Hello and welcome. I'm really excited to chat with you today about work life balance as a registered dietitian and how we as dietitians can maximize our time. Well, I am going to give you some tactical steps along with some storytelling today, and I want to share some personal experiences from me as I am both in my second trimester, which is really exciting and we're in the middle.
We're actually launching right now. Our membership, which is really exciting called the library. So I want to share some personal experiences about managing time and how I've been able to progress over the years. And then some of the mistakes I see our clients make, which are so common, right? It's, it's just that it takes some practice.
So balancing your life and your work. As a Dieititian can take some trial and error. And when you do find that balance, it's going to help you with feeling more satisfied, creating more impact, and really preventing burnout. Because if you push too hard or you don't push at all, on the contrary, you'll end up feeling dissatisfied and burnout can lead to mental health issues.
It can lead to you taking really long breaks. And so you want to find a sustainable way. To showcase the work you do as a dietitian and make it work for your unique life because we all have different thresholds. Some of us have a higher capacity to do more things where others of us don't. And then we have seasons of our life.
Like right now, me being pregnant, the pregnancy has been really smooth and I'm really fortunate. But I have felt a little more tired and it says sometimes I have my regularly programmed schedule has had to be adjusted because I'll need to take in the day nap, or all of a sudden just not quite have the energy for as many calls as I did previously before I was pregnant.
And so it's a matter of self awareness to know hey I'm going through this stage for me it's pregnancy for somebody else that might be. Starting a new career, transitioning a career as you're doing this on the side, or it might be that you have a lot of fast business growth. You've hired your first dietitian to work under you and your business, and it's causing a lot of anxiety.
And that's normal. And then not to mention, we have the personal things, right? Maybe you're having some challenges with your spouse, or maybe you your family member is sick. And so you're going to have to adjust how you're feeling based on your environment. And so that's why reflection and writing affirmations can be really helpful, as well as building a community and being around other like minded dietitians who want to grow a business, who want to create alternative revenue streams and non traditional routes, while also staying true to their brand philosophy.
And that's why I created the library. And we're really excited to launch the library next week. And we have our free webinar, so I don't want you to forget to sign up, where you'll learn secrets to selling as a dietitian without feeling salesy. This is a really hands on webinar. I've never done something so hands on before, where you can actually leave with tactical steps about how to either create a page.
Or how to improve the sales patients you already have. So I really would love to have you sign up. You'll get a lot of free, valuable information. And I will invite you to join our membership if that does fit for you. Because it's a fantastic community where you can progress with your business skills.
But of course, the support of me and my team. So the first tip when it comes to balancing work life for where you're at right now, hopefully through my storytelling and intro there, you've thought a little bit about where you're at. Like thinking about your personal life, your personal circumstances, for example, me, second trimester pregnancy, and it could be you, family member issues, things like that.
And then also thinking about kind of your pacing with where you're at with your business. If you're like some of our clients, maybe you are building your business on the side, or if you're like others of our clients, you're doing this part time because you want to be able to have a flexible schedule and spend time with your family or build a family.
And you don't want this to be a 40 hour per week. Type of a situation, which is very traditional, right? So you might want to have a flexible schedule and 20 hour work week or something that you can manage and scale to your own liking, which is why online business is so exciting. So, the 1st tip I would say, and I talk about this quite a bit is learning how to prioritize your tasks.
Often productivity is confused with prioritization. So productivity is not doing more things. Productivity means you're doing the right things at the right time. And it's so challenging to know what's a priority. It's something you only learn by making mistakes. And that's why being kind to yourself and building resilience as a dietitian, especially an online dietitian, through the landscape of nutrition software and online bullies and this whole climate we're navigating together through the internet.
If you're able to not give up and allow yourself some credit, give yourself some slack as you're learning how to prioritize, you will achieve better outcomes. So one of the best ways to prioritize your tasks would be to start writing down. What are you doing on a daily basis? Now I have a whole and workbook and I have a whole exercise that I give our clients inside the library where you can and you can follow this without my exercise, but it helps to have the visual.
I can do it with you if you join the library, but if you don't, then I hope you take away some tips from today's free episode. If you write down all the tasks you do in a week, like a mini audit, I know it sounds a little overwhelming, but bear with me is huge payoff. Write down the tasks that you do, and then write down on a side column, like almost like a, it would be, you'd have a horizontal column that has like lists and categories, and then vertical would be one through 50 tasks, right?
