Life is What You Make of It

Today I’m rolling through some emails in my hotel room before heading out to be a tourist in Jolly ol London. It’s one of my favourite cities and I’ve always had a great time when here. It’s funny, after all the North American media coverage last week following the terrorist attacks on London Bridge and the attack near Westminster a few months ago, you wouldn’t think the people here were even giving it a second thought. It’s almost as if they’ve been through worse and kept their spirits up. Or the media is making a mountain out of a mole hill.

I’m also getting the experience of seeing the fallout from the British vote last night, and to see the difference between North American media coverage of politics and the British reaction to politics is to be honest, cute.

….. and Canadians, although we have your Queen on our money, so we’re used to it.

Aside from the situation of world events, I’m over here to present Complete Shoulder & Hip Blueprint with Tony Gentilcore to a group of trainers from The Third Space, a fairly posh chain of clubs here in London. Aside from the privilege to present alongside Tony, someone who’s a great friend and amazingly brilliant trainer, it’s incredible to think I’m able to travel to cool places like this, have people show up to listen to me talk about shoulders and hips, and they actually pay me to do it.

4 years ago I had my first workshop in London, a small gathering of 25 fitness professionals listening to me yammer on about post rehab topics. Since then, I’ve been able to put together groups of people to talk in London a few more times, as well as Prague, Oslo, New York, Los Angeles, and about 20 other places. (Note: if you’re interested in hearing me talk in other locations, check out HERE for more info)

Coming from a small town in the middle of nowhere, British Columbia Canada, the thought of being able to do stuff like this would have blown my teenaged brain had I thought it was possible. I just wanted to get a job where I could earn a decent income and workout when ever I wanted, which I was able to do in training. It was pretty comfortable for a while, you know, like 16 hour work days 6 days a week is comfortable.

What changed and lead to some discomfort and the need to diversify or adapt to change was in 2008. The club I work out of moved and was in a temporary location while building a new club location, and as a result of that move to a space that was about 1/5th the size of the previous location, the number of clients I was working with was cut in about half. This also coincided with the world financial meltdown, a significant drop in oil prices, and a lot of layoffs and restructuring around the world, which means a lot of my clients weren’t able to pay for training or significantly decreased the number of sessions they were able to train.

These were all factors outside of my control, but had a dramatic effect on what I did and my quality of life.

Because of these changes, I decided to start this very website you’re reading here. It was more a way to put out some thoughts and resources about training to help give more value to clients. They had a question about an exercise, I could send them a video. They didn’t understand something about why we were working on something the way we were, I could send them an article about the topic.

Eventually I started to write articles for T-Nation, which was a big step. From there I put together a couple of video seminars, which I had no idea how to do before, and still think it’s the work of some wizard demon how people can see and hear me talking about things on the other side of the world while I’m sleeping. People even contacted me to build their training programs over the interwebz.

This isn’t meant to brag, because I can honestly say there’s a lot of other people out there doing these same things, and in many ways to a bigger degree than I have or ever likely will, but just to show that you’re not bound to your circumstances.

Last week I had James Fell on my podcast, and the first question I asked him was how he was able to get to a position where he was getting invited backstage to interview celebrities and attend concerts and shows for free. He said he started out with a local paper that eventually lead to an opportunity with a couple of international papers, but those wouldn’t have happened without starting at the local paper.

I wouldn’t be where I am and doing the stuff I’m doing without putting in 12-16 hour days for the better part of a decade. I wouldn’t know the value of hard work if I hadn’t been fired from delivering pizzas when I lived at home. (seriously though, 2 trailer parks with identical names, and 2 families with the same last name at the same number within those 2 parks? What the hell!)

I also wouldn’t be doing the stuff I’m currently doing if I didn’t decide one day to do it. I was asked on a Facebook Q & A session a few weeks ago about what my favourite inspirational movie was, and I replied Scarface, because your situations don’t define you.

Considering he was a Cuban immigrant who had every disadvantage working against him at the time, he found a way to make the best of his opportunities, and while sure it involved a lot of killing and coke, you could easily sweep those details under the rug and just focus on his determination to be somebody who accomplished something. Not everyone has a pet tiger.

Maybe relating myself to a murderous drug kingpin isn’t the best idea. Meh, it still works.

Challenging times bring about change. People tend to be scared of change, even though every beneficial thing that’s ever happened to them came as the result of positive adaptation to change, be it a new job, new relationship, or new training stress that lead to the appearance of some new biceps definition. Many new Fortune 500 companies were established as the direct result of economic recessions. This could be because their founders found themselves with a new preponderance of free time to work on projects (ie they were fired or laid off), or because the new economic environment made an availability of opportunity to do something new to benefit a certain market segment or the population as a whole.

Because of the economic challenges of 2008, I’m in London preparing to have a group of elite trainers listen to me talk about the shoulder and hip for 2 full days with this guy.

Where you are now is not a testament to where you will be in 5 years or even 10 years. You may have no idea where you’ll be or what you’ll be doing, and that’s okay. I’m here because I started a free blog after losing a bunch of clients to sagging housing prices and a surplus of oil on the free market. It started as a whim to occupy some free time and now makes up 2/3 of my total income from the fitness industry. This didn’t happen because I knew what I was doing or had an idea of what to expect. I just decided to do it and see what happened.

Okay, enough writing. Time to go explore the city and hopefully lift heavy things. Have a great weekend!