Episode 302: The Power of Saying No with Hallie Bulkin, MA CCC-SLP, CMT®, CPFT™

Hey and welcome to episode 302 of the Untethered Podcast. This is your host, Hallie Balkan. I am excited because we're gonna dive in today and talk about something I don't always do on here, but it's the beginning of the year and it's my podcast, so I've decided this is what we're doing. And what is this? Well, hang around for a moment and you'll find out. Quick Disclaimer all information, content and material of this podcast are the opinions and of the speakers and is for the informational purpose only and not intended to serve as a substitute for the consultation, diagnosis and or medical treatment of a qualified healthcare provider. Welcome to the Untethered Podcast. I am your host, Holly Balkan. I'm a certified myofunctional therapist, feeding specialist, podcaster, business owner and mentor. This podcast is all about getting your questions answered and collaborating with colleagues to bring you the most up to date information in the orofacial myofunctional therapy, airway tether, Dural tissue and pediatric feeding therapy space. If you're new here, I challenge you to keep an open mind and join my mission to spread this message far and wide. If you've been around since June 2019, thanks for being a loyal listener. As we jump into today's episode, remember to listen with correct oral rest Posture, Tongue up, lips closed, teeth apart, breathe through your nose. Let's get started. Foreign. Things first. Before we jump in, we are going to be doing our free training, our free five day training for screening your first pediatric feeding patient the first week of February. So if you have never done that before or you want to do it again, like I said, it's completely free. Go to feedthepedes.com backslash screening and or nope, not screening training, got that wrong. Feedthepedes.com backslash training and you can join us like I said, for free. You're going to get five hours on a certificate of completion and yeah, basically you will leave knowing how to screen your first peed feeding patient. I'm going to teach you how to do the screening, how to make sense of the results, how to make next step recommendations and ultimately the fastest way to launch yourself into treating, assessing and treating pediatric feeding cases after the screening if that's what you desire. So Like I said, FeedThePedes.com backslash training is the correct link you want to go to, but I want to dive in today and talk a little bit of, you know, there's a lot of these posts going around like Instagram And Facebook of like the ins and outs for 2025. And so first of all, welcome to 2025. I know we already had our first 300th episode which basically finished out 2024 and launched 2025. But that was more of a reflection on my end, my business. And I encouraged you to do the same for yourself. What I want to encourage you now to do is look forward into 2025 and this is going to apply to you whether you are a therapist in business for yourself, whether you are a therapist in business for somebody else, that, that's not relevant. Even though these are more goal focused and almost business minded in a sense. When I work with one on one clients, which I do, whether I'm helping them grow their private practice start or grow private practice, or I'm helping them to launch an online business, I, I do all of that. I have a lot of initial conversations with therapists especially that look, something like this, right? A lot of, well, I'm not going to give away the whole thing because a lot of this is what people pay me the big bucks for. But I am going to share with you some nuggets, some critical things because as I've said for 10 years in my private practice, my goal in my private practice, right, is to take all of the kids and their families and their caregivers from surviving to thriving. But I took that methodology essentially, and I applied it to what I want to help you all do as therapists. Because a lot of times we feel like we are just surviving day in and day out in our businesses, in our jobs, and that's not a good feeling for anybody, right? That's not necessarily where we want to be operating from because survival mode is something that your patients are going to sense, they're going to feed off of that. And that again, is not good for anyone. We need to be at peace ourselves. We need to be working from a calm nervous system in order for our patients to thrive, thrive. So what does that look like for you? And what can you change in your daily life maybe to help yourself thrive a little more, right? So that's kind of what I want to focus on right now because I think a lot of people talk about like, oh, we're going to set goals. And look, goals are great and I set smart goals in my own business. You know, goals are not just for our patients, IEPs or their insurance companies. Goals are for life. They're for everybody. Now that said, what I think we need to think about, okay, is this whole movement and I've been talking about this for a couple years. And I talk about this in the business side of things, more so than in the clinical side. But it's true across the board, right? We see a lot of people, especially in the SLP online space, talk about like, oh, you gotta set work life. You gotta have a work life balance. And you, you know, and I've done an episode, I believe, on this in the past just on this topic, there is no such thing as balance because balance one day looks completely different than balance and next the next day. And I think that when we set these balance goals for ourself, we set ourselves up for failure. And look, failing forward is a great thing sometimes, right? That's how we learn. Everybody has to fail somewhere in order to grow. I'm all for it. But to consistently set yourself up for failure day after day, week after week, that's not good for anybody. So instead, what I often tell my clients to do is to set work life boundaries. Okay. And what that looks like is determining, for example, when your work hours are and when you're in work hours. That might mean that you're, you're checking emails or returning phone calls, you're doing, you know, you're seeing patients, writing reports, whatever it is you need to be doing. Whether you're the owner of the company or you work for the company, you have your work hours. Now, obviously, if you're the owner, you have a little bit more flexibility. If you're working for someone