Frustrated

So I just had my eyes opened at work today.  I am apparently a phenomenal trainer, great with people, and do a wonderful job at helping people reach their goals/feel better about themselves.  But I guess I'm terrible at my job because I don't sell things.  I just got out of a 30 minute meeting where the take away was I service too many sessions and don't make opportunities to sell stuff.  If I wanted to sell things then I would have taken a job in sales, not personal training.  Everyone would like to have a lot more money, a lot more things, and a lot more of just more.  Cue the girl from the weird kid commercial "I want more, we want more, we just want more".  I apparently have my priorities backwards because I don't want more money.  I mean I do, don't get me wrong, but right now it is the least of my worries.  I am currently making the most money I have ever made in my life, and I'm happy with it.  I am quite happy where I am and how I'm doing.  I'm able to workout and better myself as an athlete (little secret life ambition of mine to be a professional athlete of form), I am able to set my own schedule for the most part and do what I want.  I can finally pay for my bills without constantly having to reach into my savings and pray that I can pick up extra hours from a second job.  I don't want a lot and I don't want to be greedy, but the constant nudge that I shouldn't be happy until I'm making some imaginary number is driving me crazy.

I have been told that I have the best retention rate of clients for new trainers.  I am a firm believer that if it isn't broken then don't fix it.  I tell my clients what to do and let them learn from their mistakes.  If I say to not drink yourself silly over the weekend and to not eat a bunch of crap then it's probably because those things won't help you lose weight and look and feel the way you want to.  Then when you do what I tell you not to and gain weight it isn't my problem and I will say "ok, you did it your way, let's do it mine."  They do it my way and lose weight, shocker.  These are the same people that if I pushed them to buy supplement after supplement or test after test that they would just walk away and I would be without a client.  Apparently I'm supposed to push sales and let people walk away so that I can replace them with people who will buy whatever I want them to.  I don't want retards that just parrot what I say, take everything I tell them as gospel truth, and refuse to think for themselves.  I like people who have something a little bit wrong with them, or just simply don't want to do what I say just because I said so.  "Because I said so" isn't science, it isn't training, it's just telling you what to do and hoping that you'll spend enough money to pad my paycheck and let me play with your wallet until you lose the weight that you want to lose.  I don't want a brainless idiot that will buy whatever I want them to, I want them to buy what I want them to because they see the value in it and understand it will help them.  If they don't want to buy something I want them to understand what they're doing and why they're doing it.  If they don't understand then I want them to be willing to learn.  People will only see sustainable results when they're willing to learn and understand they why and how.  If not then they will just repeat whatever the fad is and see quick results but then yo-yo back to their previous position and go "I don't understand, I ate what you said but then you stopped thinking for me so I gained everything back".  I don't want to think for you, I want to teach you.  I guess this is wrong way to go about things.  I'm a great trainer because I have people that will stay with me forever because they like what I do and how I treat them.  I'm apparently a terrible trainer because I'm not saying "wow, this combined home income is $300,000!  I should make them buy testing, the most expensive heart rate monitor, supplements out the wazoo, and training until the cows come home!".  I apparently missed a memo somewhere that said "thou shalt not be happy until thou makes x amount of money".  Did anyone else get it because I certainly didn't.

What I should really do is just open my own gym.  You know the movie Patch Adams with Robin Williams?  My all time most favorite movie in the world.  He wants to have a free hospital where people can go for treatment and not have to worry about the cost of the medical bills but just focus on getting better.  I want to open a gym version of that.  Make it Biggest Loser style where people come to workout, learn how to eat healthy and train healthy, and actually see results.  Instead of being voted or kicked out each week by being under the line or whatever, they only get kicked out for being unwilling to try.  There are some contestants that you can clearly see that they used their sob story to get on the show in hopes that they can just get by and not make any real changes just so they can get the money at the end.  There would be no money to be had at my gym, just hard work and results.  None of this "I'll only train you if you're willing to take 4 supplements (which based on our portion size equates to 12 pills per day), train 3 days per week, have heart rate monitors out the butt, and do 4 different types of stress tests".  When I'm talking stress tests I'm not talking the cardiological medical useful stress tests to determine if you have an issue with your heart.  I'm talking spit in a vial 3 times a day to figure out that you have high coritsol.  I have a stressful job and life I don't need to spend $200 and spit into something for 3 days to figure out my stress hormones are high.  Waste of money.

This rant is getting a wee bit winded.  I'm going to call it and go back to things that I like to do, like train people.  If it's not good enough for you then fire me.  I'm a trainer, not a sales person, I'm sorry that my life goals don't match up to yours.

Planning

So I'm officially training for a 50K this week. It's going to be the Rocks and Roots 50K trail run at Alum Creek February 9th.  I was starting to miss structured training and meal planning.  I haven't done trail running in forever, so I'm looking forward to running around in the mud, dirt, and jumping in water :)  I'm going to start taking my Zo pup with me on some of the shorter runs because she loved running the trails when we would go to Red River Gorge.  To help me organize my life I've tweaked my meal planning spread sheet a little bit to include a workout column.  This has helped keep grocery bills down, my week a little less hectic, and stop any arguing about what's for dinner.  What do you want for dinner?  Check the fridge, what does the sheet say?  Problem solved.  This has also helped when we are going to be using the Crock Pot because I make sure everything is set up/out to just toss in the Crock Pot, plug it in, and head out the door.

