Your Fulfillment Matters – Finding Your Personal Purpose With Craig Filek Of Purpose Mapping

No matter what you want your clinic to become, it still all boils down to understanding why you exist as a business in the first place. Countless numbers of episodes in this show have been spent discussing the importance of determining your clinic’s purpose. However, what is not talked much about is the importance of determining your personal purpose. In this episode, Nathan Shields speaks with Craig Filek of Purpose Mapping to shine a light on why having the clarity of your own motivations and purpose in life is just as crucial as that of your business’. He talks about how it allows you to see what needs to be prioritized and what needs to be let go, making you feel accomplished instead of stressed or overwhelmed. Get in touch with your true self and practice acting in alignment with it. Eventually, you will find yourself feeling more free and certain about your actions because, at the end of the day, your company’s purpose and values are simply an extension of yours.

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Your Fulfillment Matters – Finding Your Personal Purpose With Craig Filek Of Purpose Mapping

I have Craig Filek of PurposeMapping.com on. He focuses on helping individuals figure out what their purpose is in life. He’s been a coach of mine. As I’ve been working with him, I wonder if I’ve failed to make the connection between company purpose and personal purpose. Recognizing that your company’s purpose and even your company values are simply an extension of your purpose and values. You essentially created this business to fulfill a personal purpose that you had in your life.

As owners, you start moving out of treating full-time, it will be helpful for you and it will be super-efficient in determining what tasks are most important in prioritizing your day if you can be clear about your purpose. Why are you stepping out of treating? Why are you wanting to see the business grow? What effect do you want to see from doing that? That all comes from knowing what your purpose is. Craig shares a message for the audience at the end that I hope all of you take to heart. It’s one of the reasons I do my show and it meets one of my missions in life. I would hope that as you read this, you can recognize and come to the realization that it is an important message that I’m trying to get across specifically to you, the reader. I’m finding this to be one of my favorite episodes in doing this show and I’m excited to bring this message to you.

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I’ve got Craig Filek, a personal coach of mine and the Creator of Purpose Mapping. I’m excited to bring him on to introduce him to the audience simply because we’ve talked about purpose, vision, values in regards to the companies and the clinics that we own. I want to talk more about the personal purpose and how important that is to figure that out as we are continuing to grow and develop over time. It’s a step that I’m seeing some of my coaching clients come across in what they initially had as a personal purpose in opening their clinics is not quite serving them. It shows up as maybe burnout or overwhelm. Craig, thank you for coming on. I appreciate it.

It’s great to be here.

Craig, you worked with me and it was a great experience. The reason I reached out to you is that I felt like at that time, and you probably noticed it more than I did, that I didn’t have a clear purpose at this stage in my life. It’s such a valuable thing to consider as we’re looking individually. PT owners that I come across also may struggle with that a little bit. Tell us a little bit about what got you to this point? What’s your professional path to become the creator of Purpose Mapping?

The word that popped up was desperation. I started a business young. I was a young father and it was bonkers for a long time. I was trying to figure out like, “How do I get a grip on this? How do I get a grip on myself?” I’ve probably read a thousand books. I invested pushing 300,000 hours in coaching, training, therapy and workshops. I became a junkie of this stuff because every insight it felt closer to what I call alignment with my purpose and my mission. There was this sense of like, “I’m doing better for having investment.” I kept getting positive results there. I kept growing. One of my claims to fame is I’ve tanked more businesses than most people dream of starting in a lifetime. It’s funny to say, but it’s brutal when I was in it. It’s like, “This is not working. I’m burning out.” I can flip houses and make $30,000 in a weekend, but how sustainable is that for my nervous system, my family? I would walk away. The business is proper, but a lot of sales and marketing-oriented things.

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What I loved about that was it focused on human psychology. I was a Philosophy major. I was trying to figure out life like, “What’s going on here? What are we doing?” The root of my story is I was trying to figure it out. I came across personality profiles. Those were super helpful. Also on the more philosophy side, I’m talking about philosophers like Zig Ziglar, Tony Robbins, Michael Gerber, Stephen Covey. The classics of success philosophy and it would all say in their own words but I started connecting the dots. It’s not hard to do. They’d all say, “You’ve got to have a purpose. You’ve got to have a why. You’ve got to have a mission.” They were all pointing at this thing that I had to have that I didn’t seem to have.

