E548 | Are You Being A Clinical Martyr?

Something that I see as being a massive challenge in Healthcare is martyr syndrome. This condition is basically where you self-sacrifice and service to others at the expense of yourself. This could be something you are dealing with and today I wanted to chat about what steps to take to handle this. Enjoy!

• Phasing out of your career and moving on to other things
• Giving up part of your existence
• When you learn, it's exciting

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Podcast Transcript

Danny: So there's all kinds of hidden fees within your business that are just part of doing business. One of those is credit card. Processing and for us, we didn't even realize how much we were paying in credit card processing with the first management software we were using for our practice. And when we switched over to PT everywhere, we just realized we were saving literally hundreds of dollars a month with credit card processing with their partner with Card point versus who we were using with our prior.

Software. This has made a massive difference. It's more than paid for itself. It allows us to decrease our overhead. It allows us to have more cash flow to reinvest in our people, in our technology, in our facility, in marketing and everything that's gonna drive the business. So don't get abused by credit card processing companies.

Make sure you're paying what you should pay. And if you're looking for a management software, highly recommend PT everywhere directly integrates with a. Processor makes it very easy and their rates are super, super competitive. So it's saved us a ton of money and it probably will do the same for you if you don't know what you are getting charged.

So head over to PT everywhere. Take a look at what they've got. I think you really like it. So here's the question. How do physical therapists like us who don't wanna see 30 patients a day, who don't wanna work home health and have real student loans create a career and life for ourselves that we've always dreamed about?

This is the question, and this podcast is the answer. My name's Danny Mate, and welcome to the PT Entrepreneur Podcast.

What's going on guys? Doc Danny here with the PT Entrepreneur Podcast and today well, We're talking about martyr syndrome and something I think is actually a massive problem in in healthcare in general. I don't wanna say problem, but a challenge a difficult situation to understand, resolve and figure out the best solution for people in healthcare in particular, when they start to really.

I think about themself leaving the field or moving and transitioning what they're doing and not necessarily putting themself in a place where they have martyr syndrome. So let me quickly, I'm gonna define this real, real quick. Some of you, you might be experiencing this or have experienced this or know somebody that has actually very common in healthcare in general, but basically martyr syndrome is where.

You have self-sacrifice and service to others at the expense of yourself. So self-sacrifice and service to others at the expense of yourself. And when I read that and I think Okay, service to others at the expense of yourself, I think of a lot of A lot of jobs, honestly. When I was in the military, I would lump a, a good bit of what people do in that as service, to other.

In fact, people bank veterans for their service, right? And. It in a lot of ways, it does take a toll on on you. It can very much take a toll on your family. And, but yet it's important, right? It's an important thing that we need. We need a military and we need people that are, willing to volunteer to be a part of that.

When we look at police, firefighters, teachers I lump into that. I think of teachers for. This situation in particular my brother-in-law, his wife was a teacher for a decade or a little bit longer, and it's just interesting to watch firsthand as. The you count up the hours of time if they're putting in the amount of compensation they have, which is just like way less than most reasonable people would say that it should be.

And really it's a service career, right? But I think that what In particular now, a lot of people that are leaving these different industries, these different careers is because they are choosing other things over that that career because of their own families, their own. Health, their own lives.

And maybe this is just the way it's gonna be, where younger populations are going to have, careers where it's more of a service sacrifice, sort of position. And then they're gonna phase out of that and move on to other things that allow them to have a better work-life balance.

Or they just decide, this is a really important role for me, a really important job, and I'm going to basically give up a lot of other things in my life that are important in order to, be a part of this career and help these other people. And I don't know if there's anything that I would say is like right or wrong about that.

I think it's a decision that people have to make and that is complex, right? There's a lot of layers to that. I'll give you, a couple relevant examples just from my own life and when I decided to lead the army, one of the biggest reasons that I would've stayed was because of the the soldiers that I was working with.

The, with, especially when I was at, when I was at my brigade. These were. These are my guys, man. I was, embedded in an infantry brigade, with an office in the middle of the barracks. I trained with these guys. I was around 'em all the time, and I developed a lot of close friendships with other, other leaders within the within the brigade and battalions that I was that I was attached to.

And, I felt a real strong. Pull to want to stay and be a part of that. Now, ultimately, the military does what they want with you and they move you to different places. And they, I was taken outta that role and I was put into a role that I just really didn't like which was more of like a troop medical clinic sort of satellite hospital clinic.