I know a lot of people have hectic schedules and need some help figuring out their lives.  Everyone has the same problem of figuring out what to have for dinner, where does anyone need to be, what time does x, y, and z need to happen, and what all needs to get done today.  I've started keeping a small notebook in my bags to use as my brains annex.  I have so much going on between family, training, work, trying to start a new program, and life in general that I simply don't have space for it all in my brain.  I just write the date at the top of the page and write everything that I need to accomplish between dusting, laundry, to emails that I need to send to my manager, or anyone I need to reach out to.  It helps me see what my day could look like and prioritize things as I go.  If I see my list takes up an entire page then I start weeding it out on things that are only absolutely necessary.  I know a lot of people have trouble figuring out what they should do and end up sitting around doing nothing because they don't think they'll get through the list anyway, so why begin?  Nothing will happen if you don't start it, so you may as well start and get through the best you can.

This is roughly what my life looks like sometimes, it's not all in these boxes, but it's a start.  I also haven't put in my mileage for the week because I'm still working that part out with my coach.  But it will let me see what days will suck for training and what days I should be able to be the most productive and accomplish the most.  This will also be useful for when I start making my Christmas presents.  I love making my presents, but they just take a while to get through.  I just need to plan better so I don't end up doing a sewing marathon like I do every year and I basically don't move from my sewing machine for hours at a time.                                                                                  

I'll add the agenda to a tab up top so people can access it better and make it their own.  I encourage my clients to use a style similar to this because it helps them see their weeks a little bit better than just hoping to remember things from day to day.  Planning out your week makes life easier when it comes to food because really all you have to do is plan a little bit and you can cook the food you want, and eat healthier simply by planning.  It usually takes pizza about 30-45 minutes to be delivered to your door.  If you planned accordingly you can thaw frozen chicken, chop up potatoes, and have everything cooked in the time it would take you to order a pizza and wait for it to be delivered.  Just a thought.  When I point that out to some of my people they have an "ah ha" moment and realize that they let life happen to them instead of trying to control what goes on.  Planning accordingly and trying to control what you can makes life a lot easier.  Food is fairly easy to control, you don't have to let it control you, it's not going to jump into your mouth on its own.

Back to planning and training!  Still loving my new computer!

New Computer!

So my computer for the last 4 years is finally on its way out.  It's been a long, slow, painful process, but it has finally happened.  It works well enough to turn on and do minimal functions as long as you have the patience for it to potentially restart, take a small life time to open whatever you're looking for, and also take FOREVER to start.  I've never been an apple fan, but I've decided to go by way of the MacBook Air for this computer because I've played the PC game and remained unimpressed.  I had the iphone for a while and while it was a good phone, it was also unimpressive.  Though it was about the only phone that I managed to not completely destroy, fry, or drown.  I think that was due to the fact that I was terrified of crushing it so I kept it in a full case the entire time.  I destroyed a Lifeproof case, otter box, and another off brand version of the otter box.  Red ended up giving me the Otterbox for his work phone because I had successfully destroyed everything else and didn't want to buy yet another case.  When it was time to upgrade though I switched back to the world of Android and got the Samsung Galaxy S4.  I love the screen size, how easy it is to use, how I can customize nearly everything, and just the way the phone works in general.  The one thing I miss about the iphone was the way the voicemail worked.  Now when I have a voicemail I have to wait until it is done having me re-save old messages before I can listen to my newest message.  Quite annoying.  But that's the end of the list of things I miss really.

Now as for the computer switch.  I have never had a mac of any form but I have always heard good things about them and thus far they seem to be indestructible.  I know some of my friends that have had them for 5 years with zero problems.  I have been incredibly hard pressed to find a friend with a PC that went longer than 2 years without a problem.  My last computer, the one that I just replaced, lasted 4 years but the last few months have been very irritating.  It would restart multiple times in a row, decide that it would want to update every time I would put it to sleep, and then take a small lifetime to start back up.  In the last 3 weeks the HP updated 3 different times.  The first week it had 27 updates and took 4 hours to sleep/update.  Second week it had 59 updates and took over 5 hours to sleep/shut down.  This last time it had 63 updates and FINALLY shut down sometime after I went to bed 6 hours later.  It was also getting hotter than sin and I was pretty sure that I was going to catch something on fire just setting it on there.  I've had the Macbook Air for a whopping 4 hours now and it is definitely going to require a huge learning curve.  Once I get used to it I'll be fine, but the getting used to it thing will take a bit.  One thing I've officially decided is that I strongly prefer the Microsoft office set up, so that will be my next purchase for this.  I've been messing with the Numbers app deal that's on here, and even though it's fairly easy to use, I still would rather spend my life working on excel for stuff than this thing.  Numbers has a lot of cool things that I can use, but I move so much faster on Excel and can just shuffle something off to my manager in about 30 seconds that seems to take forever on here.  It'll get better though.  The really cool part about all of this?  Outside of a truly functional computer??  The fact that now when Red is traveling for work that we can Facetime!!!  We used Skype last week when he was in South Carolina, but most places he doesn't have decent enough internet for his computer to allow him to use Skype.  Now with Facetime he can use his phone or ipad while on his trips and we can chat on here!!

Ok, well now that I have a functional computer hopefully I'll actually blog more.  I have most of my 2014 race season planned out and I'll have A LOT of training to do, but it'll be fun.  Quick run down:
January: Disney Mickey Marathon (pacing Red for the Marathon portion of the "Dopey" Challenge he's doing)
February: 50k Rocks to Roots trail run
March: nothing, maybe Xenia half marathon
April: Xenia half marathon if it's not in march
May: Rev 3 Knoxville 70.3 and Triple T
June:
July:
August:
September: Ironman Wisconsin
I'll probably have something in the summer months, I just don't know what yet, we'll see!!!