My Time as a Personal Trainer

Here I will write about my experience as a personal trainer. What I learned. How I passed the exam on my first try and felt overjoyed. How I got the job by simply sharing about my passions about training others as well as my own training, did not feel like much of an interview as much as it felt like a conversation. How my hiring manager was one of the smartest people I’ve ever come across… I mean Bachelor’s in Neuroscience, Master’s in Math, knew in-depth kinesiology, could diagnose deep-rooted mobility issues completely accurately from vague and albeit rushed descriptions. How she served as a figure to inspire me, show me what kind of trainer I could become, how academic rigor was crucial for achieving a high degree of mastery. How this translated into future endeavors and probably subconsciously influences me to this day. How I had to balance my love and passion for training/science/biology with the necessary aspects of the job such as being a salesman as well as a trainer. How it reframed to me the way in which my individual input is directly correlated to what I receive, aka how when I’d put a lot of effort in I’d get more out via more sales. How helping other people was one of the most enjoyable things I’ve ever done. My role felt important. I was helping people overcome lifelong insecurities. I was helping people achieve things they didn’t know their bodies were capable of. I was helping people heal injuries, heal relationships with food. My work felt important because I could see people’s lives getting better as a direct result of my effort. That completely reframed what I ever thought my career could be. It was no longer about money, there was a deeper sense of purpose driving me, a sense of purpose that I knew I could carry with me elsewhere. The frustrations, the stresses, the difficulties, the hard moments where one of my clients, who felt more like a friend than a client, struggled to look himself in the mirror after we’d done a sprint to lose 15 pounds and he was both happy with his body but struggling to synthesize all of the mixed emotions brewing within him, he wanted to do better, he struggled to like his body, but he knew he had to accept that it was okay to be nice to himself, that it was okay to celebrate this win of having lost 15 pounds, even if it wasn’t the ultimate end result which he wanted. Being a participant in these stories, helping some achieve the end result and for others just being a part of the journey, it all meant so much to me. Even though it’s outside of academia and tech, it’s not a cool coding project, or a perfect transcript, or an interesting app, it’s valuable because it showed me what I valued in a career.