080: Craig Filek - What’s Your Life Purpose?

Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing, but you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective and really well done? I think docsa talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent, and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have. Talk to docs of talent and you won't be disappointed. Go to docsatant.com Bill G Again, that's doxatallent.com Bill G One more time. Doxatallent.com Bill G Check it out today. What's your life purpose? I bet most of you don't have a very good answer. Some of you might have a notion of it. When I ask rooms of people, high powered, accomplished, educated, successful people, do you know your purpose in life? 10 or 20%. 20% is a really good day, raise their hands and have an answer for what their purpose in life is. But the people that know that do have a compelling answer for their purpose in life have an edge and their actions and their everything's focused. Today we're going to talk about how to get that purpose and if purpose is of interest to you or if you've just wondered about it and you don't know how to approach it, this show is all for you. Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business Podcast. I'm Bill Gallagher, your host and Gazelle's growth coach. I'm here today with Craig Filech, who's going to talk to us about his work in purpose mapping. So Craig, you're in the Phoenix Scottsdale area, is that right?

I'm actually in upstate New York. Mutual friends in Phoenix.

We got connected through a mutual friend in Phoenix and you can tell I didn't read thoroughly on the bio as we set up this. So welcome to the show from upstate New York.

Thank you. It's great to be here.

I'm telling you later how I'm flying to Phoenix later today and I'm thinking you're going to get excited about that and be like, oh, you're going to be in my way. You should have done this here. But you're in New York, so it's great to meet here by video Skype session and talk to you today about your work in purpose mapping. Tell me about your background or tell our listeners about how you come to this, how you get started in the world of purpose mapping, how you've worked, worked on creating a process or a flow to help people figure out that purpose.

Sure, sure. So I think it really started for me in 2002. And my first company, my business partner, was an E Myth Mastery student. And the very first thing that Michael Gerber has people do after explaining the system's philosophy, is to go through your primary aim. Right. Who are you, why you're here before getting into your strategic objective. What is your business? How are you going to build your business to support who you are and why you're here? And that really made an impression on me. I think I did my primary aim exercise about every six weeks for the first year or so, just really trying to get that. And as I dove into, you know, studying Tony Robbins, Jim Rohn, Brian Tracy, you know, just. I would. I used to leave the library with stacks of cassette tapes back in the day and take them on the road with me and do the automobile thing. I noticed that they were all talking about the importance of purpose, the importance of having a clear idea of why you're here as the basis for everything else you do to succeed. And that's really where it started for me and where it all came together is when I started. I don't know if you've heard of Ken Wilber. Our mutual friend Corwin is also a big fan. But I was a philosophy major. Ken Wilber is considered the foremost philosopher currently living on the planet. They sort of say Aristotle, Nietzsche, Wilbur. And what he did was he integrated so much of the human endeavor in the history of civilization and started what he called the integral philosophy. And I started applying that think of like a Venn diagram. So if you take Tony Robbins and Michael Gerber and Jim Rohn and Stephen Covey and Robert Kiyosaki and all these guys I was studying, and you lay over all of their ideas in a Venn diagram, things start to stand out. And the idea of purpose was the one that really stood out for me. And so I latched onto it. It just made sense. And I ran with it, sussed out the rest of the framework into something that takes that vague existential idea of who am I and why am I here? All the way down to. And what is my very next action step that, if I take it today, will make everything else easier or inevitable on my path.

So before you were doing this, you were doing some business consulting work, and you actually were so caught up in this, you left that whole thing behind.

I did. I actually. I was. I was Starting to launch purpose Mapping. I was doing a social media business because it was the hot. You know, this is the wild west. It was when Facebook first came out publicly and, you know, everybody was trying to figure out how to use it for. I was a direct response marketer. You know, I was in the planet Dan, Dan Kennedy direct response copywriting world and I was trying to figure out social media and it just blew up so fast, I couldn't keep up with it. It was making me nuts because everybody had a program and, you know, just growing so fast that eventually just it quits. And a friend of mine said, what are you going to do? And I said, you know, I've got this thing that's been percolating for a few years. And I wasn't called Purpose Mapping at the time, but she said, well, show it to me. And I showed it to her and we ended up dating as a result and then ended up looking at her company that had kind of taken a turn into the ditch. And I said, you know what? This is a cash cow. Let's rebuild this together. And so using our conjoined purpose maps, we forged ahead and we grew this company into a very lucrative professional consulting business. And a few years in, I realized, you know what? This is making me nuts. I'm not happy at all. And it was totally out of alignment with who I had grown to understand myself to be and the reason I was here. And so I stepped away and eventually she bought me out and I just kind of. I kind of coasted. I drifted for a while and just let things, you know, I let go of the rudder and I eventually drifted back into this slipstream of purpose mapping. And what it's really about is helping leaders find their alignment with their flow state. Because ultimately, if we're here, it's to optimize our potential to really live into the greatest contribution that we can make in this world. That's what I do now.

