Can you Cure Trainer Dis-ease?
By Kelli Calabrese
Personal trainers rarely endure the typical diseases like diabetes, cancer, obesity and heart disease that most people do. We have well earned the fortune of good health as others resources are consumed by disease. When you think about it, we have a huge advantage because we rarely are consumed in a negative way by our personal health. We may have minor inconveniences, but we are sick less often, spend less time in doctors offices, have less worry about medical bills or spend agonizing hours on the phone with insurance companies to settle claims. We get to enjoy being physically and mentally superior thanks go our healthy lifestyle choices.
Would you agree that our health gives us an advantage in every way? If so, why then have trainers submitted to other dis-eases such as regret and angst for wasted resources, in particularly our time, talent and money? You might rationalize in your mind that you are not doing so badly, things could always be worse and you are clearly doing better than the guy across town, but what you speak overrides how you think and how you act overrides how you speak and think. You have both the power and the authority to choose to re-act to any situation.
In the BB curriculum we say to have response-ability, the ability to respond. The word react is positioned as a bad word. React makes me think of being out of control, not having the ability to think before taking action and reactions tend to have a domino effect with one decision negatively affecting those following it. Rarely is reacting something we come to cherish. Reacting is usually something we later regret such as the harsh words that we didn’t mean or the facial expression that didn’t match the receiver’s expectation or maybe even explosiveness that seemed to come from our core. I’m coining a new phrase, suggesting not that you react, but that you re-act. As I intend it, “re-act” means to think, the take it from the top . . . to act differently . . . . better.
What if you decided that the top three things that were weighing the heaviest in your life were unacceptable? Maybe one of those things is the number of hours you are working, another the amount of dept you are carrying and the third an idea you have been procrastinating about acting on. Your three may by totally different, but how would it feel if you could identify those three things and then build up enough hate about them that you became fully convinced you could and had to change them through your actions.
For me, one of those heavy things was e-mail. I receive on average 500 e-mails a day. While I can instantly identify about 80% of them as junk, the other 20 seemed to require my time. Some seem like legitimate opportunities that required some investigation, some are media requests, others e-mails from trainers with a need that tugs at my heart strings, others unsolicited training requests which I needed to politely decline, still others personal e-mails from committees I am on or my kids schools. Then of course there those looking to sell me something and then some newsletters I legitimately want to take the time to read.
I found myself writing an average of 80 e-mails a day, detailed e-mails with heart felt responses to trainers I didn’t know. Or to wanna-be fitness gurus’ who requested to interview me. There were the interns who wanted to include me in their final projects or the web sites who wanted me to be on their advisory board or contribute to their e-zines. How could I not help them? What about the lady in Philadelphia who was seriously concerned about her obese teenage daughter who was being terrorized at school for her size? At the end of the day I would go to bed frustrated that I missed my workout, barely spoke to my husband, was distracted by thinking about e-mails when I was with my kids and I didn’t get to the urgent and important things that I needed to grow professionally.
One night about a year ago, I was returning e-mails when I should have been in bed. Phil called. He said, “Whose e-mails are you returning and what is it that you did to owe them a personal detailed reply from you”? That was my turning point.
E-mails were consuming my day and I decided after a season of cutting my workouts short or missing workouts entirely for people I didn’t even know (and some I did), that I hated being a slave to e-mail. I was fully convinced I could do something about it. I started deleting, delegating and declining (maybe the title of my next book Delete, Delegate, Decline) and feeling good about it.
The good news was that just by thinking and responding differently the answer was within my reach. The evidence was in the freedom I felt in hitting the delete key and in having more free time. For me it’s still a work in progress but it’s tremendously improved. I know I have choices and at the end of the day, I am not on the pay roll of anyone who is emailing me and I don’t owe strangers who obtained my e-mail address, any of my time.
By re-acting to my e-mail I was able to increase my capacity because I freed up my time. Not only have I not missed any important opportunities, but I have completed more of the important things I wanted to do and was available when extraordinary opportunities came my way. I predict that my e-mail will only increase in the information age. I will continue to re-act strategically rather than react to the e-mail just because it came into my inbox and appeared to be urgent in the moment.
In this months Platform Call, Phil and I talked about the difference between “the economy” and “your economy”. When you can identify the top three most heavy things in your life as unacceptable and even hate them, you are two steps closer to having “you incorporated” become a more enjoyable and prosperous place.
It was easy for me to hide behind my e-mail. I LOVE what I do and I genuinely want to help as many people as I can, but not at the expense of my workouts or freedom and balance in my life.
Once you have identified your three trainer “dis-eases” re-think, re-speak and re-act differently to become free from dis-ease. You have heard this before, but its worth repeating, “If you always do what you have always done, you will always get what you what you’ve always got”.
If you keep finding your self in the same situation with the same patterns of challenges, you are the common denominator of dis-ease and need to change how you re-act. What you don’t hate you will permit. Don’t finish a day wishing things were different. Carpe Diem – Seize the Day and become Trainer dis-ease free!