Setting, which ultimately was one of the big drivers of why I decided to get out of the military. But I totally see the reason why people will give up a lot to, to stick around. There's just a, there's a feeling of something more than just yourself that is compelling to be a part of.

For sure. My my siblings both are involved in healthcare. One is a ICU nurse. And the other one is in emergency medicine. He's a flight care nurse up in Baltimore. Works for a major hospital and my sister works at a government hospital here in Georgia. And they both have really demanding jobs.

I'm talking, 24 hour shifts, like when my, with what my brother does, my sister does, night shifts, only 12 hour shifts and. I remember getting an opportunity to be a keynote speaker at a aviation medicine conference that my brother was was a, he was a part of the nonprofit that put this on.

And so there's a few hundred. Aviation, medicine specific physicians, nurses, medics that were coming in to do continued ed training. And they asked me, they said, Hey, can you put together a presentation on how we can be healthier? And so I said, yeah, sure, I can do that. I was doing all this work with tactical groups for Kelly Tourette's group and constantly working with military operators, lots of pilots, especially for helicopters.

So I said, yeah, sure. Like I, I'll put it together. And as I started doing research and trying to figure out like what's the most relevant thing I can do for these people? I started to realize that the that the healthcare landscape is atrocious for your physical and mental health, and especially when it comes to swing schedules.

So shift work, like what both of my siblings do and what my dad who is also in the the health field, what he did for years and. When I was looking at the research and in particular looked at the health world Health Organization, how they define shift work, I found it just, pretty shocking that shift work is defined as a carcinogen.

Meaning if you. Work shifts. If you work nights, if you work 24 on, 48 hour hours off, this is not just healthcare. This could also be firefighters, police officers, any number of jobs in including, labor jobs, that, that are night work, you are going to die faster. It's like that's just the what's gonna happen, and to stand in front of this room of a couple hundred folks and to. Drop this on them and many of them know it's terrible for them. They just don't know how bad maybe it is. I thought to myself, I said, damn, if. If I knew that physical therapy was a carcinogen and I was gonna die faster and live a less healthy life because of the demand of shifting time zones so much where I'm asleep during the day.

I'm awake at night, and then I'm back to days and back to nights, or I'm up all day at night and then I'm sleeping, try to recover the next day. If I knew that I would've a real hard time staying in that career really hard. And. A lot of it has to do with the people that matter to you when you leave work.

That's the thing that I think is the hardest part. And even, with my my siblings, even as they've had kids, it's been interesting for me to see, like they know it and it's not something that, I think that they want to continue with forever. I, they definitely, in most cases, are probably gonna want to move to a job where it's a little more, structured day work.

But frankly they find that boring because people don't get stabbed during the middle of the day as much as they do at night. And that's what my brother deals with. It's just legitimate. Life-saving trauma incidents as well as his wife who does the same. She's a nurse practitioner that deals with trauma at one of the biggest trauma centers in the East coast and runs a surgical team.

Like they're just legitimately dealing with saving people's lives on a daily basis. And as important as that job is, even they take, a look in the mirror and they think to themself, man, Is it worth it? Are these strangers that I'm helping worth more than my own health and my relationships with my kids that I don't get to see as much as I would like because of the strict schedules the non flexible schedule associated with this type of work.

And it's a really challenging, complex problem, right? Like it's, I don't know what the right answer is for them or for anybody else. And I think it's far harder in the emergency medicine. Realm like the rest of my family functions in, then it was for me in the non-life threatening healthcare environment, right?

Look, let's be honest, if we look at importance of what we do, Not to downplay. I think what we do is very important. But, if you've been stabbed and my, my brother can help save your life that's pretty damn important, right? If you hurt your back deadlifting and I can help you get back to deadlifting, it's less important than being alive, right?

Maybe we can all agree that we are n not necessarily the most important medical providers when it comes to, I guess life and death. It's not even close. So when I see Martyr syndrome, which is very common in the healthcare landscape, the question that we ask ourself is who's going to save these people's lives?

If I'm not here, who's going to, work with my guys if I'm not here? Who's going to see my patients if I'm not here? And we put ourself in a place where we sacrifice ourself and our own relationships. At the expense or for the benefit of other people. And I don't know what the right answer is for this, but I know when I looked in the mirror and when I see people that are within pH physical therapy that are burned out and they're seeing really high volume, I'm talking 20, 30 plus people a day, they're writing.

