Personal Fitness Professional - November/December 2008 - (Page 16)

[THE B A L A N C I N G BY KELLI CALABRESE ACT] bad. It simply means that if you’re going to grow outside of the paradigm, you have to take responsibility for liberating yourself from rules that need not apply. CLARIFY YOUR TIME-SPENDING HABITS AND FOCUS ON SUCCESS In the last two installments, I introduced the concept of F.O.C.U.S, where “F” represented your Future as ﬁtness professional and the “O” signiﬁed Observing what is going on in your life. This issue moves on to “C”larify what it is that truly makes you happy and that you desire to accomplish. When you have clarity, you can move so much closer to the balanced life that we all preach about to our clients. The world is coming at us faster than ever before in history, and most times it seems that everything has the utmost importance and urgency. From the cell phone ringing to emails buzzing and text messages coming through at a high frequency, we always seem to be distracted, and it becomes diﬃcult to truly make the best decisions for our career and lives. Distraction is the road to failure — some would say the work of the devil. When you are pulled in the direction of the artiﬁcial world, it’s near impossible to get ahead, and there’s rarely time for introspection to even notice what’s working and not working. When moving towards clarity regarding who you are, what you want and the best way to achieve it, it takes some dedicated quiet time and some thought-provoking questions to come up with answers that give you direction. In order to get clarity, you need to ﬁrst determine what it is that you love, what excites you the most, what you are good at and what you can get paid to live the lifestyle you aspire to have. Once you ﬁgure out with clarity what you love, which I am assuming for a grand majority of readers is positively inﬂuencing the physical transformation of someone’s life, the next step is to decide the best way to achieve it. If you can leave your ego behind for a moment, ask yourself what the things that only you can do are and then what you can delegate. Literally make a list of all of the things that you do in the course of a day from hour to hour. How is your time spent? Then expand it out over the course of a week. For example, you might determine that you currently spend 10 hours a week cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, grocery shopping and running errands. Does it make sense to hire someone to do that if you are worth $70 an hour and those tasks are done at $10-15 an hour? How freeing would it be to turn those tasks over to someone else so that you could be available to do what you love and are paid well to do? Having clarity makes decision making much easier, and your life then becomes much more enjoyable. How wonderful would it be to be free to do what you are best at and only what you love and delegate or eliminate the rest? We all have the same amount of time and cannot save it; however, we can spend it diﬀerently. 3. You must take solid risks with proven outcomes, risks that will test your “stuﬀ.” These need not be risks with potential for undue loss but rather risks that ask you to step outside of the safety of your present, risks that ask you to produce additional revenues by moving away from familiarity. This will serve to create greater balance between altruism and reward, wiring you for greater success. 4. You must accept a new sense of responsibility, one that forbids you from pointing ﬁngers and blaming outside forces for your own misfortunes or unwanted outcomes. This includes taking responsibility for client outcomes, despite challenges they may present. 8. You must be willing to go inside, identify your own beliefs and examine emotional links that have led you to your present. Only then can you learn to master your emotions and accept beliefs that serve as pure fuel for growth and achievement. 9. You must be willing to step near the boundaries of your perceived scope of practice, recognizing that there is a sea of gray most trainers aren’t willing to step into. Within that sea, bordering on medicine, nutrition and psychology lie some of the most powerful keys to achieving a respected position as a ﬁtness professional. 7. You must learn to separate who you are from what you do. If you are to become a true professional, there should be clear separation between being “at work” and being yourself, enjoying the life your business has helped you design. 6. You must learn to leverage your time so you can connect with hundreds of clients, optimizing the value of your time, allowing you to move away from the reliance upon one-on-one for a set hourly fee, even if oneon-one training is the core of your business. There is an inherent ceiling when you limit your income to sessions reliant upon a single person, a predetermined time frame and an established market value. 5. You must accept that your business is in fact a business, and while you don’t need to master business skills in line with an MBA, you have to understand simple business strategies that guarantee proﬁtability. 16 Perhaps you just want to take people through exercise programs and haven’t an ounce of interest in developing a business strategy of exploring your true potential. Perhaps you enjoy following the crowd. Perhaps you’re comfortable with the existing paradigm. If that’s the case, you’ve chosen your side, and it’s up to you to make peace with that choice and enjoy your avocation with all of its inherent limitations. If you believe there is a professional level of achievement you haven’t yet tapped, consider the nine musts carefully. Examine them with your guard down and your ego pushed oﬀ to the side. You’ll ﬁnd the view from the more professional side of the mirror may be more challenging to hold on to at ﬁrst, but if your experience mirrors mine, you’ll ﬁnd the reﬂection from the professional side glares so brightly it becomes the only side you’ll ever choose to see. Phil Kaplan has been a personal ﬁtness trainer for 25 years and receives awards and acclaim for his programs aimed at propelling ﬁtness professionals to new levels of success. Visit www.bebetteracademy.com or read additional articles at www.philkaplan.com. ● GO TO WWW.PFPPLUS.COM TO READ NOV-DEC2008 · WWW.FIT-PRO.COM DETAILS ON HOW TO CLARIFY YOUR LIFE http://www.bebetteracademy.com http://www.philkaplan.com http://www.phpplus.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Personal Fitness Professional - November/December 2008

Personal Fitness Professional - November/December 2008 Contents Letter from the Editor, Writers Your Scope of Practice Combating Youth Obesity Current Controversies The Balancing Act Product Profile Building a Base of Special Populations The Right State of Mind Mark Your Calendar The Equipment Dilemma Too Much To Do, Too Little Time Exercise Spotlight Holiday Gift Guide New on the Market Alyte Piedra

Personal Fitness Professional - November/December 2008

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