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Are you chasing a purpose needlessly? In this episode, I chat with Adrian Dray, who experienced precisely that. Adrian dives into his personal journey from an emotional and financial low in 2017, a time that challenged his to-the-core beliefs about the conventional pursuit of purpose. Through exploring and mastering the unknown, Adrian's life took a complete 180° turn when he embraced GDPR legislation, achieving an invigorating career refresh and unraveling new practical wisdom about mending a personal series of setbacks.
Join us for a raw, authentic conversation that breaks down mainstream self-help myths whether diagnosing the necessity of a life purpose or managing emotional downfalls deftly. Adrian's narrative accentuates the power of focusing on courage and mastery instead of living in perennial perusal of one's ’’why’’. Plus, get insights about the tools and strategies he implemented to keep pushing forward even after debilitating outages like an illness and emotional burnout, culminating in career growth he had never imagined before - at CareStack, where they make the practice management simple for dentists.
Stay inspired to break myth-ridden limitations by tuning in with us and learning from Adrian's unique journey!
You can reach out to Adrian Dray here:
Meet Adrian at CareStack Inner Circle: https://carestack.com/en-GB/company/events/inner-circle-2025
Book a Demo: CareStack.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AJ.Dray
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrian-dray-carestack/
Mentions and Links:
Organizations:
People:
Studies:
31% More Productive with Positivity
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Michael: Hey Adrian, so talk to us. What's one piece of advice you can give us this Monday morning?
Adrian: My piece of advice, and thanks ever so much for having me on, is really around some of this mainstream self help advice that you often hear inside, outside of dentistry, which is you have to start a project or start a particular path with knowing your why.
Or there's this overemphasis of the pursuit of purpose. My advice, and this is from a story that I can give, a bit of a painful story is that advice from my perspective is a bit a fallacy. And that holding fast to that, level of thinking can actually be quite limiting for people. I am not a life coach by any stretch, but I think that maybe sharing what I've been through might give people a perspective and hopefully free them from what I see a lot of people who are imprisoned by this pursuit at the moment.
Michael: Interesting. So why, what, if you can break it down to us. What went on or why should we believe that it's a fallacy?
Adrian: my story started in, late 2017 is before dentistry. And I came to the realization the paycheck I was expecting to receive after working for a family run business, which I'm a member of that family wasn't actually going to come through and I was already in a bit of a financial pickle.
Difficulty, that's very English word there. And I really struggle with that. Now. I happened the year before to nurse my father who unfortunately died. He'd had secondary liver cancer. And this kind of moment that I had, this paycheck not coming through was a sort of a trigger for me to suddenly think about all that last big stress in my life that I obviously hadn't dealt with.
What this did is it threw me a bit of an emotional breakdown. I stopped working. I just basically watched cartoons in bed for weeks. I was self employed at the time as well. And so my financial situation was just getting worse until, a family member who depended on me said to me, Adrian, you need to fix this.
problem is at that particular time I was horrifically sad. And I've recently heard the best definition of sadness that it is the perception of a lack of options, which leads to hopelessness. So for me, I had an option to stay in bed I had a second option to go back and work for the family business, which I didn't want to do.
But other than that, I didn't really know what to do. So I made the Option to find an option, right? So I did that and I came across a really weird thing It's called gdpr for u. s listeners that may have heard about it, is a piece of data protection Privacy legislation that was coming into the uk affecting businesses at that particular time and I thought well, maybe I learned this Maybe I just go all in and learn this and see where it takes me.
So I learned I listened I watched You I did courses on everything I could do. And it was a fantastic distraction. It got me out of bed and I joined privacy professional Facebook groups, which are, a riot, but I came across one called GDPR for dentists. It's the UK dentists. I joined that. And over time I helped grew that I'd started answering people's questions as I was learning.
I started posting content and therefore my confidence started to build from this courage that I built. Was starting to generate right because this was a very uncertain time for me And as I reflect back on it, I realized that the opposite to uncertainty is not certainty. It's courage You need to have the courage just to move out to get out of that state of feeling uncertain and that courage served me quite well because After a few months, I got a job as a gdpr consultant Which paid better than what I was in the family business for the last few years You I then became in a few months after that in a very senior role that on paper was like five years ahead of me on my career path, but I managed to get this kind of just living off this rocky montage of listening, learning, answering, consulting, training, just seeing where it took me.
And I got this kind of passion for working dentistry and being with that community. Now all things were going well, had the experience, thought I'd set up my own business, I'd got And I got a, a good six months of selling out training courses, speaking events, consultancy. And then I got COVID.
I got COVID in July 2021. And I got it bad, like hospital bad to the point where consultants were having conversations with me, such as, we're doing everything that we can do, Adrian, so you don't die. And my family were being told to prepare for the worst. Now, the spoiler alert on that is I survived but when I came out of this, they call hypo oxygen room, when you're on your own, it's just about to die kind of room and went back to the main ward.
I look out to the people around me, suddenly there was a couple of nice guys, but some of these guys were so aggressive and rude and abusive to the nurses swearing. And I thought, you know what? I'm just gonna be as nice as I possibly could. I had a long road of recovery. And I thought well, you know, in my side personally, I know who I am, but you know what, I came out of there feeling quite lost professionally.
