal day off, so, um, I have to do chores and laundry and groceries, all that fun stuff. So my ideal schedule has Monday through Friday, with the exception of Wednesday. Also, you can see, my ideal day has me off at 4.30, with the exception of. I work one late day a week until six. So that's what I learned from Michael Hyatt.
Speaker 1:And then, if you've been with me for any amount of time, you have heard me talk about Pivot. So Pivot, the book Pivot by Jenny Blake really is instrumental in, I would say, just changing the course of my life, because here I am, um. So in this book there were exercises. I'm telling you, get the book, do the exercises, write the answers down, because every year from Christmas to new year's, I evaluate, I go back and look at those. It makes me so proud of myself to see how far I have come. But part of those exercises were you know how I would like my day to look, how I would like to feel with my day. So, um, really kind of just plays into the same thing.
Speaker 1:So I call this the first layer of the ideal week. Then, um, so, so this is really how I want it to be. And then, um, I have, let me look at my calendar here. Then I do the next layers, if you will. So, and this is something that I teach, I teach in my calendaring system, in the total calendar control lesson, um, but this is where I I root, like, this is life, okay. So these blue, um, these are my appointments. That's when I block out my time to go to the gym, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:So when you're designing your perfect week, I want you to a dream. So do a perfect one. Now, obviously, if you're working, that's going to be different, but I want you to dream what you're going to do so that I can help you get there. If you don't know what you're working towards, it's going to be really impossible, okay. So, um, what's realistic? What are your non-negotiable? So this is going to be kids activities, this is going to be work. So maybe, um, instead of like where mine says batching content from 1030 to 430, you might be saying, hey, I'm working, I work on Tuesdays, thursdays, fridays, or maybe Monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday, um, then I want you to consider what your freedom number told you.
Speaker 1:If you don't know what your freedom number is, I want you to go back to that episode, um, so you can see where you're able to cut back. So, in the freedom number example we were talking about, you know, I did just an easy math example of needing to earn $36,000 a year and if you were making $50 an hour, that that came out to be 14.4 hours a week. So if you were trying to do what I have done and build a business that allows you to work from anywhere and have total control of your calendar, you're you really want to be working. That you know 15 hours a week instead of 40. So, um, that is going to show you where you can cut back. So, um. So your goal is that you start to match your dream week, your perfect week, your ideal week, with um, real life, day to day, real life day to day. And then you're going to keep refining and working towards that. Um.
Speaker 1:There's times where, if I compare these different layers, my week gets overrun by work and not saying no, um, and then I start to not take care of myself. I take my workouts out of my schedule, I don't go for my afternoon walk so that I can get that afternoon sun and build my vitamin D and keep my melatonin levels where they need to be. So, um, I have to check myself, and so will you. Um, I also love, as I'm recording this, it's towards the end of the year. So I always do an end of year workflow where I look at what did my calendar look like for the whole year. So I do use my calendar really like a journal. Okay, so every minute is accounted for and that's just so. When I do my end of year workflow, I can go back and say, hey, what worked, what didn't work, what do I want to keep doing? Um, what do I want to double down on? What do I want to eliminate, delegate, automate, all of that kind of stuff. So, um, you will keep refining to get towards that ideal day.
Speaker 1:So, let's say, theoretically, you are teaching, teaching, you're working and you want to also be building your myofunctional therapy business. You have found, let's say, you can cut back one day of um of hygiene. So now, instead of you know, monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday, friday, practicing, maybe you're going to take Wednesdays off. So Wednesday becomes your business hour day. I talk about this in the boundaries lesson, so, or in the boundaries episode. So that would be when you do business. That's where you're going to get ahead. That's when you're going to work on your 90 day essential tasks. That's where you're going to work on building your website, building your network, working on marketing um, finding humans that you can tell like, hey, I can help you. That's where you get that time.
Speaker 1:So, and then, as you start to build your myofunctional therapy business, you are now, you know, starting to make money on Wednesday. So maybe you get to a point where you're making, you know, two thirds of your income from hygiene, you're making two thirds or a third from myo, and now maybe you're able to cut back a little bit more. So now maybe you can lose, um, you know, cut back another day of hygiene. So that is how you go from overworked to overjoyed. I truly am. I am overjoyed in the ability to work from anywhere and be in total control of my calendar. Also, to be able to work from yoga in yoga pants, that's great too.
Speaker 1:So, um, so your call to action is to um, learn more about you know, make sure you know what your freedom number is. Find where you can cut back. Start working on your calendar. Um, get your butt inside the Ditch Hygiene Academy so you can go through my total calendar control program. Um, I teach all about boundaries. I teach you all about project management, time management, all of that kind of stuff. So that is a wrap, my friend.