So you're going to dump out your tasks vertically, and then horizontally on this sheet. That I have created that you create yourself, you would have categories. And the first category would be like, how do you feel? Does this task drain you? And then you might have another category that says, is this task related to your main goal?
Maybe your main goal is getting your first client or getting your next 10 clients, or maybe it's achieving a certain level of profitability. Whatever your goal is, you want to make sure that the tasks you're performing are helping you achieve and work towards that priority. So if you constantly write it down on a weekly basis and get a sense of what you're doing in your business, you can then highlight what tasks are really urgent.
And then the other tasks you might be spending more time on because you can actually have a column that lists the amount of time you're spending on tasks that aren't necessarily serving you best, or they're not serving you best right now. I can tell you a really easy low hanging fruit when you're trying to prioritize and practice your prioritization skills would be spending less time.
Just using social media for fun. So if you want to use social media as a business tool, or let's say you're not ready at all to use social media, which that's okay. If you say I'm not ready to use social media yet, I'm actually going to be building some relationships in person in my community, doing some teaching and speaking, and we want to hold on the social media.
Then you might limit yourself to no more than 30 minutes a week, so that you're allowing your mind that freedom and that space to focus on building other skills, such as your interpersonal skills, right? Maybe your empathy skills when you're going to meet folks in your community. So that's one example.
And then if you are using social, but you notice that you're kind of getting out of hand, I mean, hello, we've all been there. What you could do is create a limit within, let's say, the Instagram app that you don't want to go more than 20, 30 minutes a day. And that at least will help make sure you're keeping within you know, an allotted amount of time so that you're not going overboard.
Of course, you're gonna have to practice some self control. And if you see a limit that goes off, you want to stick with it. But it's really interesting. If you look at your phone history, or you look at your. I think it's your battery. It shows what percentage per week you're spending on each platform. And you can see for many of us, it's a lot more time than we would want because we just kind of get lost in it.
And if you can avoid that, then you'll have the energy and the capacity to start prioritizing the tasks that might be less fun. But are going to be have a higher payoff, such as building relationships, following up with people, promoting yourself, whether it's on social media or you're in person at community events, or you're reaching out to people, you know, when you're asking them, do you know anybody who needs nutrition coaching, or you're asking people to talk more about nutrition?
What are your concerns and questions about nutrition, et cetera, those types of activities are going to have a higher payoff than you mindlessly scrolling on social media, especially if it has nothing to do with business. If you want to learn more about how to sell as a dietitian, I want to remind you that we are launching our membership next week.
And if you register for our free webinar over at dietitianboss. com, the link is on our homepage on our Instagram, on all our social media platforms. We'd love to see you there. We do have two times. Available so that you can join either an afternoon slot or an evening depending on your schedule. Heck, if you wanna join both, I'll see you there.
They'll, they're both live. We'll have time for q and a, do a little chit chat, and it's very hands-on, so we'll be building or updating a sales page together. Okay? The second tip would be to create a schedule. Now, if you're listening to this and you're like, oh my gosh, love, you've talked about this a million times, I've already created a schedule, then just bear with me because there might be an opportunity for you to modify your schedule.
Maybe you haven't set aside specific times in your schedule where you want to work on personal activities like blocking off for exercise most days or walking your dog or some affirmation practice. Or maybe you haven't blocked off enough blocks or any blocks. to work on business activities, such as actively promoting your service and talking to people about their nutritional needs, doing some basic research in your community or online.
So those are the types of things that you can add to your schedule. And then you can, of course, evaluate them later to see how you can make some adjustments. So very often, again, kind of creating schedule goes back to prioritization. You might have a schedule. But once you look at your schedule, you might realize that your schedule isn't as prioritized as you want it to be.
And one thing I'm really proud of that we've done here at Dietitian Boss, and I was taking years, so it didn't start like this, but now we're a four day work week, which means we don't work on Fridays. Now there's a lot of different ways to do a flexible work week. Some businesses will say that the staff can choose which day they want off.
The reason that we've done a 40 workweek is because we found that's great role modeling for our clients, for dietitians. And it showcases our values of flexibility and helping you build a flexible business. We want you to see how we run a business that's a 40 workweek. And we want you to see that if you want to do this for yourself, it's absolutely possible because we have a life outside of our business.
We have families and hobbies and interests that are not aligned or that are not exactly the same thing as business, right? So let's say I know some of our. Some of our staff member really enjoys some of our staff members really enjoy volunteering in their community. They enjoy art. They enjoy things that have no direct correlation with what they do here at Dietitian Boss.
