Do you know who you really are?
I had a good conversation with an old coach the other day. Someone who I confided in and received help from last year. We have both now moved on and the conversation was both intense, confusing and completely rewarding and satisfying for me personally.
The truth is that we no longer agree on how I should grow my fitness business. Yes, I learned a lot from that program, and it helped me in some ways, but it's time to move, up and forward. I have learned one very important thing from this relationship and this experience, and I would like to share that with you today.
Stay true to who you really are and what you want to accomplish in life, whether it's owning your own business, trying to advance your career, finding your wife and starting a family, developing solid relationships with your colleagues, whatever. The most successful people in life surround themselves with the right people, and when they discover that certain people they have been working with or are close with are no longer serving their life's mission, they move on quickly, and they don't feel badly about it. Test Fast, Fail Fast, adjust fast...write that one down.
There is also another very important insight I want to share with you. I heard President Obama touch on this in an article I read about him recently. You need to be very careful with any coach you work with, because if you're not careful, and your coach is not as skilled as they should be, or has an agenda beyond helping you achieve your potential, the relationship can skew and ultimately take you to a place you don't want to go.
Simply put, if you don't maintain full awareness of who you really are at all times, your coach can end up holding too much power over you.
A true trained coach's job is to help you achieve the goals that you have set out to achieve, whatever those might be. You might be working to advance and grow your fitness business (as I am) or you might be trying to advance your career, lose weight, find your wife, work through past problems with family members, etc.
One of your coach's most important jobs at all times is to help you unlock your true potential. Doing this effectively requires pure skill, compassion, empathy, talent and attention at all times to the nuances of the process. Each coach has the program that they believe in. They have their method, their tools, etc, but at the core of the process is the client, and how they decide to best put the coaches tools to work for them.
For me personally in this situation, it was time to move on. Not because this particular coach has a bad system, but because that system was never really designed to unlock my full potential. Did it work for me for a time? Well, yes in some respects. And there were many other ways in which the process, the tools, and the recommendations were doing me a serious disservice. Why? Because I made the mistake of forgetting who I really was, why I'm here, and what got me here to begin with. I take full responsibility for that. And I take full responsibility for the task ahead of me of moving forward too.
What I hope you take away from all of this is the importance of staying true to yourself, your goals, and your values at all times. I think we all get caught up in the fitness business trying to find the best ways to grow our businesses and be successful. And as a result, we go looking for the next best thing or tool that's out there that will help provide the magic. When all along, the magic is waiting within. You just need to open the curtain and start the show...
Great blog. I am on your list and today I was really compelled to read your thoughts. They were right on for me. I just wanted to add that in today’s economic climate it is even more important to stay true to yourself and do what you love!
Thanks Elizabeth 🙂
J
Who is John Ashworth?