From Burned-Out to Beach-Bum: A Personal Trainer's Success Story

I just booked a 10 day vacation for my 30th birthday in Barbados. It's the first time in my life I'll be somewhere warm during the bitter cold month of January. It’s a tiny place off the grid that offers daily surfing lessons, and private studio cabanas right on the water. Barbados is supposed to have some of the best surfing waves for learners like me. I've longed to be somewhere warm and beautiful for my birthday for as long as I can remember. If you need me, I'll be the one in the hammock (most likely the same color)

In planning this trip, you know what I didn’t do? I didn’t have to ask my boss for time off. I didn’t have to feel bad that I was losing out on a week+ of pay. I didn’t have to risk losing my clients for being gone. All because of one decision I made that granted me my freedom. All because I'm now an online trainer.

What's online training, you ask? Online training is a new and exciting way for me to offer my clients what they need, when they need it, without the limitations and expenses of the gym so that I can offer a better, and more cost effective, service than an in-person trainer

You see, when I lived in Pittsburgh, I had established a business teaching yoga in unique places such as breweries, wineries, coffee shops, and parks...on top of supervising a university fitness department and having in-home personal training clients. I was living the typical strung-out trainer life. Me (in the blue pants) teaching yoga at Wigle Whiskey in Pittsburgh, PA

I loved most of it, but at the end of the day I still wasn’t making a substantial amount of money for the work I was putting in. I was spending 6 years of my life gaining valuable experience, but being worn down to practically nothing.

And then,

My husband got a dream job offer in NYC! It was never in the plan for us to move to the Big Apple, but being the adventurous type, we said what the hell and uprooted our lives and two dogs to Queens, NYC. Knowing that should I stay in Pittsburgh I would have had to establish a brick-and-mortar studio to continue on my business, but the universe had other plans for me. The little yogi in the big city.

So I applied for 3 jobs before moving. I accepted one in Lower Manhattan, what i believed to be the “next step up” in my career: management in a luxury apartment fitness center. Fancy. Well, after 6 months of 40 hour work weeks, long commutes, being sedentary thus gaining weight, and working for people who treated their employees as nothing more than expendable, I had to make the very tough choice to walk away from something that was causing myself emotional and physical harm. But then I remembered something:

While I was at a yoga training in India the leader asked us to sign a contract with ourselves stating “I will not engage in behavior that is harmful to myself or others.” Well, I was allowing my ego and greed to cause strain on my body, my relationships, and my life.

My time in India was a critical turning point in my life and shaped who I am now.

The funny thing was, during that management period I heard about a guy named Jon Goodman and this program he had called the Online Trainer Academy. Basically, It was a program designed to do what I had failed to do over and over: have a successful online presence as a fitness professional.

Here's Jon! I got to meet him in person at the Strong Summit in Toronto this spring.

I’ve had two websites (three including a project for University) and none of them went anywhere, mostly because i hadn’t a clue as to what I was doing. I took a tiny financial risk and signed up for the program.

So I started it.

Then I ignored it for the duration of my employment at “grownup job.”

Then that 6 month mark came along and all of a sudden I found myself somewhere I hadn’t been in a long time: completely unemployed. It had been the joke in the family that I was the one who always had at least 5 separate jobs to pay taxes to in the spring, and being beyond busy was just my version of normal.

Now I was at home, with nothing to do but avoid cleaning the apartment, full to the brim of knowledge and skills and no one to share them with.

I was determined to finish the training a before the one year anniversary of me buying the program. So, I opened the book, and picked up right where I left off. Then I graduated and became an online personal trainer, and yoga & lifestyle coach.

So here I am now, working for the first time in a home office with my dogs at my side, and building a clientele through online personal coaching and fitness challenges. I'm measuring my success not just by the money in my pocket, but the amount of freedom and happiness I have found by learning how to expand my skills beyond the studio and into something sustainable.

If this sounds anything like what you or someone who you know has been going through, I urge you to read-on and check out what the Online Trainer Academy is about. I haven’t experienced a more well-thought-out and comprehensive program in my life. And beyond that, Jon Goodman actually gives a sh*t about your success and the efficacy of his program. If you are about to invest your money in yourself, give it to someone like him. Give it a peek by clicking the unnecessarily-giant icon below: