Busy… Busy…

So much to do, so little time…

How many times have you thought that you didn’t have time to do something important, because you felt that everything else in life was getting in the way and stopping you from achieving something that you wanted to? If there is one thing I’ve learned on my journey, it’s that people can easily fall into the trap of telling themselves lots of little lies, buying into those lies, and ultimately bringing about the failure they predicted in the first place.

“Whether you think you can or whether you think you can’t, you’re right.”
– Henry Ford

So here I am facing a little dilemma, because I KNOW that what I believe is powerful enough to bring about the actions or consequences that I wish to occur, and while I believe I will get all of the work that I need to get done done in time to secure a job, the sheer volume of work that I need to do is frankly quite overwhelming, and all of this has needed to happen at the same time as when I get to see my kids for the first time in nearly 6 weeks!

Reality check time. My kids are more important to me than anything, so I give up the time that I should be working my ass off, because I value my time with my family more, particularly when my kids are concerned given they get to see so little of me as it is. It’s a choice that I make and one I make gladly. Now however, I have sent the kids back to their mother for a week, and I now have only a couple of days to get done all of the stuff I was struggling to get on top of before, and I find myself both stressed at the sheer enormity of the job I need to do, and driven by my own need to damn it all and succeed just to spite myself!!

So where do things stand with me and my goals? Well, I have registered a business name, located a gym only 20 minutes away where I will be able to kick off my new career as a kind of “franchisee”, and I am presently doing a big project for my fitness qualifications, which is putting together a business plan. The nice thing though is that I can kill two birds with one stone, but writing my real business plan, and submitting that as my completed project. Bonus!!

As soon as I finish all of the outstanding assessment tasks, I’ll be able to get my professional registration and insurances, and when all of that happens, I’ll likely be ready to go live with my business. I’ve been quietly putting together all of the stuff that I need to arrange such as website, business blog, and other stuff. My mum has been busy designing the business logo, and when all of the planning has been done and dusted, I’ll be ready to hit the ground running so that I can concentrate on building up my clientèle and doing something that I’ve discovered I am rather good at! 🙂

I attended an induction week for the gym that I will be working as a PT with. It was a lot of fun, and I realised that the course that I attended for my qualifications was better than I had realised, because there were many other people there who weren’t as thorough or as attentive as myself and my classmates were during our course. It’s kind fo cool to realise that I’m already a better quality of trainer than many out there, and I’ve realised that I don’t really need to do very much to exceed the public’s expectations in terms of what I do and quality of services. But before I get a really big head and start thinking I’m SO bloody “superior”, I’m reminded that I really don’t care what the other PT’s are like. I really only care that I am the best I can be, that my clients will always come first, and that I have a really wonderful opportunity here to do some serious good in the world, even if only in my own limited way.

So the “vision” – if you will – is to do the best I can, earn as much money as I can, and sink a good portion of that back into a little research and development. What I’d really like to do is to develop several programs in conjunction with local allied health professionals to provide support for:

• people who suffer with anxiety and depression
• people who suffer with obesity and related illnesses
• families where generation obesity is becoming a real problem
• people who suffer with anorexia and bulemia, and related illnesses

These are all somewhat preventable problems, and knowing  from personal experience how hard it is to keep motivated over a long term in order to get through many of these issues, I feel very strongly that there isn’t enough done to really deal with such problems with the immediacy and the efficiency that they deserve. I’d like to find a way to better educate people in order to try and eradicate such issues, or to at least reduce the impact of such issues on the people who suffer with them, and on the families and friends who are likewise effected.

So I’ll be planning and “scheming” over the coming months, putting lots of stuff together, building my business and preparing to give a whole lot of public talks locally, trying to raise awareness about many issues relating to health and fitness, and somehow managing to prioritize enough time to not only get all of this done, but also to keep in touch with the rest of the blog’o’sphere, and of course to spend as much time as I can with my family while all of this happens. I think that I can do all of this, and like Henry Ford was telling us, I know that I am right!

😛

All my latest news

Well, I’ve clearly been a little slow to get on-line and update this blog these past few weeks. It’s been about a week since my last post and I’ve been so busy that I’ve not made the time, thinking that I’ve got other “more important” issues to deal with. This is really the sort of thinking that I want to cure myself of, because it can be so easy to lie to yourself about the priorities in your life, which can then make it easier for you to allow your priorities to slide and make it even harder to reach your goals. So I guess you could say that it’s one of my goals to remove this pattern of thinking which more often than not results in the creation of barriers between me and my goals.

