It’s a Good Time to Get Your Life Together
By Kelli Calabrese
Have you ever noticed that where you spend a majority of your time in thought is where you are the most invested in your actions? For example if you are heavily focused on growing your personal training business you have little time for distractions from anything that will take you away from successfully growing your personal training business. You are less likely to get involved with an MLM, pick up a new hobby or spend hours hanging out with friends playing video games.
On the other hand if you spend most of your thought in worry about how you will pay bills, get new clients and make the necessary repairs to your home and car, you can imagine the actions that follow the outcome of those thoughts.Everyone is successful at accomplishing the objectives of their thoughts. But why are some people so much better at accomplishing positive objectives than others? How is it that some trainers can’t hold on to a positive thought for more than thirty five seconds and others spend thought purposefully laser beam focused on growing multiple streams of personal training income?
There are three barriers I have found that separate those who can get their lives and business together and those who continue to be troubled and fall short.
The first is the environment you are in. Realize that you will earn within 10% of the income of the ten people who you spend the most time with. Think about your closest friends and how together and balanced their lives are. Your environment shapes your thoughts and impressions and leads you down a path. You may not realize how much of an influence your environment has on you until you leave it. Have you ever traveled to a place where things were extremely clean or people were extra friendly? Didn’t it give you a good feeling?
I invite you to take your digital camera and take pictures of all of the places you frequent in a day, especially the places you spend most of your time. Is your environment (office, car, training facility, house) cluttered, noisy, filled with negative people, dirty, depressive, dark or uninviting? How is your environment causing you to think and ultimately act? Do you love your workspace? Is your training environment uplifting and positive? What can you do to make things more enjoying in your environment? What can you eliminate – including people who are distracting or demeaning? Make positive changes to your environment as first step to changing your behavior.
The second barrier to getting your life together is our culture. Culture is different from environment in that our generation shapes our behaviors and beliefs. In today’s culture, people expect to have quick rewards with little effort. There is a feeling of entitlement that is detrimental to achievement. Hard work ethics have been replaced with copying and pasting, looking for short cuts, working the system and doing the minimum to get by. I can tell you that little replaces hard work. There are no short cuts that I know of despite what our information culture wants you to believe.
Third is the volume we allow into our lives. We simply have too much stuff in our closets, brains, in-box, on top of our desks and coming at us from all media angles including TV, internet, satellite radio, bill boards, print, people and more.
What would happen if you missed a tweet on Twitter or a nudge on Facebook? How would you feel if you cleaned out 80% of the junk in your life and were reduced to the things that truly were important to joyfully growing your business and having peace in your life?
What would happen if you said “no” to some social invitations? How about if you said “not today” to your time being consumed by the internet? How would you feel if you unsubscribed to 80% of the junk that came into your inbox? What if you spent the average of 4 hours a day that Americans spend watching TV and you used that time to ask and answer a series of questions that could help you get your life together?
What if you changed your environment, went against culture and reduced the stuff in your life so that you could focus not on the trouble in your life, not on the crisis, but on the possibilities, on the victories which you are about to achieve through over serving your clients.
My good friend Phil Kaplan has used the term busy and broke to describe average personal trainers. They are too busy to learn, change and grow, but they are busy with things that are ordinary and counter productive. If trainers learned from their mistakes, we’d have a training community filled with success stories. Instead trainers get stuck in an environment, influenced by modern culture and cluttered with non-sense.
I invite you to be peculiar, to be different, to get more focused, spend less time in distractions, become disciplined and to grow in your successes!