Documentation. As every break that they have, they're literally staying afterward. Saturday mornings, they're catching up on their notes and they're exhausted. They're exhausted because your day. Is crammed full of so much stuff. Think about this. My friends that work in software companies, my friends that work, with bigger corporate sort of organization, companies that are general business.

They're in marketing, they're in logistics. Any number of things. They might have a meeting or two a day, maybe, something like that. Unless they're really high up and they're bouncing around from meeting to meeting. But when you're working with patients, it's like you're having a meeting every hour of the day that you're at work.

And it's mentally draining. It's exhausting to be so focused on other people and then have to do so much documentation on top of that, which is not something that most people are excited about. And keep in mind, the work that you do can either give you energy or it can drain you. Think of shit that you love to do.

Let's say you, you love. Photographing stuff, you're super into photography. I bet you don't feel drained after a few hours of taking photos, but I bet you do feel drained after a few hours of writing notes. Because it's not that engaging and if we didn't have to do it, we wouldn't do it. But we need to because we have to have defensible docu documentation and it's part of the job.

It's also part of what justifies what you're doing to healthcare groups that are paying, right? Insurance companies that are paying for that. And it's something that. Is just a difficult task that people have to do. So when we look at burnout, the amount of, it's not the amount of work as much as it is the environment and the type of work that's being done.

But what I've noticed, and I see this in the type of career field that my brother is, it's rampant because they feel this obligation to serve other people to like literally save lives. And I can very much see why it would be harder in that setting than our own setting. And yet I still, I see the same thing where providers in these settings, especially emergency medicine settings, are ultimately willing to give up elements of their own life and their own physical health in order to do the job that they're doing.

And they, they feel this sense of obligation and it's. It takes a selfless person to feel that, but once you get to a point where you are literally burning yourself out and a lot of these jobs, like divorce rates are higher, health is terrible, and it's because you are not seeing your spouse as much.

You're not taking care of yourself, you're not sleeping well. Your hormones are all screwed up, right? And for a lot of 'em, to get to a certain point, it's too late. This is their career and now they've got golden handcuffs on and they can't leave. They can't do something different even if they wanted to.

And when I look at the physical therapy profession, And I think about this martyr syndrome that I see within this as well. I see two things. One is people don't want to leave the setting they're in because they're developing relationships and actually helping people that are coming in there, right?

And they feel like they're abandoning them. So they have martyr syndrome and they feel like if they leave who's gonna see my patients? I'll be honest with you, if you are burnt out and you dislike what you're doing, I don't know if you're doing yourself any favors by staying there and in fact, think about how miserable you are.

Other times you know around not being at work, how miserable you probably are on Sunday, knowing that you gotta go to work on Monday and that you hate it and for five days you're gonna be doing shit that you hate. That sucks. That's a trade off that you are making because of feeling obligated to some stranger that has a knee replacement that you don't know who's gonna work with him.

I don't know who's gonna work with him, but somebody probably will. But I tell you what, if you're, if you are giving up your happiness and the energy that you have for your family just to be able to do that, I don't know if that exchange is worth it. And I tell a story, whenever I talk about, when I really realized that I needed to make a change, and it was when I was living in Columbus, Georgia, I was assigned at Fort Benning, Georgia and.

It was my last duty assignment and I wasn't sure if I was gonna get out still, so I'd got there. And when you get there, the way the Army does it, they're real tricky about how to try to keep you in. If they move you, you incur a year. Even though I didn't have a year left on my contract. I had a year after they moved me.

So they'll move you so that you incur more time and they have a little bit more time to try to keep you in. And they dangle other jobs in front of you and stuff that I wanted to do. But one day I got home and I remember our kids were really young, right? So like my son was, At the time, he was probably two.

My daughter just born, she was a couple months old and. My son, I remember he came up to me and he wanted to play with me when I got home. So I had sick call. Hours would start at six. Normally my day would end around three. So I would go from six to three. I'd have, 10 to 20 people that I would see first part of the morning with sick call.

And then another probably, I don't know, 12 or so people after that. That I would have on a schedule within the clinic. So it was a lot of people and just a lot of documentation. It's just a lot of volume. And I remember coming home and I sat down and he came over to me with these little cars hot Wheels cars.