else, they may be dictating what your work hours look like. So working within those constraints, Right. You're still considering what hours you work, and then you're looking at what hours you don't work. Okay. Because I see a lot of people and listen, well, we'll get into this in a moment, but what I was going to say is I see a lot of people who just work nonstop. They're not necessarily getting paid overtime, but their work expects that they're doing X, Y and Z. We need to be better advocates for ourselves. If the person you're working for, the company you're working for, is assigning you too much work for the paid hours that you exist in within their business structure, that's a them problem. Right? It becomes a you problem. Because in order to keep your job, people will say, well, I have to do my job. And that means that requires me working like 10 hours a week outside that I'm not getting paid for. No. Right. This is where we got to throw up those boundaries. There's no such a thing as balance here, what are you going to continue to balance? This mismanagement by the person that you work for or this mismanagement as a business owner? As business owners, you need to know how much time your team is putting in for various tasks and if that time falls within the allotted hours that they're getting paid for the week. Or are you asking them to do things above and beyond what they're getting paid for? Because legally, if you are, you have to pay them. Right? So. And that could be true whether it's a contractor or an employee. Now there's a little bit more room with like contractors because you may say, oh, this is a project based rate. Right. And a project based rate is X. And so however many hours it takes you, it takes you. And that's a different conversation. That's not where I'm going here. A little tangent, but I wanted to just kind of put that out there in case some of you were like, well, it's not how it works where I work. Well, it depends on the setup. Okay. That's less common in the therapy world though, right? Typically, you may get a set amount to write a report and, you know, you. Let's say it takes you two hours or four hours, that you may be getting a flat fee for that. Um, but when it comes to, like your therapy, typically therapy is paid based on the hour or the half hour or the session. You know, unless you are a salaried employee and you're just working 40 hours a week or whatever number of hours a week and so on and so forth. Okay, I'm not giving you like, financial advice here. This is not me providing financial advice. I'm just giving you some food for thought. Okay, think about, think about this, because I cannot tell you how many people I talk to that don't even realize they're being asked to do like a time and a half work wise, but only getting paid the regular base salary and they're not getting paid beyond that. So if you're not able to get your work done during the hours that you're working, and it's not because you're inefficient or slacking off, it's because you've been asked to do the job of two people. That's a different kind of conversation. Right. Okay. Was not even planning to go there today, but we just went there. So money, I've done episodes on this in the past. You can go back a couple years, see what I've talked about. Like, money. I know money is like a taboo topic. In our industry. But it's something that we need to be willing to talk about and especially when it comes to money and time. Okay, so kind of going to wrap up that little side of this conversation for a moment and go back to not having balance but having boundaries. Okay. Boundaries, right? What do boundaries look like? Well, I gave you an example. Setting work hours and non work hours, personal hours, maybe in your schedule, say like for me, right? And this is something I struggled with for a very long time and it wasn't until 2024 and I've done this in the past, but I kind of fell out of it in 2023. In 2024 I came back and I said, that's it. I'm putting up boundaries. I'm putting up boundaries with the energy of people around me. Like I'm removing all toxic energy. I'm putting up boundaries when it comes to work hours, travel hours, work, work out, like gym hours, family hours and so on and so forth. And I learned how to do that really, really well. Now I work for myself so I have the flexibility to do this. But for example, in the morning, my hours between when I wake up and my kids wake up and when I get them off to school around like 7:45 in the morning, that time is them time. You know, my team, if they text me, I may check my text messages and make sure there's nothing urgent. I may respond if I have a moment or two. But other than that, like that's the time for me to like basically get them out the door to school and we got to be focused so we are on time. So that's that chunk, right? Then I walk the dog and I might go check my social media while I'm walking the dog. But then I will come back in and I'll spend about a half an hour going into Monday.com, which is, which I have for both of my businesses and well, both of my online businesses I should say. And I will spend time going through my tasks there. From there I go and oftentimes I'm going to Pilates. So pilates sometimes is 9am, sometimes it's 9:30, occasionally it's 10, which is just super late for me. But I really like the instructor. But anyways, I will work until I go to Pilates. I will come back, I will either jump right back into work, sometimes I have calls. Different days of the week look different for me. And there are certain days that I intentionally leave open, certain days where I maybe have zero calls, like Thursdays. And so those are Days where like I have opened up time to schedule appointments or to run certain errands and whatnot. And so I've kind of chunked my schedule in a way where I'm able to operate it the way I want to. And I do my best to end calls when I can by like 2:15, 2:30 in the afternoon. If my kids are staying later for after school activities, I may be able to go to like 3:30, but I don't record anything after that time because my kids are home and it's not, it's. I don't want to sit here and make them sit in silence while I'm recording. So I've made it work for me, right? And so it becomes very noisy in my household after that hour. So I can still continue to work if I desire. Or some days I stop working them, other days I'm working till 5 or 6. It just depends, right? But this is what I've