E703 | The Danger Of Living A Lukewarm Life

In this episode of the podcast, Doc Danny explores the concept of living a "lukewarm life" and why it is a dangerous place to be. He starts by describing this predicament as a state where one doesn't hate their job or situation, but also doesn't love it. This is a common situation for many people, especially those in clinical director roles or other stable positions that lack true fulfillment.

Doc Danny shares a conversation he had with one of his team members who used to work in wine sales and experienced this lukewarm existence before making a major career change. They discuss how this mindset often prevents people from taking risks and pursuing a life and career that aligns with their passions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has unexpectedly forced many clinicians and directors in secure roles to start their own practices. Doc Danny points out that almost all of them, given the choice, would never go back to their previous lukewarm jobs. Starting their own businesses allowed them to create the life they truly wanted.

The host contrasts this with the more common approach of letting one's job dictate their life, rather than taking control and actively shaping their life. He encourages listeners to "take the red pill" like in The Matrix, and see the world as it truly is, rather than passively accepting the constraints of their job or situation.

Doc Danny emphasizes the importance of not letting opportunities pass by, referencing a book about the regrets of the dying where not living true to oneself was a common regret. He urges listeners to view life as a video game with only one life, and to take calculated risks and challenges in order to reach their full potential, rather than settling for a lukewarm existence.

True success, according to Doc Danny, is being healthy, happy, and wealthy in all aspects of life, not just financially. He acknowledges that achieving this balance can be difficult, as people often excel in one area while struggling in others.

If you are looking into starting a physical therapy clinic but are second guessing yourself, this is the podcast for you! You can also check out our Side Hustle Guide for extra info on this! We also wrote a blog post that outlines this very well here.

Ready to elevate your practice? Book a call at the link below with one of our expert consultants today and start your journey to delivering unparalleled physical therapy.

www.physicaltherapybiz.com/apply

Do you enjoy the podcast?  If so, leave us a 5-star review on iTunes and tell a friend to do the same!

Are you a member of our free PT Entrepreneur Facebook Group? Join today!

Podcast Transcript

Danny:  If you are the kind of person that feels like you, you want to do something else, you want to challenge yourself more. You want to see what you're capable of. I can tell you this one day, you're going to not have that opportunity anymore. You're going to be too old. You're going to have too many responsibilities.

And that chance will have passed you by, Hey, are you a physical therapist looking to leverage your skillset in a way that helps you create time and financial freedom for yourself and your family? If so, you're in the right spot. My name's Danny Matta, and over the last 15 years, I've done pretty much everything you can in the profession.

I've been a staff, ut I've been an active duty military officer. Physical, the. I started my own cash practice. I've sold that cash practice. And today my company physical therapy business helped over a thousand clinicians start growing scale, their own cash practices. So if this sounds like something you want to do, listen up, cause I'm here to help you.

What's going on? Dr. Danny here with the PT entrepreneur podcast. And today we're talking about the concept of living a. Lukewarm life. Now, this is something I actually heard someone on our advisor teams. This is our, this is, these are our team members that talk to people that are potential potentially interested in working with PTIS.

PTB is about their business and they have to have a good bit of business experience and understand what they're looking at. And one of the, one of the people on our team we were talking about the concept of, not hating what you do, but not loving what you do and how, you That's such a dangerous place to live.

And he called it living a Luke warm life. And I really, I liked that term. I like that concept quite a lot. And his backstory is interesting. He was actually a Somalia. So he was in in, in wine sales and, um, living in the middle ground, right? Didn't love it, didn't hate it.

And eventually made a big career change into a different industry. And now he eventually works works with us. But we were talking about. People that we have conversations with in particular, this seems to be really common with people that are in like kind of clinic director roles.

So they're making decent money. They have some responsibility. I think may have some pride with the fact that they've worked themselves into a, more of a clinical director role. And but they don't love it. It's like, they know that it's not what they wish they would do.

They just don't hate it and they stay there. And I think this is not necessarily just this obviously one position, but for a lot of people, if you are, if you don't love what you do, but you don't hate what you do, it's not the worst thing in the world, but you also never really have a compelling reason to leave.

And one of the things that we saw. During COVID in particular was many people that were clinic directors or senior clinicians that felt like they had a lot of job security got let go, whether short term or just in general, they were furloughed or they got let go from their job and they never thought that would happen because, job security as a clinician is pretty good.

But hey, when the clinic shuts down, especially people that cost the most senior Individuals you're going to be the first to go you're going to be the first that they're going to let go because they've got to cut revenue or they've got to cut overhead down when they have a big decrease in revenue So they got let go and many of them started their own practice because of this and never would have if it wasn't for literally a Catastrophic event that forced their hand, forced them to do something else.

And I can think of a dozen people at the time I was literally talking to every single person that we were potentially, going to work with. I talked to everyone. I can think of a dozen people that ended up working with us during that time that You know, if I asked them today, would you go back, would you go back to your clinic where you could take that clinical director role working for that big insurance clinic or that big hospital?

Would you go back and do it and trade out where you're at now? And every single one of them would say, absolutely no freaking way, no way, because you don't even know how different your life can be. Until you take a chance on trying to make it into what you want it to be until try until you try to create something of your own, a business of your own in this example that allows you to create the life that you want to live because of it and versus what a lot of people do.