Blogging has become a bit of a priority for me, even if it is only a minor one compared to some of the other really big goals in my life, and yet it is also a fairly large priority for me to update my blog, because through this blog I have found myself connecting with a large number of people in a very real and meaningful way. It is a big part of the career I have chosen to follow, and the job that I wish to do, so rather than seeing the blog as a chore that I need to do, I now see it as a task that I want to do in order to show others the person who I wish to be, and to show those people who I connect with that their needs are also important to me. I hope this serves to make me a better personal trainer in the longer term, as well as providing me with an outlet for all of those thoughts that I have that I feel so compelled to share with others.

I’ve also needed to push myself to do lots of things that I’d prefer to do “later” instead of doing all of the things that I’d prefer to do “now”, and using this as an excuse for a little introspection and critical thinking I’ve realised that even though I’d like to think that I’m all enlightened and can push myself harder than I expect some of my future clients will, I am still susceptible to the same negative barriers that others create for themselves when approaching something that they don’t really want to do, even though they know that they probably need to. It all goes back to all of that mindfulness stuff that I’ve written about in the last few posts, and developing a bit of self awareness in order to overcome those barriers that we create for ourselves.

Now with all of that said, I really do need to cut my blogging time short today because it so happens that there really is a short term priority that needs my attention. My wife’s parents have recently arrived from Russia, and I’ve been out and about acting as the family chef, chauffeur, photographer, and general “dog’s body” as required. I’m not complaining though, because it’s been a lot of fun having them here so far, even though my life has suddenly become incredibly hectic. The parents-in-law don’t speak a word of English, and I’m only able to use enough basic Russian to ensure I can travel from one side of the Russian interior to the other, just so long as I don’t need to ask for more than a ticket (билет – “bilyet”), a taxi (такси – “taksee”), train (поезд – “poesd”) or airplane (самолет – “samolyot”) , or where the local pharmacy (аптека  – “aptyeka”) is!  Basically I’ve not enough Russian to hold a conversation, so there’s been a lot of pointing, waving, smiling, and on the part of my lovely wife, translating!!

In other news, the reboot of my personal training studies began last Tuesday and I am WAY too excited about my studies at the moment. So much so that I’ve been finding it hard to focus on nearly anything else. This has led to some rather funny moments between my wife and I, as I hug her and start to name the various bits that I’m squeezing at the time. I recently quipped in class that with all of the anatomy we are needing to study, we’ve now found ways to make comments about the appearance of someone’s ass without it sounding too insulting. The studying is really intense. We’ve already finished the first of 9 weeks. In another 3 weeks I’ll be qualified to work as a gym instructor, and 5 weeks later I’ll be a personal trainer. This is one of the big goals that I set for myself late last year, and it feels so exciting to not only be firmly on my way, but also that I will achieve one of the big goals after having completed so many of the other little goals that I needed to complete in order to get here.

As for the course itself, I’ve having a blast! It’s been very hands on and practical, even though there is still a lot of time sitting in lectures and doing written “homework”. There appears to be almost 50% of our studies as being practical and in the actual gym, which has been really great and has helped to put the stuff we’ve learned in the lectures into perspective, and cement some of the concepts and terminology into our brains. I’ve always loved to learn new things, but this has been much better than I had hoped. Learning technique and learning to critically analyse others as they exercise is a very big part of what we’ve been learning, and getting to put this stuff into practice ourselves has not only been great from a learning perspective, it’s also helped me to improve the benefits that I get from my own workouts.

As an example, I’ve always struggled to do a pull-up (aka chin-up), even when using the easiest grip on the pull-up bar. So it turns out that it wasn’t a complete lack of upper body strength that had defeated me, but the lack of technique. I hadn’t realised just how important it was to maintain a firm core and to visualise pulling through my elbows. The great news was that I did my first pull-up, and it felt so easy!!  I then went to do a second one, and I failed mightily as I lost my concentration and let my core relax and forgot to visualise my movement! I’ll chalk that up to being so elated that I had for the first time ever done a complete pull-up! 😛

The down-side of all of this studying (on top of having house guests) is that my blogging time is now seriously curtailed. I’ve been told that these first 4 weeks are the hardest, and that the last half of the course will be easier to manage. I really hope so, because I hate the thought that I might be letting down those of you who have come to expect and enjoy some of the stuff that I write to be a regular thing. Blogging here and continuing to write about my personal journey is still very important to me, yet the reality is that I need to make time for all of the other stuff that is going on in my life at the moment. My in-laws will be leaving in another couple of weeks, and my workload may or may not decrease shortly after that. Somehow I’ll find a way to keep writing, even if for the next few weeks it’s at irregular intervals.

Anyhoo, enough about my news and all of that. I’ve not done any measurements this month, or testing, and I didn’t get around to taking progress photos. I’ll commit to doing all of that once my days become a little less busy. In the mean time, I’m back on track diet-wise, and even though my workouts have been limited to the stuff I do in class, while it’s not been ideal or complete, it’s been keeping me active and causing just enough muscle soreness that I feel confident I’m getting a benefit… and it’s certainly better than I did in March!