decided and these are the boundaries that I've set. And that way I can close my computer or, you know, turn my work email off when I am no longer in those work hours, okay? And so that is what I'm talking about when it comes to thriving and not just continuing to be in survival mode because a lot of us are tied to our phones all the time now. I chose to do some work over this break while my kids were off because we just traveled 19 out of 30 days between the end of like the third week of November and the. And basically the third week of December, maybe it was the fourth week or whatever, like Thanksgiving to Christmas, basically we were gone 19 out of 30 days on four different trips. And that was a lot. And so I really didn't have a lot of work hours. So I came back and I chose to do some work while my kids were on winter break this past week. And I did work a couple late nights because I was just in the flow. And I was like, you know, I'm just, I'm making a choice to do this right? So there's a difference between being a victim of your circumstances and making a choice to do something right. So some people say, well, why were you working till one in the morning? Because I chose to. I chose to. I knew I was going to be super productive. I knew I was going to knock like 75% of my checklist off that I needed to get done this week and so I could go rolling into the new year. You know, the. Well, now it is a new year at the time of me recording this. But you Know that way I could kind of roll forward with ease. Because one of my big focuses this year is to do everything with ease. Which brings me to my next point. One of my big flexes the past three, four years has been the power of saying no. And that's something that I think a lot of us can get really good at too because I think a lot of us overextend ourselves and then we have these issues with so called balance or really even adhering to our own boundaries. We set because we are, yes, people. We're in the game of helping people, right? Maybe not the game, but we're in an industry where we help others. You have a good heart. That's why you got into this. A lot of people say, oh, I got into this because I love it. It's not for the money. Yes, but you still need to food on the table and you still need to thrive. Not just survive, but thrive. How do you do that if you don't have enough money in the bank? Right? Because then you're always in fight or flight. It's hard to get into that rest and digest and have the nervous system calm down. So saying yes, being a yes person is not. It's not a good thing and it's not that it's not a good just not just a good thing for you. It ends up being a not great thing for other people because your stress gets pushed on to others or you know, you're, you're kind of working from this place of stress and other people think sense that and it's just not a healthy way of being for anyone. Right? So learning to say no when your gut is like, that's a no, that's a no. That's a no. Say no. I can promise you after doing this now for four or five years, my no muscle is really strong. Really, really strong. I just now, for the first time since fall of 2021, agreed to speak at a conference. And it was only because I really like the person hosting the conference. It's a dear friend and colleague. But I also think it's going to be a good time. I'm going to get to meet some people in person that I've only been talking to online for a very long time. Like there were a lot of yeah, hell yeses that came up for me and I was like, oh, the location's gonna be really hot. It's not really somewhere I want to travel to in July. But I really like this person and what they stand for and everything. They're gonna bring In. So, okay, it's a yes. It's a Y. Me was saying, like, do it, Holly. But this is again, what I mean by boundaries, right? You set the boundaries that you want to set. That's up to you. Okay? So if you want to be somebody that feels really good day in, day out, you're happy with where your career is going. You're happy with the hours you're putting in, you know, you have to get really comfortable saying no when it's a clear no. And you have to get really comfortable setting those boundaries and respecting them. You have to respect your own boundaries. Because I see people set boundaries and then they don't respect them. If you don't respect your boundaries, no one else is going to. You have to first. So that's really all I wanted to chat about today. I kind of wanted to have a little, like, heart to heart as we roll into 2025. I think it's going to be a really, really great year for everybody. I just have this intuitive feeling, and that's something that I. I worked on. You know, I have a word of the year that I have ultimately thought about. Well, I haven't picked it for this. I've sat and thought with it, but I haven't picked it yet for 2025. And yes, it's January 3rd at the time of this recording. But I want. I want you all to think about what it is this year that you desire for yourself. And maybe, you know what? I'm going to record another episode that you'll get next week on, if you haven't done this yet, on how to focus in on picking one word for the year for yourself and what that might look like. All right, so out with the work life balance. In with the work life boundaries, right? Out with the nervous systems that don't function. In with, you know, rest and digest. Let's all get to a nice place of inner peace and out with just setting goals, right? Let's. Let's take a good, hard look. Like, goals are great. You can still set them, but let's be intentional. And let's look at what desired, like change. Like, what change do you desire in your life? That should be the driver of everything here. Let's flex the no muscle. Get really good at saying no this year because every no that you say to someone else is a yes for yourself. All right, so we're going to wrap up there. I hope everyone's having a fantastic start to the new year. And I'll be back with another fun episode like this. Next week and then we'll jump back into more clinical stuff. Thanks for listening to this podcast. If you found value in this episode and want to hear more of these Myotots, Airway and Feeding related episodes, be sure to leave a review on Apple Podcasts and share this episode on your social media platforms. You can access free resources and all I offer@halliebulcan.com or pop over to allybulcan on Instagram to get all the latest updates.