Well, American management philosophy and development for quite a few years has been heavily influenced by the work of Maslow. And I'm thinking of all the folks, right? You've got Jim Rohn and Maslow, and there's this whole body of work of. Of human potential and philosophy. And who am I and who I am? My identity is so wrapped up in the work that we do, right? I had a dear friend once whose career ended and then he attempted suicide because his identity was so threatened by this collapse of. Look, if I've always been this, this is who I am, the successful executive. And now that's ended in a painful, embarrassing way. My whole existence, my notion of who I am is threatened. And so if that's the notion, and not everybody attempts suicide, but many people are plunged into deep upset depression even over things that affect their work and their thing. And one of the first things we do when we meet people in a bar or a party or whatever is ask, hey, what do you do? Right. And that's so much of who I am, and yet what I do. So being and doing are distinct things. Right? But we collapse the two and the being. And then who you are at your core so drives the actions that you take, right? So I think that's where that whole philosophy collapse with the business and self improvement and, and actualization and the whole world of that starts to meld together for people.

It's so important. And I was, I was reading an article about these coal miners down south of me in Pennsylvania and the coal mines aren't coming back and they know it and, and they, and they refuse to get retrained. I mean, they're 25 years old, but.

There'S whole communities and lives and stuff. But in there, deeply tied to this thing that is, that's. It's like saying, I'm a buggy salesman.

Right, right, exactly. And so, and you know, it happens as well. I mean, there was a great Harvard Business Review article about Summit syndrome. You know, even if you didn't lose your job, your career, your identity, as you were talking about, executives will hit this tailspin of depression when they reach the proverbial apex of their goals. You know, they leave college, they leave grad school, they get on this track, and somewhere around, you know, 40 years old, it's like, okay, I've got the house, the wife, the kids, the cars, the vacation homes. What else is there? Right, right. Because every step up that ladder is rewarding. Right. There's a dopamine release for every little success and accolade. But then after a while it starts to plateau and they start looking for more. And that's on Maslow's hierarchy when you go from success to significance to self actualization, as you were saying.

Well, I was in the advisory board for a guy years ago, came up with his motivation and in his case, his driver at that point in life, at that moment was private jet money. Right? And he was embarrassed to admit it because he realized it was so sort of shallow on some level. Right. But he was like, but I am really excited. Like, I want to reach a level where a private jet is a natural and Obvious thing. And I'm always willing to work with whatever level of motivation someone's currently at and then ask, what else, what more? Because there's something deeper and more powerful, not just higher, right? The private jet money. And I have friends who love sort of hitting that tail number stage. I'm a pilot and I rent planes because it's a bad financial decision. But there is something beyond that. So there's making it, there's avoiding failure, there's grabbing for success. There's all of that stuff that we do to survive, to look good, to make it, to not do that. And we rely on core strengths that we have, right? Those winning things that we do that have always. We learn early on, oh, I'm smart, oh, I'm articulate, and that takes us somewhere, right? But it's not enough.

Well, I mean, the thing is to find out, okay, so if I took those strengths, there's actually a metric on this that I found absolutely fascinating. A friend of mine is the executive director for the Flow Genome Project. And so they're working with Navy Seal Team 6, Google, the UN they're looking at these leaders who are really pushing the limits of their potential in humanity. And what they found is in extreme sports athletes. What they found is the flow state, that experience of feeling our best and performing our best that we all seek. Right? I mean, that's really, I think, what we're ultimately after that happens just 4% beyond our comfort zone. And so it's finding out what is the strength or the group of strengths that if I just push those just a little bit further every day, will release the dopamine, the oxytocin, the serotonin, the endorphins that give me that feeling of being superhuman that we're all ultimately pursuing because private jet money, that's great. And hey, if that gets you out of bed, go for it. But when you get to the top of that mountain and you realize, okay, if my purpose in life, and I make a key distinction between purpose and mission, right? A lot of. A lot of companies, a lot of, you know, consultants use those words interchangeably, and I think they miss something crucial. The way I define purpose is the reason that we exist, right? So Jim Collins talks about the reason a company exists. That's the purpose, the why. But the bhag, that's how I define the mission. The mission is, you know, for me, if I'm working with an individual, it's a three to ten year, big, hairy, audacious goal. It's this mountain that I Want to climb? Okay, I have to break it down. So think of it like grad school. If I'm becoming a doctor, right, it's going to be eight years. What do I got to get done this semester? That's what I can focus on. But it's in alignment with this larger goal, with my purpose to heal humanity, let's say, right? My mission is to graduate and become a doctor. And this semester I just got to get through biology. So when we make that distinction between my mission, what I'm doing, and my purpose, my being, when I get to the top of the mountain and I've graduated, right, and I'm no longer a student, I'm no longer the guy pursuing private jet money. Now I have it, that identity, it's gone. I've accomplished it, and that mission is over. But my purpose is the reason I exist. And it's kind of always.

