When you feel like you've lost your why...and your way

Nothing kills your connection to your passion and purpose quite like navigating the red tape and daily fires of being part of the healthcare industry.

I thought I had lost it. The reason I became a chiropractor in the first place. My passion to fight for the true health of my practice members everyday.

Not just the energy to keep going — I had lost the thread. The reason I built a practice, stayed up late charting or fixing, showed up through surgeries, a failing marriage, an insurance audit and a pandemic that dismantled everything I had constructed.

Somewhere between managing a team of twelve, fighting insurance red tape, and believing that more hustle meant more success, my vision for why I was doing any of it stopped being mine. It became a performance of success I couldn’t sustain and didn’t actually want.

When everything fell apart — and it did fall apart — I told myself the vision had been wrong all along.

I was wrong about that.

———

Peter Senge wrote about personal vision in The Fifth Discipline, not as a goal to achieve but as something you are pulled toward. A living image of what you are here to create in the world. What struck me most reading it wasn’t the framework.

Because the practitioners I know — the ones going through the motions, dreading clinic days, doing all the right things and feeling trapped by what they’ve built — aren’t missing a better strategy. They’re missing their own vision. They traded it, slowly and without noticing, for someone else’s definition of success. Someone else’s version of what this thing called having a practice is supposed to look like. And someone else’s dictation of what they are and are not allowed to do. And then they wonder why success on paper leaves them feeling hollow and empty inside. Like a piece of their soul has died and they don’t know how to get it back.

This isn’t a motivation problem. Or a need to go to another business seminar problem. It’s a disconnection problem.

———

When I started sitting with what had actually kept me in this work across fifteen years — through the collapse, through the three years stepping away, through now rebuilding from an entirely different foundation — a theme kept surfacing that I recently realized has always been there for me.

It has always been about connection.

Helping people reconnect to themselves. Through their nervous system. Through their leadership. Through their relationships and their sense of purpose in the world. In my chiropractic practice, that looks like building genuine space for families to heal. In my PhD research and in the work I do with health practice owners, it looks like helping practitioners find the thread back to why they started — before the industry slowly buried them in paperwork and regulations.

What I’ve realized is the vision that took the first iteration of my practice to a large team and seven figures hasn’t actually changed. It’s still there, and was lying dormant the last few years waiting for me to find it again.

What has changed is the belief system underneath it. The one that said you have to push constantly to grow. That revenue was the proof your vision was real. That money was the motivation, so more of it would fix the disconnection you felt.

Here’s what that belief actually looked like: waking up in a panic and already dealing with fires at the office, not because I was energized but because I was afraid that slowing down meant falling behind. Checking patient numbers at the end of every day like they were a verdict. Twelve-hour days that ended not with satisfaction but with a persistent dread that tomorrow I’d have to do it all again. And still feeling like I wasn’t doing it “right” or that other people had something figured out that I didn’t.

Nothing was wrong with me. I had just never learned fundamental things like connecting to my own strengths, having boundaries, and the limitations of defining my worth on achievement.

———

What drives me — what has always driven me — is a vision to truly change the world. Starting with the families I serve in Fairbanks. When I’m connected to that, I can do hard things. When I’m connected to that I want to show up in my office and continue to grow. Not to chase money or patient metrics, but because I know that what I do makes a difference. When I’m not connected to that belief, even easy things feel impossible.

Senge called the gap between your vision and your current reality creative tension. Not a problem to solve by lowering the vision. A source of energy. The practitioners I see burning out aren’t doing it because they wanted too much. They’re doing it because they stopped believing what they wanted was possible. Or they become so attached to what it’s supposed to look like they try to force an outcome rather than surrendering control. And without that belief and the willingness to let go, they run on systems and willpower and the appearance of forward motion that feels like pushing an enormous boulder up a giant hill.

What reconnected me wasn’t a new strategy. It was getting honest about which beliefs I had been building on — and seeing them clearly for what they were. False floors.

———

In June, Grow Your Roots, a paid community I’m launching here with a very nominal investment, is going to work on exactly this.

Not goal-setting. Not a vision board. A real process for reconnecting to the purpose that brought you to your profession and practice in the first place — and getting honest about what has come between you and it.

If you don’t know why you’re doing this anymore, this is for you.

If you’re going through the motions and can’t remember when that started, this is for you.

If you built something that looks right from the outside and feels wrong from the inside — you already know it’s time.

This is a journey that isn’t about more doing, but is about reconnecting to who you’re being and dismantling the layers of stuff that come between you and the purpose you have in the world.

Join Grow Your Roots