There’s a quote out there I love. “If you don’t know your purpose, then your purpose is to figure out your purpose.” That became my path and I went deep with it. Years ago, I walked away from it. I did build a seven-figure business and checked off all the checkboxes of all the mind mapping. Tony Robbins would say, “Write out everything you want to achieve in your life and then rank it. Is it 1, 3, 5, 10 years from now?” It took me twelve years to check off every single checkbox. It was stuff I didn’t even know if I’d ever be able to check off. I looked at it and I said, “I’m miserable. This sucks. I’m out.”

It was horrible to get the success that I thought that I wanted and to realize it wasn’t making me happy. That spun me out into a bit of a night of the soul, so to speak. That’s where Purpose Mapping is. I had been working on it compiling it and whatnot. To take it on as like, “I’m going pro.” This has been the only thing that’s helped me in my life. It combines, everybody is saying I need this big why. They’re also saying I need a clear what, I need a proven how. To connect all those dots seems to be the minimum viable framework for enduring successes, sustainable success. Something that I could do and not burn out after a couple of years and get good at and make it my life’s course.

That speaks to me because I found the same thing and maybe some of the PT owners out there have experienced the same. I had gotten to a level of success with my company. I didn’t have a lot of admin or executive support. I was treating full-time and trying to run the business at night and doing notes on the weekends or waking up at 4:00 in the morning, getting home at 8:00 or 9:00 at night. You did the same thing in a different venue. I would go without seeing my newborn for days at a time. I tell my wife at night before we went to bed, “I haven’t seen our baby awake for three straight days.” Going through that, it wasn’t a financial issue. As you said, you were successful. You had a seven-figure business but I wasn’t experiencing life. I didn’t have a lot of freedom. I hadn’t cultivated any hobbies. I saw some friends once in a while and I got to go on some cool vacations, which typically got interrupted by phone calls from the business. It was at that point and as I’m talking to other coaching clients, I’m not alone and you’re not alone. That’s where these guys have found this success, whether it’s Covey or Robbins and Gerber. You’ve got to get deeper. You’ve got to figure out what was serving you at one time isn’t serving you now.

You use the word stages and that’s an important framework. Particularly, I like Maslow. He’s got a good framework. That pyramid, I want to dispel some false notions. Maslow never drew a pyramid. That was somebody else. I don’t know who did that, but that seems to be the way it’s presented in high school. The psychology class is the first time I saw it.

PTO 90 | Finding Your Personal Purpose — Everything flows from knowing who you are and why you’re here. Without that, you’re shooting in the dark and your success will not be sustainable.

You see the hierarchy of needs and it’s the pyramid.

It’s helpful, but it’s not how he conceived of it. He conceived a bit more like waves. A better description is more like spinning plates. I’ve got to keep the lights on. I’ve got to keep the heat on the house or the air conditioning is the case may be. Keeping food on the table and safety. Keeping the relationships going and then generating success. “I’ve got to make sure that the kids are fed.” There’s this process of keeping it all going. If you can get all of that going, then you can start spinning the fifth plate, which is the self-actualization of like, “Who am I and why am I here?” At the beginning of moving into, “How do I become successful?” That’s a stage where it’s important to do a deep self-assessment of like, “What are my talents? What am I passionate about?” There’s the hedgehog concept from Good to Great, which they overlay the three circles of what you’re passionate about, what the world needs? What do you need to be paid for? What you feel you can become world-class at? You have to assess that. It’s crucial because the business I had built with the partners when I walked away, it didn’t collapse. I said, “This was great, thank you. I can’t do this anymore.” We were training lawyers. It was similar to what you do with your coaching of PT owners. You’ve got practice, but we need to turn this into a business.

