Mark LeGear

How do you begin to write your own personal story that developed yourself into who you are? How can we be sure what events actually form us into who we are today? I think we all have moments in our lives that define us and help form the person we are in the present. However, I must confess, that I also believe who we become is not simply the result of a chain of events that happen to us but how we choose to react to them. It is our perception of our events that make them special in our lives and not the event itself. So without further adieu, I present my own story of the events that I feel helped me on my own journey to grow into the person I am today from a career and personal perspective. 

My family moved to the Cowichan Valley when I was in Grade 2. I remember being super excited to live near a lake and starting at a brand new school. Although my family was not wealthy, we always had enough for the needs of a young boy. I remember long summer days playing outside with my second-hand bike (it was a blue, beat up BMX) and only coming home for dinner and that the sun coming down marked the end of each of those days. These were good times in my life. But as the saying goes, all good things must end and my end came with the start of middle school. It was Grade 7 and the first day at my new school. I still remember this first day clearly: it was as if all my previous classmates had been abducted and were no longer the people I had known from elementary school. It was during middle-school that I understood what it was like to be bullied. School was not a place to have fun and socialize, but rather something I just had to get through: day-in and day-out. My freedom was home and the summer breaks where I would be free from torment. After this,came high school and things were not much better there either. The one advantage is that each class had different students and I remember selecting classrooms where I could be left alone. I made sure to complete my school work as I believed that going to university would be my saviour. In my mind it was a promised land full of kind people that would accept everyone. This little narrative helped me to get through my school work with decent enough grades (my goals were always a B for each class). I finished grade 12 in 2001 and thought I was moving to a whole new world. If only it were that simple.

It was September 2001 and I made it to university: my promised land. I had decided to enroll in Earth and Ocean sciences as my childhood dream was to work as a Marine biologist. The bullying I had endured for so many years had stopped but university was not the land I had envisioned. It was at this point in my life I had come to the realization that I had extreme social anxiety and had a difficult time functioning in any social capacity. Simple things like ordering food would cause extreme anxiety. I remember being enrolled in a class that had an oral presentation and I dropped out of it because I did not feel I could complete the presentation. I knew I had a problem but focused on completing my school work and hoped that it would simply get better with time. It didn’t. 

A couple years passed and I had switched my degree to study Geography as I did not enjoy the mathematical based work required for my previous selected degree. At the time I really was not sure what I wanted to do with my life and was getting my school work done with no real direction in terms of career. I was treading water to stay afloat. On one fateful day, I don't really know why, I decided I would weigh myself. The scale read 243 pounds. I am not sure exactly how to describe the feeling but it was awful; yet, at the same time something sparked inside of me. I knew at that moment that it was time for me to take control of my life if I wanted things to change. That day marked the start of my journey for personal development and my passion for self-growth. 

After that day, I began doing regular physical activity that started with a short jog and slowly developed over time. I also began researching nutrition and health-related topics. Over time my weight slowly fell-off and my fitness continued to improve. Over the next two years I was able to transform my body but more importantly I transformed my way of thinking. I worked hard at improving my social anxiety by challenging myself to complete the tasks I had avoided for many years. I completed oral presentations. I worked in a group setting and made an effort to contribute and communicate verbally. It was during this journey, I realized that I wanted to pursue a career where I could help others reach their potential and felt that physiotherapy could help me meet those goals. At this point I switched my degree to Kinesiology and completed my Bachelor degree in 2011 and started my Masters studies in physiotherapy in the same year. Over the next two years I completed my physiotherapy degree and began my career as a physiotherapist in 2013. 

When I finished my long “University Career” (spanning over a decade) and moved into my professional work, I ran into another life changing problem: student debt. When I graduated I had over ninety thousand dollars in student loan debt. At first I began paying it off with a focus of paying five hundred dollars a month. For the first few months, I mostly ignored it but decided to have a look at my payment progress and how long it would take to pay my debt. I was simply devastated by the calculation. By paying five hundred dollars a month it would have taken thirty years to pay off the debt. By moving my monthly payment to one thousand dollars would have taken just under ten years to pay off. The Canadian student loan site had one last little bit of information that felt like a punch to the gut: the daily calculated interest cost was over eleven dollars. I couldn’t believe it was costing me over eleven dollars every single day. I felt completely sick with myself. This was a new opportunity for growth and at that moment I decided that I was not going to be chained to debt for the next decade of my life. I began to research debt and learned about financial literacy: everything from debt repayment to investing and beyond. I learned about topics such as hedonic adaptation, minimalism, the FIRE (Financial Independence/Retire Early) movement and how to budget. I changed my relationship with money and my perspective on wealth. I learned how to beat my debt and remained on an extremely tight budget and paid back my debt by the end of 2016. From this journey grew a passion to teach financial literacy to anyone that would listen and one of my life goals is to improve the financial literacy of youth to help improve people's relationship with money and prevent the kind of debt I had allowed myself to acquire. 

The next years of my physiotherapy career I continued to seek knowledge about personal development, health and human potential. I had become more and more interested in helping people to heal beyond just their physical injuries but also to meet their full potential in other areas of their lives. It became clear to me that many injured people benefited from more than just physiotherapy. I began to feel limited in my position as a physiotherapist and wanted to have the opportunity to have further reach. Then in March 2020, the COVID 19 pandemic hit. At this point I was laid off from work. From March to about June I had time to contemplate where I wanted my future to go. In early June, I was told that work would likely not resume until July at the earliest. It was at this time I decided that I decided that I wanted to create my own vision of a physiotherapy clinic. Within a few months, Titan Project Inc. was born. My vision for Titan Project would be to give amazing physiotherapy services with the addition of further resources to help each individual reach their potential in other areas of their life. It provided a platform where I could share and teach all that I had learned about health, wellness, and human potential. I look forward to sharing this  journey with you! Thank you for taking the time to read my story.