Hello everyone, this is Tonya Dawn Recla, your Super Power Expert, and I’m excited to have with us a fun guest today. Craig Filek is the founder and creator of Purpose Mapping, and what I really like about his approach is he talks about cool things like flow state, which of course, over at Super Power Experts we love. So today we’re going to be talking about exploring flow, an altered state of consciousness, and how important it is to know that that means for yourself and know what it feels like when you’re in that space, and know when, as he said before, the thing like, you’re in that kind of, yes, that wholehearted all-encompassing yes space for yourself, and the impact you can have on the world from that place.
So the Purpose Mapping is such a fascinating, hybrid, hodge-podge integrated of different methodologies, and he’s brilliant as he speaks about it, so I’m excited to let him do that.
Excuse me.
But as with a lot of our guests, he came from a different arena and he walked away from a seven-figure business and set about being in that yes full time. So I think we can all learn a lot from that. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming to the show, Craig Filek. Welcome, Craig.
Hey, thank you, Tonya.
I love to create games.
Awesome. Well, we’re going to ask you right away of course, what are your superpowers?
My super powers. So, the way I understand my super powers, it has to do with taking in vast amounts of information and then organizing it conceptually and then communicating it very clearly and succinctly, usually in symbolic ways, but also I love to create games. So in my own Purpose Mapping framework, the way I describe my strengths are creating illuminating games, and that’s what Purpose Mapping is.
That’s awesome. Creating illuminating games, I love it. I think you’ve just summed up Super Power Experts. I love that whole concept, because why do it if it’s not fun? Talk to me a little bit about how you moved into all of that.
Creating illuminating games.
I mean, it was obviously, I think with all of us, it’s just a life-long process of exploration and experimentation and finding out the hard way what doesn’t work, and dusting ourselves off and recalibrating and giving it another go. For me, it really started, I think, being adopted. I was adopted at birth, and so it was a challenging road for me. I was not mirrored and matched with the way I understood myself on the inside. I felt very much like an ugly duckling and a black sheep, until I got to college and found out that there were other black sheep. We started to flock together, and then I started to feel like, “Okay, maybe this can be okay.” And then eventually I got into entrepreneurship and was really trying to figure out, “How do I do this?” How do I … What we now call hacking. What’s the leverage point where I can have a small amount of effort and have a tremendous overall result?
And we don’t always get that. I mean, Warren Buffett would say, “Just hit a lot of singles. Don’t always be swinging for the fence. Just bat a lot of singles.” But I just had this in me where it’s like, “How do I just hit a home run?” And for me, what that really ended up being was not so much business success, although that’s important. It was, how do I get into that place where my brain was just lit up with dopamine and serotonin and oxytocin and adrenaline, anandimide and endorphins and all the stuff that just feels so good all at once.
That’s what’s known as a flow state. I slipped into a flow state accidentally in college, and then I spent the rest of my college career trying to figure out what was that and how do I get that back. So I think that’s probably where it all kind of started to come together for me was when I got into entrepreneurship and started making my own path and realized that doing sales, I could get myself into that flow state. Not as profoundly as I had first experienced it, but there was an inkling of it. And the more that I did it, the better I got, and the more consistently I could get myself into flow.
What I loved about it was, I got my degree in philosophy, trying to figure out what the heck that flow state was. Turns out I should have been studying positive psychology, but I didn’t know that at the time. But what I loved about sales is that it was philosophy. It was the psychology of human motivation, and ultimately, my own personal achievement in helping my clients get results in their lives. So flow was always in the periphery, and ultimately, I think that’s what we’re all seeking.
One of the definitions of flow, from the man who coined the term, Mihály CsÃkszentmihályi, is when you’re doing something for its own sake. It has intrinsic purpose. So eventually, I started connecting the dots between being in flow and living our purpose. And as I was studying all this entrepreneurial stuff from Stephen Covey and Jim Rohn, Zig Ziglar, Tony Robbins, you know, all the great human motivation, personal development, and sales sort of godfathers, so to speak, they all kept talking about purpose. And so the dots just connected over the years. I could go on and on about it, but I just love this stuff, and I love watching people light up and not just as a fluke, but as a practice. How do we turn this into something that we’re clearly and consciously working towards on a daily basis to activate in our lives? Because I think this is the purpose of life, is to feel fully lit up, and that’s why we seek it and crave it so much, as you know.