We need to put systems in place. We need to get some structure here so that when you leave, you come back and it’s running better than when you left it and went on vacation. That’s the holy grail. We did that, we built it to 22 people on the team and it was great from a standpoint of like, “I checked off the checkbox. I achieved success. We did it.” That business is still running and the revenue is double now. There’s a way that we have to look at going into becoming successful and then what’s beyond success. What we were training these lawyers to do that was the businesses that I was doing was we were training them to build a law business. Some of them would come to us and say, “I see your systems. I see that this would work. I don’t want to be a lawyer.” That was a big revelation. They were on this train there. Their people had gotten them on. In that hedgehog concept, if you’re not passionate about it, it doesn’t matter if you can get paid for it or even how good you can be at it, you have to have all three. That’s where I was going with that. There’s going into success and then there’s what’s after success, which is where you and I met. You’re like, “I did it. Now what?” Those are two different stages that require a slightly different address.

The way I’ve mentioned it and not that I bring it up all the time, but the way I see it sometimes is people can attain a certain amount of success. To me and I don’t know where I heard it but the next step seems to be going from success to significance. That can mean a lot of different things for a lot of different people, but it’s almost expanding your influence. You attained some level of personal success. My influence needs to spread out further into not just my family, but maybe my community and my larger network. That’s when success lends into significance, which could be measured as success at a greater measure. Getting back to purpose, it fulfills a greater purpose in yourself. Is that what you find?

It’s no longer about the money. It’s about fulfillment. That’s why I like the spinning plates metaphor because it’s hard to be fulfilled if you can’t keep the lights on. There’s an interesting indicator where it’s $70,000 a year and you could adjust it for where you live. Every dollar that we earn an additional up to $70,000 makes us happier for earning more money. That ladder becomes this hamster wheel where we’re running faster trying to get more money and it’s not making us happier. That’s called Daniel Kahneman’s number. He wrote, Thinking, Fast and Slow. He’s a Nobel Prize-Winning Economist. That’s a key insight. If you’re making over $70,000, how do you step back and say, “I’ve got another plate I’ve got to start spinning or I’m going to burn out trying to earn more money for marginal gains in fulfillment?” It’s a different gear. It’s a different plate.

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You use the word burnout. Do you find that it’s something like burnout, overwhelm or something like that? Is your body or your mind telling you that it’s time to find a different purpose or what you’re working on isn’t fulfilling your needs?

I’m going to unpack that a couple of different ways because there’s a lot in it. For one, it goes back to that lawyer anecdote that I was sharing. It doesn’t matter if you can get paid well for it and you can do it well. If you hate it and you’re not doing the thing that you are here to do that you are fulfilled by, you’re already grinding your gears, you are already burnt out. There’s that aspect of it. There’s the aspect of even if you do love it and you see this with rock stars, musicians, professional athletes, they only play for a few months a year. Most of the time they’re training, but they’re resting. They’re getting ready for the season. A PT owner, where’s your nine months off? You don’t get that. There’s looking at, how do I maximize, back to the revenue, the passion and the sense of capacity, the skillset? I’ll never be good at basketball. I’ll never even be marginally good at basketball. Trying to be an NBA player would be stupid. It was like, “What’s wrong with you?” There’s a gray area where it’s like, “I could be good at this thing and it would pay fine. I like it.”

If that’s why you’re in business, that’s our recipe for burnout, misery and making your family miserable, potentially losing your family. I’ve seen it go bad. There’s the, “I love it. I’m doing it.” Like a professional athlete, it puts my inflow. It’s amazing. It’s awesome. Maybe you’ve got to get your economics differently shifted. You’ve got to figure out the money piece so that you can work less and make it a little bit more and be able to manage it. I’ve seen burnout happen in all three of those ways.

It’s interesting as you’re talking and you talked about stages. My personal experience there was maybe a decade there. I own my company for many years. For the first ten years or so, if people ask me, “How’s the business going?” I’m like, “I love treating patients and I’m making a connection with the community and we’re growing, but I hate all the business stuff.” What was interesting is as I started working on the business as a business and not a job that owned me, essentially, I recognize that treating patients didn’t fulfill my purpose anymore, so things changed. As I worked on the business, recognizing that I can create a greater influence then that’s started sparking a different purpose in my mind. You see that change in evolution in time. Whereas initially, I would’ve been happy to have someone else take all the business headache off of me, all the HR stuff and whatnot. I found that changed as I started stepping up to the role that I should have had all along, that was to be a business owner. It’s interesting that the transition that took place in me.