He had a bunch of these and he just, he wanted me to play with him. He wanted me to play cars with him. And I told him no, and I fell asleep on the couch. And I just remember him like mop, like in, in like sad music playing while he is walking away. He probably doesn't even remember this. And I turned him down and he looked real sad and he turned around, he walked back over where his little track was that he was playing with, and I fell asleep on the couch.

And when I woke up, it was like two hours later he's still playing with his cars. And I felt like a complete jerk. Like just not even having enough energy to be able to do something fun with my son who'd been sitting at home all day, probably, waiting to hang out and play with me. And I turned him down and I thought to myself, I was like, man, this is not good.

Like I f I feel like I have no energy. I feel depressed and I don't like the direction that, my life is going. I don't want to have no energy left over and turn my son down or really anything that I find meaningful and say no because I don't have any energy to do cause I've just given it all up.

At a job that I don't find much meaning in anymore. And for a lot of us, I think we get to that point. And maybe you don't make the drastic change that I made and have a catalyst like that, but maybe you've had moments like that in your life and you just ignored 'em, or you just didn't really focus on 'em maybe as much as I did.

But I, I know that's the moment for me when I was. Done. I was like, I can't do this anymore. I'm gonna figure out what I'm gonna do after this. I'm not doing this for another 13 years like everybody told me to do, so that I could get my 20 years in the Army and have a pension and all the benefits that come along with that 13 years long damn time for me to be like shit and dislike what I'm doing.

So that was a big catalyst for me and. For you, you may love what you do. I hope you do. I hope that whatever clinic you're at or whatever you're doing, it's you love it. And if you don't, I encourage you and I really hope that you don't just get caught up in what I see in the profession as this idea of martyr syndrome, of if if I leave, who's gonna help.

Bury out and who's gonna help Linda and whatever else. And we develop these relationships with people and it's meaningful and we want to help them and they like us because we are helping them achieve a goal. And it's a great work environment. It's probably one of the best jobs on the planet in my opinion, like one of the most personally rewarding jobs you can have.

It's way better than most jobs, like most people go to work. And they do some shit that they don't see any sort of like direct correlation with. They don't have anybody bringing them a, a pound cake because they help them get back to playing tennis again or whatever. Just think about how great that environment is and how much people enjoy working with you and you helping them.

And now you take that personally rewarding job and you load on so much ancillary shit with documentation and insurance verification and all these questionnaires we have to do and all the volume you have to see because of poor reimbursement and private equity owned practices that just want to see more and more revenue and more and more profit, and all of a sudden they ruin the fucking job for everybody.

It's not fun anymore. And you're burnt out because of it. So what options do you have? You either suck it up and you end up giving up part of your existence and happiness for what you want to do, and understand that you're gonna give up a lot of energy and it's gonna drain you a lot to just work in that environment for a long period of time.

And you have to just come to terms with that, or you have to decide to do something else. And we wonder why there's such a huge nonclinical push within the profession. I'm talking about people that have either worked their whole life as a physical therapist or they've spent seven years getting a doctorate to then all of a sudden decide, I don't wanna do this anymore.

This isn't what I signed up for, and they move on to something else. And oftentimes it's because they want more flexibility. They want diversity in terms of like their job of what they're doing and their day-to-day. And they don't want to feel exhausted by the end of the day. They want to have something left over for the other stuff in life that's really important.

Like life is not about your job. Your job is there, so you have something to try to be great at, so you can make an income and have money to then do the shit you wanna do outside of your job and experience the world with the people that you wanna experience it with. I guarantee you, if you talk to somebody on their deathbed and you're like, do you wish you would've worked more?

They're absolutely gonna say no. And I sure as hell bet they wish they wouldn't have worked more in a job they don't like. And this is where the catch 22 happens, right? It's okay, if you leave, then who's gonna take care of these people? And I don't know. But somebody will. Somebody will. Or they'll get so thin in the profession that they're going to have to start compensating more.

They're gonna have to start making the job more enticing. For people to want to do it. Just look at the travel nursing world. The nurses have a mass exodus since 2020 and really it started before that, but that really accelerated it. I had an interesting conversation with my family about this, and they're all nurse, they're all damn nurses, right?