Absolutely, and I love so much of what you’re talking about, and the passion with which you’re speaking about it. I think it’s so important for people to hear that, to feel that energy from those of us who seek that above all else. It’d be too easy to write it off as adrenaline junkies or whatever the case may be, because it really is the courage to live a full life, or to live that wholly and refuse to say, “Well, we can’t always get everything we want,” or “That’s a pipe dream,” or, “To seek that is irresponsible in some form or fashion.”
I remember the pivotal moment when I hit a point that it felt irresponsible to not do that, and it was a significant shift. I call it the tipping point, and that’s the point that I think people get to where there is no going back. We kind of do this little yo-yo dance routine for a little bit until we really truly step into that, and it’s like, “Wait, no,” and it kind of takes us embodying it and going, “Okay, am I still alive? Am I okay?” Because we’re not real sure, like in the way [woo-woo] side of the house, it’s like, “Maybe I’ll just leave my body and I’ll go somewhere else if I do this,” or on the conspiratorial side of the house, “I’m going to die. Somebody’s going to kill me.”
You know, we have many crucifixion and witch burning stories to back that up. So it’s like, there’s all of this kind of collective storytelling that we’ve done that creates all kinds of excuses for why you can’t do this and why you shouldn’t do this. Even in parenting, even in business, you have to toe the line; you have to be … I mean, I remember the moment we decided to take on the Super Power brand. We had been playing with it as a marketing strategy, but it was like, even something as benign as something like super powers, I still had to work through the concept of, we operate … Our very first business was a corporate counterintelligence firm.
So it’s like, “How you gonna come out and talk about super powers? You’re going to destroy your brand, your reputation,” and it was this ongoing, kind of peeling back of layers to come out of government and out of that arena and to really move through all of that to a place where it’s like, “Wait, maybe we can play and have fun and live the life that we want,” and, “Do we dare make the bold claim that we can develop the lifestyle and the career and everything else that is fun for us and lights us up?”
It sounds selfish, but I think that it’s the least selfish thing any of us can strive for.
Its the matrix we know all of these stories.
I think it’s the ultimate game. When I was studying philosophy, Descartes, who’s the father of modern philosophy, came out with this meditation on, “How do I know what’s really real?” And what he bottom lined it as is, “I think, therefore I am.” But everything else could be a dream. I could be dreaming that I’m awake. I mean, it’s “The Matrix,” I mean, we know these stories. It’s such an archetypal journey.
And now we’ve got Elon Musk saying things like, it’s possible, it’s in fact probable, that if the technology continues as it is, we’re moving into virtual reality now, pretty soon the graphics get so good that it will become indistinguishable from what we consider to be our waking reality. If that’s the case, then it probably already happened, and we’re currently living in a simulation.
There’s a video where he gets really aggressive about it. He’s like, “Tell me the fault in that logic.” It’s just like he wrap his head around it.
Remember Donkey Kong and Flogger and Super Mario Brothers.
And so I just, I reached that point, you talk about the tipping point, and I just realized, you know what? It probably is the case. I mean, once your brain lights up with these neurochemicals enough times for a long enough duration, you kind of realize, “Huh. Reality’s a bit more malleable than I was led to believe.” And so now, I just consider it to be a big virtual reality game, and just like, remember Donkey Kong and Flogger and Super Mario Brothers? There’s levels, and every level you get to there’s a bigger boss and there’s a bigger fear, you have to get the combination of whatever it is. You gotta get in your flow state, you gotta get the right combination of moves, and you have to learn things along the way. But there’s always going to be those people, those voices, those beliefs on the inside that got programmed when we were younger, telling us, “You can’t just do that. You can’t just have the life you want. You can’t just live in flow every day.”
How do you get permission to do that? And I think in a way we just realize, we have to give ourselves that permission. Just say, “You know what? Pretty much, this is the reason I’m alive. I’m alive to be in flow. These are the things I do that put me in flow, this is my contribution to the world. It feels amazing, and everything else is just a no, sorry.”
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Beautiful.
Well, we’re going to go into some really fun areas here right after the break. Let’s tell people where they can find out more about you.
Cool. So I set up a special link for your listeners at purposemapping.com/powerup, one word.
Perfect, awesome. Thank you so much. So we’re going to take a quick break, it’s about to get real fun here, folks. You’re not going to want to miss what comes after this break. I’d imagine Craig and I have some interesting stories to share about flow state and “The Matrix” and all of this virtual reality whatnot. So we’re talking about exploring flow, an altered state of consciousness, and we’ll be right back after the break.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
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