Success Planning for a Prosperous Future
By Kelli Calabrese
This is installment # 5 of the Balancing Act which started out with acronym FOCUS
F- Your Future as fitness professional
O - Observing what is going on in your life
C - Clarifying what truly makes you happy and being clear on what you desire to accomplish.
U – Unifying with those who you aspire to be like or who are like minded.
S – Success Planning
By now most people have forgotten their New Years Resolutions, including personal fitness professionals who preach about the importance of goal setting and success planning. If you set out to make an enjoyable and profitable living as a personal trainer, but keep falling short you need to make some decisions. Deciding means to cut off any other possibilities. Unless you are independently wealthy and truly enjoy helping people get fit for free, you need a specific plan to earn a living that can give you financial freedom and remove money worries.
Waking up every day, training a handful of clients and then spending the rest of your time complaining or wallowing in self pity is not the road to success, but it is the road most traveled. Don’t overwhelm. It can be easy to come up with so many things that are stacked against you that you feel paralyzed.
That’s why my first step in success planning is for you to first let go. Moving forward in any endeavor requires letting go of things that hold you back or weigh you down so that you can make room for great things. It’s usually the thing that has a strong hold on you that holds you back. For your clients it may be an addiction to sugar or alcohol. For you it may be something negative that consumes your time, a business relationship that’s gone bad, a work situation that no longer matches your idea’s for growth. Letting go can mean to stop over-committing yourself, learning to say no, transitioning a client who is detrimentally affecting your schedule or maybe letting go of a group of friends or activities that no longer aligns with your current situation.
Once you have assessed what it is that you do with your 24 hours in a day over the course of the week and then identified your time wasters, now would be a good time to go back to the first 4 steps in FOCUS and review what your ideal future looks like, observe the things that ARE working in your life. Clarify the most urgent and important items and determine who should be in your inner circle of influence to help catapult you to the next level. Once those are on paper you can begin planning for your future success. Having a plan dates back to the bible. Those who have a vision about what their future will be like have a greater chance of accomplishing that vision. And even if the vision does not come to fruition they find they are better positioned to handle and enjoy what ever the outcome is.
Start by projecting out one year from now. What excites you? What do you see yourself doing? Dream in detail about what your ideal professional day will be like. How much will you work? How much money will you earn? What type of clients will you train? What will your work environment be like? Who will you be working for or who will work for you? How many clients will you have? What will you specialize in? Will you have other streams of income besides personal training? What will be your cost to do business? How will you attract new business?
Continue to ask yourself specific open ended questions beginning with who, what, when, where and how until you get down to something that excites you and is currently out of your reach, but attainable in 12 months. Then do the same for your personal time outside of work.
Once you know what your professional career will be like in 12 months, begin working backwards, considering where you will then need to be in 9 months, 6 months, 3 months and 1 month. What things will have to happen at each interval and ultimately daily to make your 12 month plan a reality? For example if you want to have a total of 8 clients paying $1,000 a month to train twice a week with you, what do you have to do now to secure that? If you want to have 2 trainers working for you who each have 15 clients paying $75 an hour, what do you need to do today and in the months following to make that a happy reality?
Then take a look at the things you did today and the long term impact on your life. Are you doing things for today or for the future? As you make each decision today, stop yourself and consider the impact a year from now.
Once you have your plan and are excited enough to make it a reality, decide what you may need to put off. If your goal is to open your own studio in a year, that may mean, putting off setting up the home theater or keeping your current car an extra year or a more modest vacation, but none of that will feel like a sacrifice if you are excited about what your life can be like in a year and how your reward will be even greater for your future security and financial freedom. A delay in gratification now can have a one hundred percent return later.
The enemies of your success are the law of inertia (a body at rest remains at rest) and the law of least resistance (taking the easiest path). What you think about most of the time will determine the results you achieve. Are you thinking about doubling your sales, making larger sales, increasing profitability, selling more to the same loyal customers, reducing your costs and offering new services? Or are you thinking about how everyone has an advantage over you, how life has dealt you a poor hand and how other trainers were handed their fortunes?
When you think you know what you want your outcome to be, continue to visualize it in great detail. For example if you want to open up a studio, where will it be located, how many square feet will it be, what will the layout be like, what are the colors, what will be the name, what equipment will you include, how many employees will you have, how much profit will you make and so on. One of the things that separates the ultra successful from the rest is their abilities to be visionaries. To see into the future with great vision and detail, professional athletes use this to build confidence, perfect their skills and win tournaments.
Once you have the details down, create your plan of action to achieve your outcome. Your internal senses will give you a lot of feedback in respect to whether you are on the right track. You can’t get what you want until you know what you want. You have more abilities than you give yourself credit for. Remember to be flexible as life is not a success-only journey. Even the best-laid plans sometimes must be altered and changed. Be open to input and consider any potentially viable alternative. Be willing to be wrong and be willing to start over.
This column is called the Balancing Act, because life is constantly moving and the moving parts are never equally balanced. Stay FOCUSed on having the best possible outcomes, enjoying the process, serving those seeking fitness, dreaming big and following through on those dreams in a big way!
Kelli Calabrese is the co-author of Personal Training – The Prosperity Formula. Go to www.CalabreseConsulting.com for info on this career escalating program and the monthly coaching offer. Kelli@KelliCalabrese.com