And. It's so interesting to hear them and they're like, yeah, this was a long time coming, but this just accelerated it. And now if you look at it, travel nurses, they make a lot more money than a nurse that's working at a hospital. And even nurses that are working at hospitals are having to pay them more because they've had so many people leave.

And that's what happens. Supply and demand. We actually have a lot of physical therapists actually, that are coming outta school. Lots of new grads that are gonna come in and take those shitty jobs. As soon as people start deciding, I don't wanna do this anymore, this work environment is just not conducive to long-term work in this setting.

They're gonna have to change it or they're gonna have to compensate people more. But what you gotta look at is yourself. I don't know what people are gonna do with those settings. I don't know what compensation's gonna look like or how the supply demand curve is gonna shift. All I know is for me, and this isn't necessarily the answer for everybody, but for me, when.

When I left the military and I went from a structured, very strict, huge organization, and I went into an office in the corner of a CrossFit gym that couldn't have been any further away from the setting that I was coming out of this big hospital organization clinic that I was assigned to. I didn't know what the hell was going on.

I didn't know what I was gonna do. I wasn't sure if it was gonna work. But I was so much happier than I was whenever I was in that big, safe environment. And it came down to a few things. The first one was control of my day, for better or worse. And this is actually a huge issue that a lot of people struggle with.

They don't know what to do with their time. All of a sudden, there's no, no one's your boss, no one is saying, Hey, I need this number of relative value units done. I need, this number of bill units or whatever I need. These notes done by this time. Nobody's holding, nobody's doing that to you.

You're a big boy or a big girl at this point. You gotta put your own pants on and decide what you're gonna do during the day. And if you wanna waste your time and you wanna play Fortnite all day, that's up to you. Unless you're gonna become a professional gamer, it's probably not gonna help you get food on the table for your family.

So my guess is you're gonna get your ass out there and try to get some patience. And that's what I did. I got out there, I tried to get patience the best I could, and I tried to do, The best job with them than I possibly could whenever they did come and work with me. And it was great, like so refreshing to get to a point where I was working with people that I really enjoyed working with.

I was. Making better money than I was whenever I was in the military. And honestly, that was like a side effect. That wasn't even the thing that made a big difference to me because we always lived below our means. So it didn't really change much for us. It just was like more money we could save.

We didn't really change our life in any significant way, but what changed my life in a significant way was the actual quality of work that the. The interest that I had in what I was doing, the satisfaction with what? With what I was doing with my life. The ability to be creative within my own career field and make my company look the way it, I wanted it to look, make my patient population look the way that I wanted it to look, work with people that I just absolutely would've worked with for free.

Cause I found so much interest in those populations that it was easy for me to work with them, and I didn't feel drained after I would see. Six to eight hours of patience during the day. In fact, I had a ton of energy whenever I got home. I sure as all wasn't turning my kids down to play with them whenever I got back.

And more than anything, I had flexibility and I had. I had the ability to decrease some of the monotony that we have on a day-to-day basis because I was able to use my skillset in the clinic. But then I also had to learn and develop a lot of things outside of the clinic. And I think that for most of us, we thrive in an environment where we're learning and progressing and trying to improve in some area.

Typically that's gonna be clinically for most of us clinically, we're trying to learn how to help this one specific type of, injured person out better. Okay, I'm having, I'm struggling with hip injuries. Okay, what can I learn about that? What con ed course, what, other clinician can I talk to?

What mentors are out there? What books can I read? What online content is there that I can consume to start to, get a better idea of what's going on, what research studies are out there now. Or I can really start to see what's the best way to get better at this? And just chipping away.

I've taken those blind spots out of your clinical skillset and making sure that you are world class what you do. Most of us, we love that we're a bunch of nerds. We thrive in that environment. And then when you add in the business side of it, it's, it feels overwhelming and it actually is, it's daunting.

Because you're like, oh shit, now I have to learn how to sell and market and I have to learn how to understand finance and I have to systemize things and damn, maybe I need to hire somebody at some point. And there's so much stuff that you have to learn, but when you learn, it's exciting, it's energizing cuz you're progressing.

It's why kids are so damn happy. Everything's new to them. Everything's new. Every experience is new. You ever seen like a little kid eat sugar for the first time? Think about this for a second. I remember we were like super strict with our son. We was eating like avocados and. Sweet potatoes, right?