I think Piaget was good at describing new psychological capacities that come online. For instance, I remember being in grade school, 5th, 6th grade, there’s a sensitive period of development where a child cannot understand volume equivalent. You take a can of Coke, this is what happened at our lake house. I remember the slightly older cousins and the slightly younger cousins and I happened to be right in that sensitive spot where I realized I didn’t know that before, now I know this. There was this learning epiphany and it was the tell a short fat glass and a tall skinny glass and it was the same volume of Coke. I was like, “That’s the conservation of volume. I couldn’t have learned that six months prior. It’s a similar thing. It’s like the spinning plates. You have to get enough success going and then all of a sudden you realize there’s more for me. Where’s the roadmap for that? That’s where I’d love what you’re doing. This is one of the things we talked about on our first call.

Before we even engaged in working together, you’re in a phase of life where you’ve achieved this success. You have a lot of skills and knowledge, and you’ve got a lot of passion for helping people, guiding people where there isn’t much of a roadmap to do what you’ve done. That’s where the significance starts to come in. The meaning starts to come in because you’re not just impacting that individual. You’re impacting your whole family, potentially for generations. Everybody that they touch their business growing, more people being healthy in their bodies and alleviating pain has an overall benefit for society. That’s where the sense of significance comes in but you have to reach a certain level of development before that’s even available to you.

How do you recommend someone that’s reading this? Maybe they’ve spun enough plates. They’re sick of spinning them all and holding them all at the same time. Where do they start? They could go directly to you, but if someone were to start, where do we start to figure out, “What is my purpose?” Maybe they might’ve even done the purpose homework for their business. It’s an extension of them, but it doesn’t fulfill their purpose. How do you go about helping somebody, or what would you recommend they do to start that process?

There are many YouTube videos and books. Tony Robbins has a process and Michael Gerber has a process and everybody’s got a process. You could find one of those. You’re saying before hiring a coach, what could they do? Take an hour or something. It goes back to what we were seeing about stages. The sense of purpose evolves. When I was in my twenties, I had to keep food on the table. I was trying to find something that I could tolerate doing because I’m unemployable. I don’t know how you are, but nobody is going to hire me and I wouldn’t want them. I had to figure that out and it was a bit of a harder road for me. This is the advice I’ll give when young men come to me and they say, “I’m thinking about this. We’re starting a business and we’ve got a kid.” It’s like, “Your purpose is being there for your kid. Your purpose is to make sure that the rent or the mortgages pay.” You don’t need to be worrying about the top of Maslow’s pyramid. You’ve got to be making sure that you’re going to know that the hatches are all bad and down.

At that phase, it’s more about skills. To take some skills testing, the number one that I would recommend that people can go on and in twenty minutes they can have an insight about themselves and, “I’ve been focusing in the wrong area. No wonder that’s felt hard,” is the Kolbe.com test. What’s fascinating about this woman, I know you did it, but I don’t know if you know the backstory about this woman. Her father was the Wonderlic IQ test guy. She was sitting there at the dinner table at 15, 16 years old. Of course, she’s intelligent because she was raised by an intelligent man and she says, “Dad, that’s all great but how do people apply this in their lives?” He puts his fork down and looks at her and says, “That’s your work. This is my work.” He was quick like, “I don’t care. That’s not what I’m doing.” She took that on.

It’s an amazing resource and it’s amazing to give to your team. I was introduced to it as a hiring tool that you should do this because people will tell you all things about what they’re capable of and you don’t know. If you give them some assessments, you can get a better sense of it. The second thing I’d recommend is, what we did is we triangulated 6 or 8 different tests because then you start to see where they overlap and the rest can blow away in the wind. That kept coming up. You’re never going to forget that.

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Common terms would come up to describe me throughout those personality tests. It’s not that any one of them was dot on. Usually, they were pretty good at explaining to me, but similar things would come up each time.

