As I got more experience training individuals I began training groups of people and realized I was making a difference in peoples lives both in the realm of health & wellness and also helping people find their way through life.
My Journey to be a Life Coach started back in the early 2000s..If someone had asked me to write a blog post about being a life coach that could alter lives when I was under 30, I would not have believed that I was capable of making even a small positive difference in anyone’s life or providing advice that was truly helpful. Even though I had been coaching people in fitness and wellness, I didn’t think in those terms. Although I had coached as an internal health and qi gong practitioner, yoga and group fitness instructor, strength coach, boot camp instructor, personal trainer, and Exercise Specialist, I still never considered myself to be a life changer.
As I gained more experience training people and began training groups, I realized that I was making a difference in people’s lives, both in the realm of health and wellness and also in helping people find their way through life. At that point, I started to reflect on the experience I had and the effect I was having on people.
I remember when I first switched to coaching health, wellness and fitness from teaching and practicing yoga, qi gong and martial art. I was excited to be shifting to the realm of preventative medicine, that is to say, to be helping the community maintain a better state of health and fitness to avoid complications that could arise from not addressing a our health and fitness. Even though at the time I was very fit and helping other fit people whilst doing my practice, I was super excited to have the opportunity to help people who were not fit and did not have a background in exercise.
Undoubtedly, becoming a coach is a great way to make a positive impact on people’s lives. Coaches help people to reach their goals, develop their skills, and become the best version of themselves. However, I realized that I was providing people with a lot more than just physical fitness training or rehabilitation. I was impacting the way they were thinking, the choices they made, the opportunities they considered, and were exposed to. I was given the chance to impact their ability to acquire useful perspective and experience. It was around that time that I began really loving what I did. What started as a way to earn money became a passion, a calling, if you like.
It was as if everything I had done previously was for a singular purpose. I had been preparing for my calling in life, often without realizing it, because in a way, I had fallen into fitness coaching as a career, and although I wanted to help people get fit, it was actually, initially, at least, more about me having an income and a career.
It wasn’t until one day when I was driving from a bootcamp to a personal training session that I realized that coaching was my career and that I should really love doing it, or my time spent coaching people would not be so enjoyable.
My goal in this blog is to share some insights I gained from working with a cross-section of the community, from motivating to opening people’s minds to another way of thinking, giving them the ability to break out of ruts.