Wow - what a busy few of months: Amazing 3 week trip to Thailand and Cambodia (April), launch of weekly Bootcamp class (May), and collaborations with some fabulous fitness professionals (June).
But none of that is an excuse for my lack of Blogging, especially as there's so much to share with everyone. I'll be posting an entry for each of the above over the next few days, but in the meantime I should explain what's prompted me to get typing again after such a gap (my last post was, embarassingly, 2 April)! The short answer is, quite simply, that I want to improve myself as a fitness coach. The long answer requires a little more explanation and a big thank you to an elite trainer...
I guess self-improvement is something we all want, right? Who wouldn't want to be "better"? But what do we actually ever do about improving ourselves and reaching our goals? The plain fact is that we rarely do anything. We think about it, we maybe share our wildest dreams with our nearest and dearest, but beyond that, we just end up getting side-tracked. I'm as guilty as the next person with this! I say "if only..." and "I'd love to do..." and "wouldn't it be great if..." but rarely do I get round to following things up. Like most people my excuse has always been time. "I don't have time to write my Blog this week", "I don't have time to read that article", "I don't have time to complete my own workout today". That's because daily life gets in the way. For everybody. Not just me, not just you - we all have 24 hours in a day! We all have to work, eat, cook, shop, clean, do admin, keep fit and maintain a social life. Most importantly we need to get out of that rut. We have to change our habits and make the time to do what's important to us and that means prioritising!
This might all sound a little deep for a Wednesday afternoon, so you could be wondering what's prompted this? Well it's a mix of a few things (about which I'll be blogging in the next few days) but culminating in a post I read last night by one of the UK's leading personal trainers, Dax Moy. Dax's article was all about setting goals. Not just wishy-washy wouldn't-that-be-lovely stuff, but clearly defined goals and determining what it is we'd actually like to achieve. He alluded to the "perfect day" goal. That isn't to say the best day you could ever imagine for a special occasion, rather the way you'd like to live your life on a daily basis in your ideal world. The article highlighted the fact that we (the fitness professional) often lose sight of our own goals because we're so focused on trying to help our clients achieve theirs, and that we need to reassess our own goals in order to be truly excellent trainers and coaches.
Anyway, before I start to plagiarise what Dax Moy had to say (!), the point is that it got me thinking about my own career in the fitness industry. I suppose my first goal and biggest achievement was actually setting up my business in the first place. After 5 long years working for an Investment Bank in London I was desperate to find a route out, and I wanted to exploit that opportunity to do something completely different and to find a career that I genuinely loved. A lot of people had their doubts as to whether I'd even manage to leave the clutches of the corporate world, and those who had faith were still a little dubious about my timing (i.e. trying to set up a persoanl training business just after we'd officially hit a recession)! I was given a lot of advice about going to work in a gym first just to get some experience and to have a ready-made client base, but I was determined to make the most of my escape from the city, and wanted nothing more than to be my own boss and do it independently.
Luckily for me, it has all worked out and my business grew pretty quickly. For the past 18 months I have been handling a very large client base and have seen some amazing results with the people I work with, and I am incredibly busy. But that's just it! I am incredibly busy, work very long unsociable hours, don't exactly rake it in, and often don't have time to do all those little extras that I'd like to do from a professional point of view. I certainly haven't blogged enough, I still haven't tapped into online products and I'm only just reconnecting with other fitness professionals in the area (more on that to follow).
All this is a very long way of saying that I am now at a stage in my career where I really want to take my fitness business to the next level. That's not to say I want to open a chain of gyms or take over the world - and actually I'm keeping my goals close to my heart for now - but needless to say the first step is to get blogging more. Try to keep connected with everybody, share my experiences and hopefully receive valuable feedback through that process.
I promise to write a couple more posts over the next few days to elaborate on various points of interest from the past 3 months. Good to be sharing that with everyone :-)
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