The magic of my process is that we triangulate all these different tests and then we put them into a common framework where we check all the boxes. We got the why, we got the what, we got the how. Those will evolve, but the boxes don’t. The framework is going to stay for the rest of your life. You’ll know, “I’ve got to update my strengths here.” I would recommend the Kolbe. I would recommend there’s something called Wealth Dynamics, which you did. Wealth Dynamics is beautiful. It’s wonderful and simple with 25 questions. The best $100 you’ll spend on your wealth and business development. It tells you where to focus and who to hire next. Those would be the two right out the gate and then you could get something out of the Myers-Briggs but a lot of Myers-Briggs is misunderstood. It’s easy to mistype without having a coach to work with you who’s trained in it. If you get the right type and you read the right report, I’d like 16Personalities.com and I love PersonalityHacker.com. I took their training. They’ve got the best model for understanding it, but you can get a free result at 16Personalities.com. Those are the three that I would start with. You can do those in an hour. When you triangulate, “They’re all pointed this,” dump the rest, double down on your strengths and go with it.

I have to laugh every time I’d talk about Kolbe because there was one section in there that defined me well and to the point, it said, “Do not work on small engines.” I shared that with my wife and she busted up laughing. Because she knew that if I took a Saturday to tinker with an engine or try to fix something, try to be the handyman in the house, it would result in crying children and arguments with my wife. Her telling the kids, “Give your dad some space. He’s got to work some things out.” I’d go jumping through that house all mad and hoping everybody noticed how upset I was. Honestly, one of my goals is to hire somebody to fix all those things for me. To find a handyman and the peace it would give me and my family would be much greater. The tough part is to part with my money. It’s hard for me.

You’re an accumulator in the Wealth Dynamics.

Yes and the thought of that, thinking about hiring somebody out to do that stuff, it brings me peace. To look back in that Wealth Dynamic and say, “That’s right. I need this type of a person if I’m going to do well. I’m not the salesperson. I need to hire the salesperson.” Looking back in my growth as an owner, I was like, “That’s why that move. That’s why that hire worked out well. This is why I aligned with these people because they provided this strength to my weakness.”

Imagine there’s a big jungle gym in the room. All bars and things to bang your head on. The lights are out and you’re, “I can figure it out.” You’re swinging on the monkey bars and then you hit into something. All I like to do is turn the lights on and then you go, “That makes sense.” You can navigate your life with ease. That’s what these profiles will help the people reading and start to get a grip on. It’s like, “That makes so much sense.” When you’re talking about fishing, the small engines, a lot of people are running their businesses from this place of, “I should. I’m the man of the house, I should fix the dishwasher.” The woman stands back and says, “Give your dad a space.” I want people to know how frustrated I am. That’s the recipe for burnout. That’s a disaster.

It brings much peace because as I went through the process with you, I’ve got things on my plate that I recognize they aren’t my priority. I can get to them and I’ll schedule them according to getting things done and I’ll put them on my calendar to work on them but not until I get the more important things done first. As we figure out our purpose, you did this with me, is break it down to what my vision and mission are. Also, what are my goals for the next 6 weeks to 6 months? What do I need to do to reach that 6-week to a 6-month goal because that’s already in alignment with the other stuff? It’s the same thing that you would do with your team. That was an interesting thing.

As I talked about personal purposes with one of my coaching clients, he’s like, “You’re saying what I learned about doing it with my business, I apply to my personal life?” I was like, “Pretty much.” Look at those business principles and apply them to your personal life. To the point where I had a business coach, his family had values that they expressed every day. They all had a mission statement that they would say to each other every day. They had goals as a family. He didn’t have written down as you would in your business, but he had processes and procedures for how he cleaned out his closet every six months. He took those business principles into his personal life.

You know what’s interesting is it’s like the jungle gym in the room with the lights off. We have values and processes. We have them anyways. Those boxes get checked one way or the other. This is making that conscious and then making a conscious shift in some of the decisions about, “The thing I need to do is move towards my milestone in alignment with my mission and not fix the small engine.”

