Stop Staying in the Box: Lisa Trubey, RDH, on Finding Your Purpose in Dental Hygiene

Episode 23: Meet Lisa Trubey, RDH, of Rooted Purpose RDH

In Episode 23 of The Unhinged Hygienists, Lauren Kennedy, RDH and Anastasia Dallas, RDH welcome Lisa Trubey, RDH — clinician, mentor, advocate, researcher, speaker, and founder of Rooted Purpose RDH. Lisa is a newer hygienist with decades of dental experience, and that combination gives her a rare view of what the profession is, what students expect it to be, and what it could become when hygienists use their voices.

The conversation moves from single motherhood, anxiety, perimenopause, and returning to school in her late thirties to board-exam failure, organized dental hygiene, inclusive patient care, scope-of-practice debates, nicotine cessation research, international presenting, mentorship, and building a career outside the traditional box. The through line is perseverance: your path can be messy and still be purposeful.

Key Takeaways From Episode 23

• A nonlinear career is not a lesser career. Lisa’s 24 years in dental assisting became an advantage when she entered hygiene.
• Failing a board exam does not define clinical ability or future success; Lisa retested, passed, and still became the first person in her class to be licensed.
• Professional associations move slowly because meaningful scope changes can take decades, but they do not move at all without members who advocate.
• Networking exposes hygienists to careers, research, collaborators, and leadership opportunities they may never encounter inside one practice.
• Burnout grows when clinicians lose curiosity, community, autonomy, and a sense of purpose.
• Hygienists are healthcare providers and prevention specialists, not people who merely scrape and polish teeth.
• Advocacy includes protecting patients, practicing to the standard of care, supporting colleagues, and making care inclusive.
• Dental teams can play an evidence-based role in tobacco and nicotine cessation through screening, brief counseling, and referral.
• A coach or mentor can help turn scattered ambitions into concrete action — and help clinicians believe their knowledge has value.
• You do not need one perfect niche. Purpose can grow across clinical care, education, research, mentorship, and policy.

Eight Years, One Board Retake, and a Career Reclaimed

Lisa entered dental assisting at 18 and became an RDA, working in the front office, back office, and practice management. She had wanted to become a hygienist for years, but marriage, motherhood, and life redirected the plan. After divorce made financial independence urgent, she returned to school in 2016 while working and parenting. Prerequisites and hygiene school took eight years, including a punishing commute to West Los Angeles College and clinical sites that sometimes kept her on the road for four hours a day.

She graduated in December 2024 — then missed her first board attempt by roughly one point. For a class president who felt held to a higher standard, the result was devastating. She let herself feel it, booked the next available attempt, passed 60 days later, and still became the first person in her class to secure a license. Her story gives new graduates a needed distinction: an exam result is an event, not an identity.

Why Dental Hygienists Need a Purpose Beyond Production

Purpose does not require leaving patient care. It requires knowing why the care matters. Lisa describes how passion, continued learning, and involvement protect her from reducing hygiene to a schedule of cleanings. A hygienist who understands oral-systemic health, takes blood pressure, recognizes airway concerns, explains inflammation, and follows through on referrals is practicing as a healthcare provider — even when the surrounding office has normalized doing less.

Not every hygienist needs to want the same career. Some love clinical care; others want education, research, public health, speaking, policy, entrepreneurship, or mentorship. The problem is not choosing the operatory. The problem is believing the operatory is the only door available.

Networking Is a Career Skill, Not Small Talk

Lisa attends conferences to meet people as intentionally as she attends to learn. Those conversations connected her with students, educators, advocates, collaborators, and opportunities she could not have planned from inside one office. Within months of graduation, she became a California Dental Hygienists’ Association student-relations leader and began reaching students across the state through classroom visits and virtual meetings.

Her practical advice is simple: attend the meeting you would normally skip. Walk the exhibit floor. Ask presenters questions. Introduce yourself to the person whose work interests you. Follow people who make you curious, then do your own research. Networking is not collecting contacts; it is finding the community that expands your picture of what is possible.

Organized Dental Hygiene and the Long Work of Advocacy

Professional change rarely arrives on a convenient timeline. In the episode, Lisa points to local anesthesia authority spreading across states over more than five decades and California’s long path toward the RDHAP model. Those changes required generations of hygienists to keep showing up, even when an individual membership year did not produce an obvious win.

That perspective also shapes her concern about proposals that assign preventive procedures to workers with sharply abbreviated training. Lisa spent 24 years as an assistant and respects the role deeply. Her objection is not to assistants growing; it is to designing a role whose training does not match the clinical judgment required near and below the gingival margin. Scope expansion should be built on education, patient safety, and clearly defined competency — not a shortcut around workforce problems.

