Is a Career in Fitness Your Destiny?

It is my belief that all people have a predetermined destiny. What I mean here is that everyone at the time of birth is gifted with an assortment of different talents, intelligence, physical abilities, aptitudes, attitudes and insights which will enable them to excel in some vocation which will bring them much joy and satisfaction.

Two major problems occur before a person even gets their destiny. First, they are told at an early age that their existence all happened by chance and therefore their life has no purpose or, secondly, their parents or teachers begin to program them to become something that goes completely against their predetermined destiny. Unless these people have the courage, willpower or know how to break away from this early programming, their lives will be wasted doing something that they were never intended to do in the first place. It is my belief that unless a person discovers their destiny in life and works hard to accomplish it that they will experience very little joy and satisfaction and will live in quiet desperation and depression as their life unwinds before them.

I am convinced after spending over twenty years recruiting, hiring, training and motivating people in the fitness business that our single greatest mistake has been to try to train people to be winners in the fitness business when they had no business ever being hired to begin with. We have not only wasted a lot of precious time and energy training these people, but we have done these people a great injustice trying to make them into something which does not coincide with their destiny. Some of these unfortunate people have been in our business for years trying to get good at something they were never intended to do in the first place. By analyzing the successful people in the fitness business, I have determined that there are four distinct qualities or gifts which they all possess naturally. They are all very physical people. They have been involved with some form of physical fitness activity since they were small children. Most of them would rather be in a gym playing a sport or working out than doing anything else. We might call these people “natural born athletes” or “natural fitness believers.”

These same people are highly competitive individuals. They want or even need to win at almost all costs. They may be accurately labeled as “obsessive” about winning. They are people who live their lives for the next challenge.

But what divides these people from the typical overly aggressive athlete is that these winners in our industry have a heart for people. They naturally love to help people become the best they can become. They are not only outgoing and friendly, but they really enjoy seeing people improve themselves. They are natural motivators of people. They can somehow convince people who have suffered for years trying to lose weight and stay on an exercise program to finally take action and get their results. Or they are the type of people who can go into a “down club situation” where the members and staff are negative and within just a few short days the members and staff become positive. Its seems that they like people so much that they can just draw the negativity out of them or maybe they just bring the positivity that every person has to the surface. In any regard, they are shining lights in a sometimes dark world.

Lastly, these people are overachievers who love to work. They innately understand that to perfect their skills and become the best they can be they must pay the price of hard work. But hard work to them is their best friend because it enables them to win, and winning to them is much more important than working hard.

For those of us who are fulfilling our destiny in the fitness business it should be our number one priority to find and attract others who are like us to share with us in the same destiny. So remember before you pour your energies and time into training and motivating people to be successful in the fitness business, determine first if they have these four qualities. It is far wiser to spend more time in the recruiting process looking for the right people than to hire someone who was not created to be in the fitness business.

Once you have attracted people who have these four major attributes giving you and them good odds of being successful in our business and therefore fulfilling both of your destinies, it is important that you establish an understanding of authority, hierarchy and respect. These types of people many times are willful and even rebellious towards rules and regulations. They must understand from the “get go” that we have specific job descriptions and systems which we run our clubs by and that we have zero tolerance for deviation. That until they have learned all that they need to learn and can execute it effectively on an ongoing basis, that we are not interested in their “great ideas” on how to better our company. If the new recruit comes from another fitness company we are really not interested in how their old company used to do things. Even the great Joe Montana when traded to the Kansas City Chiefs did not bring his San Francisco Forty Niner offense with him. As great as he was, he was expected to learn the Kansas City offense.

It has been said, “Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.” We expect success from our leaders and future leaders, but with that success we want to never lose our humility. We must always remember how fortunate we all are for being able to find our destiny through the fitness business, knowing that there are very few people in life who get to do what they were meant to do. Discovering our destiny is, in itself, the greatest gift of all.

Emerald City Athletics has great expectations for its future. It is our immediate goal to build twenty clubs with a high profit margin in the Greater Seattle area. It is our objective to provide the best fitness services at the lowest possible cost to the people of this area. We not only believe in fitness, but we believe in prosperity. Unlike many companies which try to produce profits by keeping their wage costs down, we believe that our greatest asset is our staff. Once they have proven that they not only have the “right stuff” for our business, but have become high producers and impact players we believe that they should be well paid for their efforts. Our company history shows that we pay 30% higher wages to our key employees as compared to our industry averages. We want people who are money motivated; who want a better life; who want to own nice cars, have a nice home and who can afford to send their kids to good schools and take nice vacations with their families. We believe that if our employees are taking care of our company by getting our members their physical results and keeping our company highly profitable, that we should return the favor by paying them well for their accomplishments.

As leaders who have a destiny with this company, you must create a vision for yourselves and your people. If the fitness business is in fact your destiny you and your people can truly achieve whatever you set your mind on as long as you continue to keep the picture or vision clear and focused in your mind. Since Emerald City Athletics has no limitations on its vision for the future, you can attain with Emerald City whatever you can conceive, believe and then achieve.

But hard work and vision are not enough to achieve huge success and fulfillment of your ultimate destiny. We must learn and discipline ourselves to train out our personality weaknesses that are inherent in all people and train in personality strengths that will be needed to become the best that our destiny holds for us. Each of us must dedicate one hour daily to improving ourselves through first identifying through realistic introspection’s what our weaknesses are and where we need to strengthen ourselves. It may be that we suffer from being too critical of others, or that we cannot control our tempers, or that we have dissipation problems with alcohol or drugs, or we become easily embittered towards others. It might be a technical problem in our business where we are having a hard time selling a certain type of guest or motivating a certain type of employee, or maybe we lack confidence when asked to deliver a presentation or speech to a large group of people. Whatever the problem or need, we must continually get better at what we do or we will not reach our maximum potential. This can be accomplished by first being honest with our evaluation of ourselves and then learning and practicing the art and power of change. This is accomplished through programming the subconscious mind. It has been scientifically proven that 99% of all our actions or behavior are based on past programming. (Dennis Watley tapes.)

The first thirty minutes of our allotted hour per day we should spend in quiet prayer, meditation or self-reflection on where we are now, where we want to be, and who we want to be. Then we should spend the next fifteen minutes creating new positive affirmations and the final fifteen minutes reciting those affirmations to ourselves. It is amazing to see the huge change that comes over people who have mastered this art of reprogramming the subconscious mind.

I will guarantee you this: that reaching your destiny in life will be hard work and when you near it you will most likely be a completely different person than when you started on your journey. The closer you get, the happier you will become with yourself and the people around you. Always remember this – even the superstars who have reached their destiny like Michael Jordan in basketball or Jerry Rice in football, always worked harder than anyone else in perfecting themselves and their skills. They are no different than us- they have their destiny and we have ours. Now all we must do is go out there and get it.