I think about that and I’m like, “What can I do to get further myself?” Also, what things are in my head thinking I should be doing that are taking me away from my purpose and intentionally being like, “I can let that go. I can call somebody to fix it or I can do it some other time. I need to spend more time with my kids or go out with my wife or something like that and develop those relationships?” I’m fulfilling that purpose, knowing that other stuff can get done. It’s not as big a deal. What I’ve learned over time and through making mistakes is if I do focus on things, then I neglect the others. I’m not going to be happy.

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The results bear out over time. It’s making this conscious both in your personal life. I started with Michael Gerber. My first business partner was in an E-Myth Mastery guy. I had access to all the modules and I went through it. I went through the primary aim exercise probably 6 or 7 times. I kept going through it because I was like, “I’ve got to get this right. I’ve got to get this dialed in.” Michael Gerber was clear. Michael Gerber, for people that aren’t familiar, his whole thing is work on your business, not just in your business. It’s creating it as a business, not just a job that owns you, that type of thing.

There’s a principle that he would start within mastery, you start with the philosophy. There’s a business system’s philosophy and then you do your primary aim, which is your purpose, then you do your strategic objective, which is more your mission. Because this is my purpose and what I care most about, therefore I’m going to build this business in this way with these processes. Everything flows from knowing who you are and why you’re here. Without that, you’re shooting in the dark and maybe you can be successful, but it’s not sustainable.

What are some of the success stories you can share with us about people? I consider myself a success story, but that’s yet to bear out. We’ll see how well I do with all this coaching stuff and whatnot, so far I’m loving it. What have you seen and how it affects other people’s lives?

There are big examples like the guy that his thing is Ultimate Frisbee. That’s what he loves. That’s his game. He plays every day. He’s in his 40s and he’s still out there banging into guys. My knees cringe every time I hear him talk like that. He leveraged an island off the coast of Panama from some investment banker who didn’t know what to do with it. He bought it and there’s no infrastructure. There’s a bunch of ocean waste up on the beach. This guy goes down there 3 to 4 times a year. He brings down a group of people and they’d go down, clean up the beach and play Ultimate Frisbee, and there’s nobody to bother them. That’s what he loves. That what he wants to do. He’s got a whole lot more. That’s one example of the alignment that just makes unheard of things. I don’t even know if he paid for this island. He might’ve put down $10,000, was going to do a Kickstarter campaign, came back and told the guy, “I can’t raise the other money. Why don’t I give you this?” The guy was like, “Take it.” That’s what clarity will do for you. Clarity is king.

Another example I’d love is the first woman that I worked with. She had worked for me in my previous business. I gifted it to her because she was a single mother and I have a scholarship fund for adoptees, single mothers, and veterans who you are looking to make changes that will impact generations. I gifted it to her when I was doing what I coached you to do, coach somebody and get started. Don’t worry about charging. See if they like it. That’s swiftly turned into money if it’s right for you and it’s working for you. For me at the beginning, I started out. I saw her and we were out walking on the beach. I was glad my daughter was there because it was that sense of meaning and fulfillment. Out of the blue, this woman said, “Craig, I think about my purpose map every day.”

This woman, bless her heart, ended up contracting Lyme disease. It was something awful. She couldn’t get out of bed for six months with two twin boys. It’s not like she has some huge rah-rah success story, but it impacted her at such a deep level. It’s sorted out her insides and what mattered most to her. She had a bucket. I could talk about them as checkboxes or a framework, but these are buckets and as you’re going through reading something, learning something, experiencing something, you go, “I know where that goes.” You don’t have to chew on it wondering, “Why did that happen?” It’s like, “That fits there. I’m not going to do that anymore,” or “I’m going to double down on that.” It makes sense. Don’t fix engines. That’s bad for me. “I got it. It makes sense.”

There are some things that I’m doing that play to my strengths that we figured out that I only have to give a little bit of time to it. When you figure out your purpose, you don’t have to spend all day in your purpose. In this enlightened state, if you could give it some attention, 1 or 2 hours a week as far as playing to your strengths. If you do something in line with your purpose every day, it doesn’t have to take a long time to do it. You fill the bucket. Put a drop in the bucket here and there. It makes your life feel more meaningful. It comes down to this and I know you train people on this. If you did nothing else except that one thing, you would be fulfilled and in the flow.

