What a weird ass year we are coming to the end of. And to be quite honest it still feels like it should be October but instead most of us have just a few more classes left. Mind blown.
The weirdest thing for me, is whilst the future still feels less than certain, I am closing the year with the most clarity about who I am and what I want to offer than ever before. Trying different modes and services over the last 20 months has meant that more than ever, I’ve had to identify who I work with, what they need from me and how I can help them better.
Late 2019 and early 2020 were the months where I had finally reached a lot of my targets. Both from a turnover perspective and a business process perspective. It was great and one of the reasons why it was the perfect time to launch my instructor website amf.world. Things obviously changed pretty quickly in March 2020.
Since then, I’ve done a lot of soul searching. Especially after spending 10 years building things up, at times it felt it that the most sensible thing to do was not to be completely self-employed and self-funding a start-up. It felt like having to start from scratch again, both in terms of systems and in terms of income security.
But I am a different instructor than when I first started. Fitness is different. There is more information at our finger tips to help our clients with the difficulties they face. We are better at marketing, at social media and at understanding what it takes to retain our client base. We have a strong instructor community who are all there for each other from all over the world. We are completely capable of taking our businesses back to those pre-March 2020 levels. It’s all about learning how to chill & refocus whilst we ride the waves that inevitably come our way.
There is opportunity in everything - and this is no different. We have developed better systems, we are more organised, more automated. We understand our clients better…. Partly because we have had time to listen and partly because we have all lived through the same situations and experiences together.
Whilst we might not know exactly what 2022 will look like, we do know LOTS of things about ourselves and about our crew, individually and as a whole. We know the reasons they came back - our community vibes, our energy, the attention we give them and how much we value each one of them. We know what we could do better, how we can better serve them in the future and we also know that we can’t do everything at once.
This is perhaps the most important lesson of all. Progression happens one step at a time. We learn gradually, and from our 'failures' and mistakes. We make great offerings & products because we tried something that didn’t work as well as we had hoped. We know how important it is to have time off. We cannot function well if we are completely stressed. We struggle to focus on our work if we haven’t had time to clear our minds. Our mental health is as important as anyone else’s. Our business goals have more realistic time frames as we gradually rebuild and remould for our future.
Whatever we are faced with in 2022, let’s acknowledge something. We have never been in a better position to weather the storm, to be flexible, to maintain a clear head when stressed and to give ourselves the time off that we need to be awesome at our job and to ENJOY our social life with our friends & family.
Group ex rules and so do the instructors that teach it.
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