Supporting Hygienists Instead of Policing Their Ambition

A profession cannot advocate effectively while its members tear one another down. Lisa, Lauren, and Anastasia return repeatedly to the need for constructive disagreement: ask why, share evidence, protect the patient, and allow colleagues to build different versions of a good career. One hygienist may pursue advanced practice while another prefers a focused clinical role. There is room for both.

Lisa also includes LGBTQ+ patients, student voices, mental-health awareness, clinician autonomy, and access to appropriate instruments among her advocacy priorities. Inclusive care is not a branding exercise. It is the everyday practice of allowing patients and colleagues to be fully themselves, listening without assumption, and making the treatment room safer for honest communication.

Nicotine Cessation: From Personal Experience to International Research

Nicotine cessation became personal long before it became a research focus. Lisa says she stopped smoking in 2005 after receiving a laser-acupuncture-style treatment around the ear, and she later studied the approach in hygiene school. Her poster earned recognition at state and national dental hygiene meetings and was accepted for presentation at the International Symposium on Dental Hygiene in Milan.

Her experience is powerful, but it is not proof that the treatment works for everyone. Reviews of acupuncture and related stimulation techniques for smoking cessation have found that the evidence is inconsistent and has not established a durable benefit comparable with recommended cessation support. The evidence-based role for dental professionals is clear: ask about tobacco and nicotine use, advise patients to quit, assess readiness, assist with a plan, and connect patients with proven behavioral support and approved medications through an appropriate medical professional.

That does not make Lisa’s research unimportant. It makes the research question important. Personal outcomes can inspire investigation; careful studies determine whether an intervention is reliable, for whom, and under what conditions. Hygienists are ideally placed to start cessation conversations because they repeatedly see the oral effects of smoking, vaping, and nicotine products — often before patients discuss them anywhere else.

Mentorship, Imposter Syndrome, and Charging for Your Expertise

When Lisa’s ambitions felt like 47 disconnected directions, coaching helped her trace the beliefs underneath the chaos. The most important lesson was not a business tactic. It was permission to trust herself. School taught her to follow the rubric; coaching helped her recognize that her decades in dentistry, lived experience, research, and leadership had value even though she was newly licensed as a hygienist.

That shift mattered when submitting conference abstracts, naming mentorship as professional work, and asking to be paid for expertise she had once given away automatically. Imposter syndrome often asks whether you are allowed to step forward. Lisa’s answer is to check the evidence: if you have done the work, know the limits of your knowledge, and have something useful to contribute, you do not need to wait until doubt disappears.

The Rooted Purpose Collective

Lisa created the Rooted Purpose Collective as an eight-week mentorship experience with group and individual options. Its central idea mirrors the episode: dental professionals can identify what they believe, find where their skills and interests meet a real need, and build ways to serve patients that are not limited to one chair in one clinic.

Mentorship does not hand someone a ready-made niche. It creates structure for reflection, accountability, experimentation, and action. For a clinician who feels burned out or boxed in, the first step may not be quitting. It may be having one honest conversation with someone who can see possibilities they have stopped seeing for themselves.

How to Start Finding Your Purpose in Dental Hygiene

• Write down the topics that make you keep talking after everyone else has moved on.
• Identify the patient, student, or professional problem you feel compelled to solve.
• Take one course outside your usual lane, then verify what you learn against credible evidence.
• Attend a professional meeting and introduce yourself to three people whose work interests you.
• Find a mentor, coach, colleague, or peer group that challenges you without prescribing their career as yours.
• Choose one small advocacy action: contact an association, speak to a class, submit an abstract, or improve one protocol at work.
• Document your experience and expertise so you can see the evidence when imposter syndrome appears.
• Stay rooted in patient safety, informed consent, professional scope, and the limits of your training.

The Unhinged Bottom Line

Lisa Trubey’s career did not unfold in a straight line. It grew through divorce, single motherhood, anxiety, an eight-year education, a failed exam, new communities, hard questions, and repeated decisions to try again. That is exactly why her message lands: strong roots are not a perfect plan. They are the beliefs sturdy enough to let you keep growing outward.

You can love clinical hygiene and still want more. You can be newly licensed and carry decades of wisdom. You can have too many interests and still build meaningful work. Stop waiting for permission, find the people who expand your view, and walk through the doorway.

Medical and dental disclaimer: this article is educational and reflects a podcast conversation. It is not medical or dental advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Nicotine dependence is a health condition; consult a qualified medical or dental professional for individualized cessation support and treatment recommendations.