Let’s break it down. We’re talking about dopamine. The only thing that makes you happy is your dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin ratios. Do one tiny little thing, because even having a goal-oriented framework for your life, that in and of itself creates dopamine. Otherwise, we grind and burnout. It’s like, “I don’t know why I’m doing this. I don’t know where this is going. Why do I keep doing this?” I’ve got to keep the lights on so you keep doing it. Putting that one little drop in the bucket, that homeopathic dose. We talk about it as your mission, your big hairy audacious goal, your milestone in 6 weeks to 6 months and what do I have to do? Where I got that from are two places. One, because I triangulate everything and everybody pretty much saying the same thing over and over. One is from a book called The ONE Thing by Gary Keller. It’s such a great book.

If you guys don’t know, Gary Keller built the largest real estate company in the world, Keller Williams Real Estate. How did he do it? He focused on the one thing that he could do each day that would move that business. It wasn’t fixing the dishwasher, it was something else. He asked all of his frontlines, all of his executives, “What is the one thing you can do?” They would ask all of their managers, “What is the one thing each of them could do?” They would ask all their frontline people, “What’s the one thing you can do?” I could call that prospect, one thing and that starts to build. You get dopamine every time you do that one thing.

Overtime that starts to take on this exponential curve of fulfillment. That’s where it comes from. The good life is a healthy ratio of dopamine, oxytocin and serotonin. Where do you get those things from? Doing things that are aligned with meaningful goals that serve people beyond yourself. It’s not harder than that. Coming up with the things that are on track for your unique strengths, your unique interests, passions and purpose. That’s the work. That’s a lifetime, but getting the framework that’s what I do in a nutshell. To give you a framework at least you know which boxes to check. Everybody’s talking about all the same stuff, but it’s a big soup.

Do you find that going through this process is different or unique when you’re dealing with small business owners or healthcare practitioners like us? Is there anything unique to maybe our physical therapy set?

I would break it down more this way. I work with executives who have a boss. I work with entrepreneurs who technically we don’t have a boss. You would be in that subset, but I would more say you’re professional. A professional is somebody who’s got a specific credential versus an entrepreneur who was the C-student that hires the A-student. I work with investors, people that however they got there, they’re investing their money. As far as professionals go, what I love about working with professionals is you’re in control of your time. You get to decide how you’re going to grow this thing and turn it from a practice to a business. That’s where you fall into the category of entrepreneurs. That’s an E-Myth distinction, the Michael Gerber distinction. A business is different than practice. As far as that goes, you are in control of your time. You do get to make the decisions about where you want to focus and who you want to hire.

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You don’t have to focus on those areas. You get to decide who you want to serve. It’s Claymation. You get to sculpt it any way you want. To me, that’s the level of Maslow’s hierarchy where like, “You’re successful in certain regard working for yourself.” If you can keep the lights on working for yourself, that’s a certain amount of success. I never thought about this before, but the answer to your question is, you’re closer and you arrive at the point of, “How do I get more meaning and significance in my life quicker than people who are grinding away at a job where they don’t have any control?” It doesn’t give them a lot of options and make a huge contribution.

It’s interesting you talk about being in control of your time. What’s unique about physical therapy owners is we take a little bit more passive approach to our time simply because for many years we’ve been servants to other people according to a schedule, patient appointments. We like to think that we aren’t in control because as providers to patients, we are at the mercy of our patient’s schedule. Whereas that was a choice that we made. It was to forgo our schedule, forgo our time to serve those patients. Sometimes you have to take some control back or make the conscious decision that, “No, I am in control of my time. I’ve given it to this time frame to the patients to serve them. I need to work on the business. I need to make a conscious choice that I’m better served to not serve the patients one-on-one, but to serve my business.” That’s a tough mindset for me to get over with some of the coaching clients I have.