Purpose is never ending, right?

It's never ending.

It's unfulfilled. It's unfulfillable. Especially because if purpose has no metric, if the why of your work is the reason that you do what you do and act the way you act and are who you are, then it's not measured, it's not defined in that thing. I love your separation of mission, which might be combined with a vision. So I have a vision for a particular way. I claim a mission on the path to that vision or part of. Connected to that particular vision of something. And it's an expression of my purpose in time. It's become specific. But how do I know my purpose?

So that's an excellent question. And there's tons of. There's tons of things out there, you know, TED talks and books and whatnot. And I've read a bunch of them, and I feel like there's something missing in just about all of them. And if you know of something that actually touches on this, I'd be curious to hear the way that I really figured it out. I was doing a lot of personality profiles. You know, I'm adopted. And so there was just this gnawing drive within me for most of my young adult life to figure out who even am I, you know, really made me nuts. And so, you know, I got into all the standard stuff, the Myers Briggs, and, you know, there's some great things out there, the Colby and the disc. And I went even deeper into things like the Enneagram and things that are more esoteric and. And, you know, what I found was again, this Venn diagram idea. They all kind of pointed at these similar, really keywords, like, the same word kept coming up over and over across all the profiles. And you can read 10 pages of a profile, and it's in one ear and out the other, but when they all keep pointing at the same couple of keywords, that's something to pay attention to. And so I started to realize, okay, if there's a being side and a doing side to our human existence, and there are things that we do that feel better and things that feel worse, if we break that down, we come up with the essence, right? The way of being that feels best. And this is who we like to believe ourselves to be most of the time, Even though we know it's not always the case. There are our strengths, and these are the things that we have to push 4% beyond. And that's what puts us into flow. The key there is that the preceding emotional experiences. Flow, fear. That's how you know you're at the edge of your comfort zone. And to kick off a flow state, you literally, I imagine, like a skier about to jump out of a helicopter and ski off a cliff, even if they've been skiing for 20 years. There's this I could die moment and then go. And that kicks off adrenaline, and then the dopamine and endorphins and the cascade of neurochemicals that actually put us in a flow state. So that's important to realize there. It's that not the things that are easy. It's the things that are actually hard. Hard that we want to go to the gym and work out every day. There's the things that we do that feel worse. This is our downfall. And these are the typical things that people would consider their dark side, their shadow. But actually, these are the things that we do that take us out of flow. So, for instance, mine is, you know, over complexifying things, alienating people, right? I'm an introvert. So if I get too much people time, I start saying things that people are just floored by. And it's like, I gotta go take a nap, right? These are red flags for me of like, oh, oh, I'm out of my. I'm out of my reach here. I need to, you know, go rest. But this was the. This was the clincher here is there's now the fourth quadrant, which is the way of being that feels worse. This is the shadow. And what lives in the shadow is our shame. This is Brene Brown's work, right? And what she found is that wholehearted people have the strength and the vulnerability to own up to that shame and to face the parts of ourselves that we all have, that we're hiding, repressing and denying that are coming out and seeping out like toxic waste into our lives, our families, our businesses, our leadership. If we can face that. Like Joseph Campbell said, the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure that you seek. What we find is our gold. And this is that sliver of divinity that lives in all of us. And that is what allows us. It frees up energy, attention and power. That when we cross from the bottom, you'll see if you go on purpose. Mapping.com. the bottom left quadrant is the shadow. The upper right is the strengths. Get that gold out of the shadow. Go cross quadrant up to the strengths. That diagonal Z axis is the axis of purpose. That liberated energy, attention and power is what gives you what you need to push the 4% beyond your comfort zone and your strengths. And that's what lights you up into your purpose. That's where you hit flow. So that's how I find it. And I think that shadow piece is the missing piece in all the other work that I've seen out there.

