WHY I FAILED AS A PERSONAL TRAINER

In order to grow and find success in my business, it’s important to review past failures and learn from them. I think working on personal development is crucial for business development. To me, they go hand in hand.

Ok, so I didn’t exactly FAIL as a personal trainer but I want to share with you why I FELT like I did.

1. I WASN’T PASSIONATE ABOUT WEIGHT LOSS. I didn’t have an interest in training people for weight loss. I wanted to train people for strength, mobility + athletics. I felt like I doing a disservice because my heart wasn’t 100% in it. Don’t get me wrong, I was (and still am) a very good trainer - my clients always got results. I studied and worked hard to learn to be the best I could be. But in the end it didn’t matter if my heart wasn’t in it. Your trainer shouldn’t care partially, they should care wholly to go above and beyond.
2. GOT LAZY. Because of this waning interest, I started to get lazy with maintenance systems. For example, I lost motivation to continually look for ways to improve their experience. I got comfortable with being above average but stopped striving to be the best trainer out there. One thing I always wanted to do was find ways to use technology to make their experiences more efficient and exciting. I always created tables and charts of their workouts and homework, nutrition meal plans etc, but if i really wanted to, I could’ve used a proper app or program for them to track and share progress. It keeps both trainer and trainee engaged and more invested. 
3. GOT DISCOURAGED. In fitness, it is inevitable that a client may experience pain, or a tweak in their body. Sometimes it would be ongoing. On the rare occasion that it did, I would feel helpless that I couldn’t help them more in that moment or overtime - even when I referred them to a practitioner I still felt discouraged because as their trainer I should be making them feel better not worse. As a very compassionate person, this began to eat away at me.
4. GOT TIRED OF THE HUSTLE. Maybe because my job was no longer providing me purpose, I began to get burnt out and exhausted. I’ve always been a hustler but over time I lost sight of what I was hustling for. I wasn’t hustling smart or efficiently anymore. I got too complacent. I had a really excellent flow financially but got too comfortable. I wasn’t pushing myself to think bigger or to grow. 
5. NEVER CREATED A SUSTAINABLE SCHEDULE. My client schedule was all over the place that my body was getting tired and would take naps in between clients and never had a proper, efficient routine. I didn’t know how to create proper parameters and boundaries with clients and would say YES to everything. In the long run, this made me overworked and tired.
6. TOO TIRED TO GROW THE BUSINESS. Because I would do everything for my clients and not myself, I had no time to envision growing the business. I wasn’t able to focus on learning the business side of things - I was doing really well with self-taught practices on marketing and advertising but eventually I hit a plateau. Although it was a good and comfortable and successful plateau, I yearned for more.
7. WORKED TOO MANY LOCATIONS. Because I was constantly hustling and making myself available to a potential round of new clients, I was working as a trainer and instructor at several locations all over the city. I had clients at several gyms, I taught classes at various studios and didn’t have the heart to cancel some of my in-home clients and would travel far every week to make them happy. Doesn’t that sound exhausting and time-consuming? Eventually, trading time for money proved to be unsustainable in the future. Even now, as a stretch therapist, I have built myself up (and am still putting systems into place) to enjoy opportunities where I can be compensated by offering services that don’t require ongoing time demands.
8. I DID EVERYTHING MYSELF. One woman show. Doing everything alone can prove to be inefficient and slow progress. Finally, I am at a point in my business where I was able to build a team and as a team, I have progressed further than I could ever imagine doing so alone.

Hopefully you don’t feel this way about your business. The reason I wanted to share this is because I’ve finally built my career where I do not have to feel bogged down or as if I was forcing things. I am energized by it! I hope you know you can build one too, and that this blog post was helpful in providing insight on how to grow your business if you choose to do so.