And this is such a different view that it can be hard to even. Maybe even conceptualize what I'm talking about. But if you let your life be dictated by your job, that is one way to to live. The people that can kind of take the red pill, as they would say, like from the matrix and see the world for what it really is.

You get a chance to create. Something that provides time and financial freedom for yourself and allows you to live the life that you want. Not necessarily build a life around what what the constraints of the job and the income and all the things that you have and the amount of time off and everything that is one way to live.

That's what most people do. And there's nothing wrong with that. But if you are the kind of person that feels like you, you want to do something else, you want to challenge yourself more, you want to see what you're capable of. I can tell you this one day, you're going to not have that opportunity anymore.

You're going to be too old. You're going to have too many responsibilities. And that chance will have passed you by. If you read there's a book that's I believe it's called the regrets of the dying, or I'm going to mess up the title of this, but basically it was a hospice care nurse that asked all these people that were, on their deathbed what are your biggest regrets?

One of the biggest things was not. Not living a life true to themself. And a lot of that was not taking a chance on themselves and really living a life based on what they thought they should do, not necessarily what they wanted to do. And that's a huge regret for a lot of people. They can't go back and change that.

And for me, I see people all the time that are living just like what our advisor said, they're living a lukewarm life. And it's not a bad life. Like no one's saying that there's anything necessarily inherently bad or wrong about it. It just depends what you want your life to look like, and for me, I look at life like a video game, right? Like it's, but you only have one life, right? You don't have all these extra lives. You can't do too much crazy shit that might die from, but you can't. You also don't want to live a life that has no adventure.

Once heard the saying a life with no scars is not a life worth living, right? Live, do stuff that is hard, do stuff that is challenging, take risks that are measured, right? And live a life, live, don't just wait to die. And part of that for me had to be, what am I, what can I accomplish on my own?

In terms of my employment, right? And for me, that was starting a business. That may not always be the case for somebody. For you, maybe it is. Maybe it's switching careers. Maybe it's doing something completely outside of the field. Maybe it's, taking a different job with a a company that you really admire and you want to make that change, but not just living a complacent life that you just get comfortable with and you just You don't hate it, but you don't love it because I think that is the most dangerous place to live That's a place where you'll never ever Make a change because you're not forced to make a change until it's too late and one day you're looking back And you wonder yourself shit What would I, what could I have accomplished?

And if we're looking at your life and in terms of a video game, let's say you could have got to level a hundred, right? If you really went for it, if you really tried, really took a chance on yourself and lived a life that was true to what you wanted to do. And for me it's not just about money or success in your career, right?

For me, it has to do with this. Are you healthy, happy, and wealthy? And the only reason I have plumped that one in is because it's how we put That's how we pay for things in the world. We don't have a choice. The other two are more important, healthy and happy. And that comes along with not having stress about money all the time and being able to do something on a daily basis that you love doing so healthy, happy, wealthy.

There's very few people that can say that they have all three of these things because they're either lopsided in one. And we know how many people do we know that literally are Incredibly disciplined when it comes to health. I mean they count all their macros. They're trying They're training and tracking everything and yet they can't seem to make it work in their job They can't figure it out.

They have discipline in so many other places, but they just can't seem to get ahead in Their job or with relationships. They just can't figure out how to, work together with other people, how to have a functional longterm relationship. All these things are part of the game, right? It's how do you get to these next levels?

That's the way that I look at it. Just personally, I'm not saying this is necessarily the way that you should. This is helps me understand, how am I doing in the scoreboard of life for my race, my, my own goals for what I want to do. And, if you're just sitting there. Yeah. At a job that, that is, is just something you don't necessarily like, but you don't hate you're going to get stuck and maybe you make it to like level five and you could have made it to a hundred and I think that's a sad thing to think about one day you look back and if you could imagine somebody could like literally show you, Hey, here's what the alternative life would have looked like as if it was like a movie.

And it's so much more awesome than the shit that you just, you know, that you did the life that you gave up on the, whatever dream it was, you had that you just ah, nevermind. It just, you let it slip away. And if you had to watch that one day, it would suck. It would be hard to watch.

And that not of ways I think would motivate people to really think don't take this for granted You don't know how long you've got and you don't know what you're capable of Until you really do take a chance on yourself. So ask yourself this. Are you living a lukewarm life? Are you just are you just living but not alive?

And there's a difference. There's a huge difference in how you feel, how you experience the world, how you intentionally live with the people that matter the most to you around you and how you want to spend your time, period. So if you're being complacent and you're just stuck in this middle ground where it's nice and lukewarm and it's not awesome, but it's not shitty, you got to really Take a second look at what you're doing your life and decide if that's what you want to do for the rest of your Life or if you want to try to do something that you're capable of and you don't even know what that is yet

Hey peach entrepreneurs. We have big Exciting news a new program that we just came out with it 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 going 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. 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 want to 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 want to take the small business association, a one day business plan.

It's going to help you get very clear on exactly what you need to do and when you're going to do it to take action. If you're interested in signing up for this challenge, it's totally free. Head to physicaltherapybiz. com. Forward slash 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 going to help you tremendously As long as you're willing to do the work if you're doing the work 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 physicaltherapybiz.com forward slash challenge and get signed up today.