How to replace your salary

I’m about to share with you a simple and effective mindset shift that balanced my logical thinking and propelled me into a different version of myself.

You might have read the headline above and thought, “But that’s impossible since I currently work 40 hours” or “Must be nice…” I get it. I used to think that way too. But that way of thinking kept me stuck.

When I started my career as a Physical Therapist, I was at $62,000/year in the outpatient ortho realm, let’s just call that about $31/hour. When I switched jobs, I took an offer with a base rate of $40/hour, but was actually structured as an amount collected revenue share, which came in around $50/hour. In talking with many PT’s in this same industry, this is generally the range of hourly or salary conversions I’ve come across. 

For the sake of this exercise, let’s just use $50/hour. Easy math, easy comprehension. 

Now you might be wondering how I’m going to teach you to convert your 40 hour work week into just 10, but it’s not really the math we need to pay attention to, it’s the mindset. It’s understanding both your value and redefining the problem you solve. 

Like many of you reading, I used to think of my job as something that produced income and revenue for me… but one day, that started to shift. I was learning more and more about the cash pay realm and started to see other PTs getting $150-200/session. At first, I was jealous… I wanted what they had… but I was stuck in an employee mindset - work more to make more... So I took on per diem roles, worked extra hours, and explored convos of ascending the corporate ladder, all just to see incremental changes and ultimately losing part of my weekends… until one day, it clicked. 

I just needed to put myself in the best position possible to be able to earn $150-200/hour and being a staff PT wasn’t going to get me there.

One day I walked into the clinic, and instead of calculating in my head how much I would make that day at my $50/hour rate, I started to think about how much it was costing me to be there—$150/hour. My mind was blown because, up until this point, I had never thought like this. 

I went from making $400 a day to losing $1200 in opportunity that day…  not to mention the time it was costing too. If I just worked 2 hours at $200/hour, I’d get 6 hours of time back.. That’s the real magic. 

I was just doing what everyone else did. Get a job in the medical field, pay your dues, and live within your means, you know the drill. But if you want an atypical life, you need to do atypical things. 

And you can have this too.

Now all this to say, it wasn’t about the math of working 10 hours at $200/hour to replace my salary, although that’s true. It’s about the mind set that you need to adopt in order to be open to that possibility.