Because I had to start again. I couldn't run my business. I couldn't do the training courses. I couldn't do the speaking events. I couldn't do the consulting because I couldn't finish a sentence because I was wheezing. lungs were shot to pieces. And so I had to start from scratch. I I had to do these menial, basic junior data protection roles. That I could have thought were beneath me. And as I recovered physically, I moved back up, I put the reps in the effort. I was actually working in a bank, I wasn't even working in dentistry, but I kept like a foot in dentistry because I knew that through this whole journey that had been a passion of mine that had weirdly come out of, this whole thing.
And in 2022, late 2022, I met Abhi Krishna, who's the CEO of CareStack. And I saw there an opportunity to get back into dentistry, to work with a company that is very input focused, that's all about hard work, that presses through, and is just looking to break through to the next thing. And there's no purpose washing And I found really encouraging. And as I look back on this whole journey that I've been on, I realized that back in 2017, if I had that emotional breakdown, if I had tried to conjure up some sort of purpose, then find a why I would have just hit another emotional breakdown I think unless you're prepared to break down that, purpose and the actual behaviors and the actions, you're just going to come up disappointed.
And so many people I see have these big whys and purposes that are typically created and crafted because of expectations from families, friends, their environment, that they end up getting there, hitting the peak of this mountain, and realizing actually they don't really like the view. So I've changed my whole view of that to thinking that the best mountain to climb is the one that doesn't have a peak.
Just keep on climbing. See what passions and purposes come out of it, and enjoy it. Don't be held and imprisoned and shackled by this, overemphasis of a pursuit of purpose. Really lean into mastery, exploring, and opportunity. It is a far better way of fulfilment. Then having to fall into mainstream, conventional self help and development around knowing your purpose, knowing your why, I've learned the hard way.
It's not worth buying into it.
Michael: I appreciate that man. So lean into mastery, exploring, and it sounds like throughout this process, you first had to figure out your options, right? Then develop courage, To do that. Then you joined a group of like minded individuals. Throughout that process and then a passion grew you remained humble in order to continue to do what you're doing And then things started changing, but if I can ask you Adrian such a moment when you're, down emotionally, do you look for options when you're like, man, I'm trying, I'm looking for options and there's nothing?
Adrian: It's a really good question. I think that maybe I was very fortunate to have that kind of intervention. Those five words, you need to fix this. I realized that particular point I had responsibilities. And I was being very good at sulking and being sad. And there's some people that are hit, in a really bad way.
They're going to need medication and counselling and that kind of thing. I totally get that. But for my particular situation, which I think speaks for a lot of people that get to that point, is that you become comfortable with that way of feeling. something to point to, it's something to blame.
And I was blaming the family business that I work for and this kind of stuff. I had to point back at myself and think there's got to be a way out of this. Now, as I've got older, I've realized, I've heard of different things. There is one where there's a Harvard business study which shows that You're 31% smarter when you're in a positive frame of mind, which means when you're in a negative frame of mind, you're dumber.
Now, if you are sad, you don't wanna be dumb. would quite be happy for someone to say, you're quite sad at the moment. I don't wanna say it's from saying to me you're being dumb at the moment. So a lot of this is reframing your thinking and the fact that the thoughts that you have that make you sad are often created by ourselves.
And they are just thoughts. I've learned as I've got older to try and see them as a tangible thing. A little bit like when you get mail in your mailbox, if it's from the IRS, you're probably not going to ignore it. But if it's a pizza delivery menu, and you're on a diet, and you don't want that, you're just going to chuck that into the bin.
Thoughts can often be like that. And I've so many times when I felt down, I've tried to view them in my head as a tangible thing to know whether actually I need to lean into it. And look at it or whether I can just discard it because if you know this formula that performance equals potential minus interference, often the thoughts that we conjure up in our heads that can have this emotional response that we work ourselves up about is just interference.
And if you really do want to unlock your potential so that you can perform better, you have to have behaviors which give you much better control over your thoughts. And naturally that can remove you from a sad state has been my experience. But of course, other folks have it harder, but deep seated trauma, which needs a little bit more attention.
But I think for a lot of us, they're probably in the same situation as me when we're feeling sad.
Michael: That's brilliant, man. I appreciate your time, Adrian. And if anyone has further questions, you can definitely find them on the dental marketer society, Facebook group, or where can they reach out to you directly?
Adrian: Facebook's pretty good. Adrian, Dre. LinkedIn as well. So one of the directors here at CareStack and all of what we're trying to do as well is to make life easier for dentists and dental practices. Take away the interference they're currently suffering from their existing practice management systems maybe it's not throwing them into an emotional breakdown You know some monday mornings it could be like that So if you're looking for something that's different check us out on carestack.
com book a demo Carestack we're all about putting the hard work in to take the hard work the difficult hard work away from practices and their teams
Michael: Awesome, Adrian. Thank you so much for being with me on this Monday morning episode.
Adrian: Thank you so much