So the shadow piece are the things that you. The ways of being that rob your.

Energy, that rob you of energy because you're spending so much energy trying to save face, to hide, repress and deny. Right. That for me, I'll just come out knowing I'm a narcissist. I've got some narcissistic tendencies. Not all the time, but when I'm at my worst, boy, do they come creeping out. And so it gives me a lot of fodder for projecting all over number 45. When I see his narcissism, it's like, rawr. But that, that's the flag for me to come back and look at myself and say, yeah, that's going to eat me alive if I don't go in and face that about myself. And to the degree I do face it, it liberates quite a bit of energy, attention and power that's trapped inside me. And I can use that to live my purpose.

So I'm actively trying to apply, as we talk right now, for myself, right. And I'm like, oh, so what is it? All right. So the deepest embarrassing things, right? The things that I'm afraid of.

So I want to admit. Yeah, right.

I don't. So being selfish.

Exactly.

Selfish and lazy and alone.

Yeah. So you feel selfish, lazy and alone.

Yeah, Those are when I think about key moments of embarrassment and stupid. Right. So moments of embarrassment and Dishonest. I think about moments that I was deeply embarrassed. I felt I was stupid, dishonest, selfish, lazy, lonely. Those are the things I don't like to admit that come right immediately as I consider my life in key moments, right? Like, oh, there's that time when I was 14 and there's that time when I was 12, and there's that time when I Was 30 and there's that time and I could think of key moments where embarrassed, ashamed, afraid, alone. That's what comes up. Stupid, lazy, selfish, lonely.

You're a courageous man, Bill. I want to just share two things with you. One, that's a tremendous amount of personal insight. I don't know if half the people listening to this could be that self aware in such a brief amount of time. And number two, my whole belly relaxed. Yeah. My whole belly relaxed. Just we're on Skype and just watching you kind of own this, our shared humanity, I just felt more connected with you and I trust you way more now.

Yeah. It's interesting, I think this courage to speak, what's unspoken, to face it, to go public, is a muscle to develop, right? And people who know me, who, who've seen me give talks or have know that I've developed enough of that muscle, right, That I can talk about my father's suicide and some of my greatest failures in life in front of a group of people because I consider it a superpower, like a gift that I have that makes a profound difference, right? And if you ask me what my purpose in life is, it's making a difference for people, it's being a contribution, right? And it's simplest, most pure sense in work, I'm helping leaders build a better world. I'm helping people find and fulfill the vision, the thing that they have that makes the world a better place. And even if the people that I work with are in survival mode at that beginning, or trying not to fail, right? That there's something hungering in them that we look for and then we want to amplify that, that makes them extraordinary, beautiful, that's noble in them and bring that out over time and realize that because that is the vision for a better world that they have, that I out to help them. And that's my work, right? So that's the life purpose fulfilled in my work. And you know, it does take some of that. People are like, well, what have you accomplished? Well, I've had some successes. I've also had an astonishing number of failures and f ups and I think they're equally valuable to Share with people, they're equally insane. You know, I, I share the. And people who know our work know that we do the Rockefeller habits and the scaling up framework for people. Right. As a CEO, as an entrepreneur, I applied them imperfectly and that's super valuable because there's. Some of them can be like, this really works. And then others of them like, wow, I wish I'd done that. And I've worked with clients now have done that, and it makes all the difference. And don't do this, but not that. Make sure you do them both. Right. So there's some insight from all of this and I think that like, so you're looking at the two realms of it. People who've heard our show. We've done other shows on purpose before, right? A couple times. I'm sure I'll do more in the future because I think it's so fundamentally important, so primal. So my favorite thing is a little, I don't know, it's different. I tend to look with people at and have them imagine the end of their life, whether it's a retirement party, which is sort of the, the weakest sauce to the super sauce, the high road, which is, imagine your funeral, your memorial service, who's there? What do they have to say about you? Right? And that's like, you know, at the end of the day, I want my family, I want my co workers, I want my friends gathered around and I want them to say that I was a person who lived generously and who made a difference for everyone he touched. Right. And that's when I know I'm doing my work.

Yeah. Yeah. And so the softness of your heart when you bring that into your leadership, man, it's so authentic, it's impossible not to trust you. And it's inspiring to the people around you, Right? Because we're oscillators, right. We're the hundredth monkey game, right? And so you show up like that as a leader and your clients can only benefit and grow.