So, I think it's important to spend some time and energy outside of business and creating a schedule can help motivate you to do that because if you know, you're going to have some fun time, whether it's at the store. Spa or some friends are traveling, or even just at home relaxing, you're gonna be more motivated to get things you don't wanna do done so that you can focus on the things you do enjoy doing and knowing that you're going to anticipate that maybe there's a certain day of the week where you'll celebrate or enjoy that for.
For me, it's Fridays. I always try to plan fun stuff on Fridays, the weekends too, but I try to plan extra fun stuff on Friday, so I don't even think about work. Now the second, the third point I wanna mention would be to delegate. Now this is more for those of you who are a little further along because you can't delegate unless if you're working with a staff member.
Now, a de delegation would mean that you have broken down a task and assigned responsibility to somebody else on the team. And of course, you ultimately are gonna have the main responsibility of the task, but you're asking, or you are you are assigning responsibilities. To certain people. So let me give you an example.
If you wanted to create an Instagram post, you have an idea and maybe you're still part of the process. If you're creating the idea of the post, but then you want someone else to schedule it for you. You might have your virtual assistant schedule, the Instagram posts, or if you're running a Facebook group for your program, for you're running a group program for your clients, you might have a virtual assistant schedule prompts to try to keep people accountable inside of your private Facebook group.
That's another example of delegation. So you would ask them. To do that task for you, you would assign them a task. You would check to make sure it was done. So that's a great way for you to have more balance as a registered dietitian. Now that has not delegation has been challenging for me. It's challenging for most business owners for various reasons.
It'll have to be a whole new episode. The reason I bring it up is because if you don't learn how to delegate as a registered dietitian, then you will, you won't be able to grow your business and you won't be able to have. Really nice work life balance, because there's no way I could do it all here at Dietitian Boss.
I'm so grateful for the team. I know I talk about them a lot. I've had them on as guests and our coaches and operations manager, and a lot of people in the business have gone on and talked about the business here as guests. And I want to share that without them, there's no way I could do everything, right?
The tech setup, the customer support. Even the coaching some of the sales and the marketing having help as I've grown has really helped me help more Dietitians and not burn out and then it's allowed me to create a four day workweek for the entire business Not just me everybody in the business has off and so it's a really nice thing to advocate So that we can show you that that flexibility is something that you too can do as well You could do it earlier on if you want.
I mean we waited For years but if you want to create that flexibility sooner in your business, you can absolutely do that. Oh, the last point I want to mention, which I could have definitely said this earlier, and that would be using technology to your advantage. So there's a lot of apps I've had guests on, you know, that we advocate for practice, better practice management software.
There's also eat love, which is meal planning software, and there's other scheduling platforms. It will practice better to scheduling and there's project management tools like Asana and ClickUp, and there's time tracking. apps like toggle, and there's graphic creation like Canva. I actually have an entire resource section over at dietitianboss.
com for what we recommend in terms of software. If you want to head over and check that out. I just want to remind you that using technology, whether it's nutrition software or just software in general is going to help you operate as an online Dieititian. So you might want to start small. If you're intimidated, you might want to start with one piece of software and build up because you're not used to it.
But, I mean, as clinicians, we all had experience in our internship with some form of electronic medical record system, whether you were in long term care using Jerry menu, or whether you were using all scripts in your clinical rotation, you've had that experience. And so operating as an online practitioner, even if you're.
Not doing private practice and you're doing an alternative revenue stream, like let's say you're doing brand work. You're still going to have to have a decent sense of some degree of nutrition of technology, right? It doesn't have to be nutrition technology, but email marketing. And as you advance and grow in your business, you'll absolutely need to learn how to use project management software, which I can talk about in depth for another day, because it really helps you when it comes to delegation.
And breaking down your tasks and keeping people accountable and getting ownership really clear in your business. So I hope that these tips were really helpful for you in order to achieve a better work life balance so that you can enjoy your life, spend time with your family, prevent burnout. And ultimately wake up loving what you do, because let's face it, you have to have time where you wake up and not do dietitian things.
And it can only be made possible if you practice these concepts I shared with you today. So as an overview, prioritizing your tasks, creating a schedule, delegating responsibilities and using technology to your advantage. We hope to see you next week at our webinar about selling. Three secrets to selling as a dietitian without feeling salesy, and it'll be a very hands on experience.
It's free. Go ahead and register over at dietitianboss. com. There will be a replay if you can't attend and look forward to seeing you there.