Sometimes “bad” news turns out to be “great” news in disguise

In my previous post, I mentioned that I had some difficulties over the last few weeks. One of those difficulties was learning that the company which I had enrolled with to do my personal training studies was starting to mess me about in a serious way. So much so that I found that they had given away my place to someone else due to a really bogus clerical error, and then claimed that I should not be upset, that I was only one of thousands through their doors, and that if I wanted to study in their full-time course that I would simply have to wait until the next classes were due to start around the end of April or by early May. I guess it’s fairly safe to say that I have been very upset about this, particularly because I have been like a little kid counting the “sleeps” before Santa comes down the chimney, only in my case I’ve been waiting for 3 months for my course to start.

Added to this has been the stress of having the bank send me a letter warning of the imminent foreclosure of my home loan if I don’t manage to find some serious cash by April 10th, and negotiating with a government department to try and release a portion of my superannuation (aka government regulated retirement savings) to help me to buy me the time I need to gain some new skills, improve my employment prospects, and to hold the bank off for the next 6 months while I get my unemployed shit together. The trouble of course is that I really am limited in how much I might be able to access, and in how far that money will go before I find myself neck deep in arrears again, so delays to my education aren’t just troublesome, but can also become very costly if it ends up losing me my house!

So I’ve been waiting so long to finally start my course, and for those who know me the excitement I feel at being a qualified PT and getting to really help others to make a difference in their lives is something I really can’t put into words, except to say that I really feel as if it is my “calling” if you like to think in those terms, and something that I feel so strongly about that I really can’t see myself every being happy doing anything else.

Yeah, I’m 43 years old and talking about this sort of stuff like a 17 year old kid who thinks his life will be over if he can’t follow the job he has dreamed about since he was 5! Perhaps I should be old enough to know a little better, or perhaps I recognise that while my life wouldn’t technically be “over” as such, I’ve been around a while, had 2 professional and one non-professional careers, and I’d like to think that I’ve learned what it is that will bring me happiness, vocationally speaking.

So to be told to effectively suck it and put up with a lot of unprofessionally poor customer service from an organisation that represents and industry where customer service is really the number one most important aspect of everything it does, well you could say that it left me feeling a little disillusioned, and a lot pissed off at the staff members responsible for giving me the run-around. I had one individual being very rude with me, who I suspect messed up the paperwork in the first place and who could not be bothered following up on a problem. I had another guy not returning any of my calls, and a couple of receptionist types who seemed so clueless that their only thought was that I should speak only to one of these two guys who were giving me so much grief.

So it ended up being a really crappy thing instead of the wonderful opportunity I had been looking forward to, and this before I had even been able to sit in a class and learn a single thing!! So I did what anyone would do when a company treats them like shit. I cancelled my enrolment, I will be pursuing the fees that they charged me which they can’t get out of refunding because it was entirely their fault that they did not manage to supply the service to which they were contracted, and I took my business elsewhere, which turns out to be a real blessing in disguise.

I found a company called Wyn Training, which is based in a gym not too far from where I worked in my last job. Not only were they able to get me into a full time course starting on April 2nd, they were also willing to work out a payment plan that I can afford even though I have almost no income at present – and which I am sure from a business perspective must be an inconvenience to them. Even better, the course itself only takes 9 weeks to complete, doesn’t require a probationary 20 hours post graduation with another personal trainer, it won’t mess up my weekends with my kids, and in as little as 10 weeks from now – if I have studied hard and if I don’t completely screw up my exams – I will be a fully qualified PT, ready to be unleashed on the world to train the lard on and off of the arses of all of my many future victims happy clients to my merry little heart’s content!!

So all of this stressful stuff that I went through with the other (muddy-named) provider has turned out to be what I really needed. Not only will I get to do a really great course with a reputable training company, I will also be able to complete my course in about a third of the time it would have taken me with that other mob. This means that by mid-year, I have a real shot at being either gainfully employed with a great PT company, or founding one of my own… and possibly even satisfying both options!! And even better, I will be doing something that I am really enthusiastic about, looking forward to doing, and working in a healthy, and active environment.

So to those of you who find yourselves at a crossroads in life, where you think that things are seriously going south and you think that “everyone” is on your case and getting you down, my suggestion to you is to find the strength within you to endure, to persevere, and to look for those little golden moments of opportunity so that you will find yourself emotionally available to take advantage of them when they appear. You can never really guess how things will turn out until they happen, and I truly believe that you can always find that positive silver lining somewhere at the end of those negative clouds that life sees you walking amongst.

Be strong, find your focus, set your goals, take a risk to chase your dreams, and you may just find that if you take advantage of the opportunities that arise, you might just manage to achieve everything you set out to do.

Just between me and you… I really hope that you do! 🙂

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