Yeah. I think one of the barriers though, for people in as they start to get an inkling of purpose is talking about it, right? Most people don't want to get emotional like this. They don't want to go here in front of other people. It feels weak, it feels vulnerable. It feels like that and that we equate with weak. They're like, oh, they won't want to follow me. They'll see I don't have my shit together. Right. And yet there's courage in it also. Right. And there's other things you can leave people with like, your stand in the matter, your commitment, like that, that, that is, is deeply powerful and inspiring. We follow people like that.

It's true. And I think there's something beyond even the leadership and your capacity in the world. I think it's just that feeling of psychological wholeness, of knowing your entire self. You know, shadow is arbitrary. Shadow is just whatever our parents and our school and potentially our religion and our society said was unacceptable. And that changes where you go in the world. Those, those change. Those are malleable. So shadow is, you know, there's no inherent good or evil necessarily. It's more just culturally relative. And so what we ultimately realize as we mature is that we want those parts of ourselves back. He had a great guest, Dave Rendahl. Love his podcast with you. And he was talking about how he was this motor mouth, you know, kid running around in school, and everybody's like, sit down. You're never going to amount to anything. Granted, right. You'll either be a millionaire or you'll be in jail. Right. And if we can learn to capitalize on those natural propensities and turn them into strengths by standing on the right, you know, the right relationship with them, they become our greatest assets.

It's great you mention religion, you talk about good and evil now, because when I think about the 10 or 20% in a room that if I ask for a show of hands, if you know your life's just purpose, more than half of the people raising their hand have some religious background. And I want you to know that that's fine if the answer that you have is from that. Now, I'm curious what you think about it, but I've always maintained that it's fine. But you really want to make sure it's not simply inherited, that you've made it your own, that you found your purpose, that it deeply moves you. Right? And it's not just something that in your world, in your community is the right thing to say, like what's socially acceptable and what you've been taught and trained, that you've actually found it, like in your gut. And some do and some it's like sort of there, but they need to actually find the aspect of it, like it's freedom and justice to the world or some other kind of thing like that that expresses them and not simply naming their deity.

Right, Right.

Yeah.

And I think it, I think it, to me, a complete purpose statement includes my purpose, right? My strengths, through which, you know, the channel through which I am enacting that purpose in the world. And my gold, right, which is that really subtle kind of little sliver. It's the 4%. It's always kind of glimmering through. But when my clients get to that point, they say, yeah, I don't really see myself that way. And I say, but have you ever? And they go, yeah, there were brief moments, little flickers. It's like, it's in there. And I think we need to have it on the map. It's the X that marks the spot. And so when we combine all three of those statements together, you know, I'll just tell you mine. Mine is drawing forth light. My purpose is drawing forth light, right? Which is I just draw it out of people, right? It's like, hey, it's in there. Let's bring it forward so you can put it on the map by creating illuminating games, right? It's like a framework. It's just, you know, here's the thing, here's the character, here's the rules, here's how you get from point A to point B. And when they go through the purpose mapping framework or some of the other games I've created, there's something illuminating that happens. They go, oh, wow. With generously centered service. That's my gold, right? When I'm not being an awkward, manipulative narcissist, I'm coming from generously centered service. And that's the goal that shines through my strengths that, you know, really puts me in flow and allows me to draw forth light from the people that I'm able to touch. And that's my greatest contribution. Very similar to yours, right? So that they can go out and change the world in the ways that they do.

Yeah, it's really great. Well, so I think we're about. This is about a show, right? So when you find that purpose and when you can articulate and share it with people, it makes a powerful difference for you and the people around you and helps to focus your work and give you insight into what aspects to focus on, where to take your work in, whatever business or pursuit you're engaged in. If you'd like to find out more, go through the Purpose Mapping experience with Craig. Then you'll take yourself to purpose mapping.com or purposemapping.com scalingup and you'll find that we'll put that link in the show notes as well, so people can go there and get an experience of your work. I want to thank you for being on the show. I also want to let people know that if you want to see how to connect all of that in the process of scaling up. If you started to get something going and you're trying to figure out how to grow, how to go from that early stage through 10 million, 100 million, or even through a billion dollars and beyond, then that's the framework of scaling Up. And we've got the tools and resources, including a free guide with worksheets and agendas and things like that to start to get your team scaling Up. We work specifically with teams of leaders in doing that. You'll find all of that plus our regular weekly podcast episodes and our blog updates and tools@scalingupbusiness.com so if you go to scalingupbusiness.com you find that you can subscribe if you like and get a regular hit once a week or so. Anyway, I thank you all for being with us again. I hope this has been helpful. We'll see you again next week on the Scaling Up Business Podcast.

Thanks Bill.

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