It makes total sense. We’re always a choice even if we’re choosing to give up our choice. For a lot of professionals, particularly the ones that I’ve worked with. I have worked with PT owners in Purpose Mapping, but largely it was lawyers that I worked with. It was hundreds of them that I’m working with. Carving out the time to sit down with a coach once a week and do some thinking, there’s a mentoring that happens of like, “Let me show you how to think like a business owner. Let me show you how to think through the processes that you need to turn this into a business.” Even carving out one hour a week. What does a PT owner going to make in that hour versus what are they going to pay a good coach for that same hour? That’s a hard nut to swallow. When you think about it in terms of the freedom and the wealth you can create over the years and decades ahead, there’s a good metaphor for this. We talked about Elon Musk. If we send a rocket to Mars and we’re a fraction of a degree off on the trajectory, that rocket is not getting nowhere near Mars. You’ve got to do that thinking as early on in your business as possible because you set your trajectory for the next years or decades ahead. The sooner you work with a coach and get a business owner mindset, the better off you’re going to be and the better off your family is going to be.

That’s my mantra. They’ve got to reach out to a business coach or they’ve got to step out of treating full-time. They’ve got to network with others, like-minded individuals, small business owners and whatnot. That’s the formula for success for all of these successful PT owners that I’ve interviewed over time. It’s dead-on. I know you don’t have a lot of time and I appreciate what you’ve provided thus far in terms of the value. Is there anything you want to share before we wrap things up?

The main thing I’d like to say is your fulfillment matters. You’re not a cog in a wheel. You’ve got freedom. You’ve got choice and at some point, you’ve got to pick up that plate and start spinning it. It’s not working for the weekends, it’s got to become part of your daily practice. Michael Gerber would say, “A business is a dojo. You go in every day and you’re shadowboxing.” You’re dealing with the part of you that would let yourself be devoured by the needs of your patients who would rather never pay you and just take and take and suck you dry. What have you got left for your family? You have to start with yourself. A drop in the bucket a day adds up over time. Do one tiny thing. I learned partly from The ONE Thing book. The second thing I learned was from Tony Robbins is he never left the site of a meeting where something was decided without taking one tiny action step. He’d be in a meeting with some investors or whatever. He’d walk out before he was out of that board room, he would call his secretary. He would say, “Fax over those documents,” or “Can you schedule this for me?”

He didn’t sit down and draft documents for six hours. He told the secretary, “Book me six hours where I can do this.” One tiny step is all you’ve got to do every day. Whether it’s reading this blog, whether it’s scheduling a call with Nathan, with me or some other coach, buying a book like The ONE Thing or The E-Myth by Michael Gerber. Taking one tiny action step towards a life that’s sustainably fulfilling and successful. That’s what I want to leave everybody with.

If people want to reach out to you, Craig, how can they do that or find out a little bit more about your process?

PurposeMapping.com is my website. You can begin purpose mapping for free. There’s a little, about a 30-minute video halfway down the webpage. You could book a call with me or you can email me at Craig@PurposeMapping.com. I’d be happy to hear from you if you got something out of this. I always love hearing from people, hearing their insights and what are you going to do about it? What’s the tiny step you’re going to take from reading this blog? The one little thing you can do that will move your life forward and in alignment with your purpose.

Thank you so much for taking the time. You’ve been an inspiration to me and hopefully, you’ve been an inspiration to many others. I appreciate it.

Thank you so much and it was an absolute pleasure working with you. I’m looking forward to seeing how things unfold for you as you drop by drop every day, start to fill that bucket.

Thank you.

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About Craig Filek

Have you ever laid awake at night wondering what’s next?

What do you do when you’ve achieved all the success you ever dreamed of, and it’s still not fulfilling you?

Today’s guest walked away from a 7-figure business that he co-founded, because it was making him miserable. He took the time to rest and allow life show him what’s next.

His name is Craig Filek, and he created Purpose Mapping® to bring his life into alignment after 20+ years of deep inner work and entrepreneurial experimentation. These days, executives, entrepreneurs & investors around the world seek Craig’s guidance when making life-changing decisions.
You can begin Purpose Mapping for free at PurposeMapping.com

Today, we’ll get Craig talking about how to find YOUR true fulfillment by maximizing your natural talents in service to a larger mission.
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