We were making this shit at home and we took him home for for Christmas. Not that he was born in December, but his first af when he turned a year old, we took him home for his year birthday, took him to Georgia and he had a little smash cake. And before that though, the day before that, we were visiting some family and one of Ashley's family members.

Had some peach cobbler, literally sticks her finger in the peach cobbler and then shoves it in my son's mouth. And his eyes got so damn big, as big as they could get. And like he had this huge grin on his face and he's like trying to crawl over the table to get more of this peach cobbler, experienced sugar like. Refined sugar, I guess for the first time in his life, probably had been addicted ever since. Like all of us are. But that's a new experience. That's exciting for him. That's exciting for kids, like they, younger people experience more new things because they haven't been around as long and it's so difficult when we just do the same shit over and over again to try to find excitement in that.

And what we really need to do is try to just improve, try to get better, try to learn new things, whatever that is for you. But if you can do it in your career, and then you can do it in a way where that increases your family's ability to have time and financial freedom, what a freaking win that is. And that's what I found whenever we started a business where my wife and I started the practice.

When I look at burnout, I look at martyr syndrome, people feeling bad about, oh, what am I gonna do if I decide to be selfish? And that's so silly for us to say it like, I felt selfish when I decided to leave the military to start a practice. Oh, that's fucked up selfish because I wanted to do something that I felt was gonna challenge me more and put my family in a better position and allow me to have more energy around them.

I felt selfish about that. That's crazy. But that's the way we feel in healthcare because we're givers. We are, we take care of other people and it's, it is normal for us to feel like we are. Being selfish and not not providing for other people the way that we could, when in actuality we just do it in a slightly different way and it can align better with what our goals are and, what we want out of life.

Because that's all it comes down to. I don't know. We're all gonna die. It's gonna happen. And imagine if you look back and you're like shit, I had that shitty job for all those years and. Didn't get to do any, anything else, and I was a miserable Moy person because of that, but I did it.

I took it on the chin. Are you gonna be proud of that? Is that something that you're gonna you're gonna look back on or you'll be like, damn, I would've done that all over again. I don't know that's just not what I wanted to do. So when you look at Martyr syndrome, you look at your career and you look at satisfaction.

There's so many variables that we have to take into account and all I can do is tell you my experience. I don't know what the right answer is for you. I don't know what it is for my brother or my sister or anybody else in the healthcare industry. All I know is when I decided to do something different with my.

With my career, with my degree, within the profession without leaving it, but just do what I was doing in a slightly different way. My life got a hell of a lot better outside of work. I had more energy, I got healthier. I had better relationships with my family, with my spouse. I had time to like work on myself More time.

Time to. Not just be cramming everything into every single minute because of how busy I was at work. And more than anything, I felt challenged in a really exciting way that forced me to grow as a clinician, as a business owner. But more than anything personally, because when I decided to go into business for myself, I had no clue that meant that I was going to get.

Slapped in the face with reality of just how many flaws I had that I needed to work on. And that's what, that, that's the shit that people, no one's gonna tell you that yeah, go start a business. It's yeah. You gotta learn sales and market and all that other shit. Guess what? You gotta learn.

You gotta learn why you got a short temper. You gotta learn why you're a procrastinator. You gotta learn why you're a bad communicator. You gotta learn why you have money issues, why you cringe when you talk to people about what you charge. All these things are deep personal problems that you either you can ignore and your business suffers and you're gonna fail, or you can work on 'em.

And it sucks cuz it's hard and you have to realize you got a lot of shit that isn't very great and that you gotta improve in a lot of ways. And ultimately, if you do that and you say, all right, I'm gonna improve, and you start working on that, all these other areas of your life start to improve as well.

The discomfort of personal development is forced on you because your flaws and your superpowers, they get. Exponentially highlighted when you decide to go into business for yourself. It's actually one of the greatest benefits from what I've found, if you're willing to lean into it. And for me, it changed everything.

Everything. And I, I hate seeing my colleagues, like zombies going into. The clinic chipping away at their volume of patients, doing their notes on Saturday morning when they should be making pancakes for their fucking kids. And instead, you're writing a note. Think about that. That's a trade off you're making.

Is it worth it? And if it is, stay where you're at. And if it's not, you gotta do something about it. You gotta make a change. I don't know what that is for you. All I can tell you is what change I made and what. My, experience was and share that with you cuz everybody's different. But if you sound like me, and that's the path that might make sense for you.

