As a health and fitness professional, some days can end up feeling like a game of 20 questions. “What should I eat?” “Why does my knee hurt?” “Why all the burpees?”. We get pretty good at answering all our clients questions, however we’re often stumped or don’t give ourselves the time to answer some of the most important questions of our own.
1. What is my purpose?
2. Why do I do what I do?
3. What are my unique abilities (and what aren’t)?
4. What are the values I want to live by?
5. How do those values govern my life?
In his book, Change Maker, John Berardi emphasises the impact that not knowing the answers to these questions has. It can lead to not only frustration with the day to day and feeling drained from all your clients questions, but also lead to a lack of direction in your career as a health and fitness pro. Today let’s focus on the first 2 questions.
As an industry Health and Fitness is teaming with passionate individuals driven to improve the lives of others. Yet how many of these trainers have you known to burn out after 1-3 years in the business? How many move onto another industry or back to a 9-5 with good office views? Often, by taking the passion we started with and putting it all into our clients and not taking the time to ask ourselves the questions above, we lose sight of why we started in the industry in the first place and end up tired and drained. This is where it becomes important to refer back to our origin story.
Another way to define an origin story would be to think of it as our inspiration, our foundation for deciding our path into health and fitness. The feeling, moment or circumstance that lead you into this life. We want to delve down further than the initial ‘I want to help others’. What was it that gave you the inspiration to help others? What gave you the initial jolt to take that first step. John lists some common examples as being;
· Did you grow up with health and fitness as a priority?
· Did you have an inspirational teacher, coach or trainer that you want to emulate?
· Were you elite in your sport?
· Did someone close to you suffer with a preventable lifestyle disease and you don’t want others to have to suffer?
· Did you run your own path and fix your own problems and know that you could empower others to do the same?
There is no right or wrong path to take or reason to jump into the health and fitness field. Any path that has lead you to this point is a good path. The betterment and continued drive comes in knowing where we’ve come from and knowing that it can help to guide our next step.
So today, take 5 mins to breathe, relax and ask yourself the question, What is my origin story? If you’re comfortable, I’d love for you to share on this post so we can see the wide array of origins and how they can impact the empowerment that we can deliver to others.