May, maybe that's it and you should look into it a little bit more. For us it's what we do. This isn't it's not just a business. I think that most people get into. Business Cause they wanna make money. I get it. That's what a business does on the surface. But man, it's more than that. It's helping people be able to enjoy what they actually like to do, what they've worked so hard on.

To become a great clinician, to become, a professional and be able to actually help people in such a meaningful way. And instead of leaving the career, leaving the profession, be able to shift what they're doing and use it in a slightly different way that allows them to have that feeling of satisfaction with and personal gratification from helping somebody get over an injury, but do it in a way where you're not giving up the rest of your life at the same time.

I mean that, that's the goal. That's what we do. Sure. We teach people how to sell and market all that shit, whatever. That's to get you in the door. That's so that we can start to help you live a better life. You impact people in a way that is sustainable for you and your family, and along the way, if you do it the right way, you developed time and financial freedom.

It's a byproduct of it, but it's not easy. And you gotta make a decision of whether what you're doing is what you wanna do forever. And if not, The path isn't easy. There's a lot of work that you have to do, but it's exciting, it's fulfilling, and you're never gonna fall. You're not gonna fall asleep on the couch, when your kids are asking to play ever again.

At least I didn't. So guys, if this resonates with you anyway, and you're on the fence about what I should do, make a change. If you have a practice and you're struggling and you're like, man, what do I do? Head to physical therapy biz.com, check out what we're doing. We got a lot of resources there.

You can learn a lot more about what we do and who we work with. But either way, I hope you decide, for you, is it worth it? Is it not? Do you, are you gonna be a martyr? Are you not? I don't know what the right answer is. I just don't, I think it's complex and it's really challenging, but I felt obligated to share this stream of consciousness.

I dunno if you wanna call this, I just, I blacked out, and here we are at the end of this podcast. But anyway, I hope you enjoy this. If you did, take a screenshot of this one, share it on Instagram. I'm on there a lot more now. These days I'm trying to be a little bit more engaged with folks and it's fun.

It's fun. And so take a screenshot of it, tag me in it tag pt biz in it as well. And we'll re-share it and hopefully, get some more eyeballs on what you have going on too. Anyway, guys, thanks so much for listening. As always, we'll catch you next week.

Hey, Pete, entrepreneurs. We have big, exciting news, a new program that we just came out with That is our PT Biz part-time to full-time, five day challenge. Over the course of five days, we get you crystal clear on exactly how much money you need to replace by getting you. Ultra clear on how much you're actually spending.

We get you crystal clear on the number of people you're getting to see, and the average visit rate you're going to need to have in order to replace your income to be able to go full-time. We go through three different strategies that you can take to go from part-time to full-time, and you can pick the one that's the best for you based on your current situation.

Then we share with you the sales and marketing systems that we use within our mastermind that you need to have as well. If you wanna go full-time in your own practice. And then finally we help you create a one. Page business plan. That's right. Not these 15 day business plans. You wanna take the Small Business Association, a one day business plan that's gonna help you get very clear on exactly what you need to do and when you're gonna do it.

To take action if you're interested and sign up for this challenge is totally free. Head to physical therapy biz.com/challenge. Get signed up there. Please enjoy. We put a lot of energy into this. It's totally free. It's something I think is gonna help you tremendously, as long as you're willing to do the work.

If you're doing the work and you're getting. Information put down and getting yourself ready to take action in a very organized way, you will have success, which is what we want. So head to physical therapy biz.com/challenge and get signed up today. Hey, real quick before you go, I just wanna say thank you so much for listening to this podcast, and I would love it if you got involved in the conversation.

So this is a one-way channel. I'd love to hear back from you. I'd love to get you. Into the group that we have formed on Facebook. Our PT Entrepreneurs Facebook group has about 4,000 clinicians in there that are literally changing the face of our profession. I'd love for you to join the conversation, get connected with other clinicians all over the country.

I do live trainings in there with Yves Gege every single week, and we share resources that we don't share anywhere else outside of that group.So if you're serious about being a PT entrepreneur, a clinical rainmaker, head to that group. Get signed up. Go to facebook.com/groups/ptentrepreneur, or go to Facebook and just search for PT Entrepreneur. And we're gonna be the only group that pops up under that.