Change Happens

I used to be one of those people who shook their head saying “people never change”. I have started this blog because I (gladly) discovered I was wrong. My purpose for writing will be to assist you, my readers with your individual challenges, goals and dreams.

I’m not going to offer purely exercise or nutrition advice here. While it is my background, it will form only part of the bigger picture. My primary theme and goal on this blog is to show you how you should, why you can and WHAT you can change.

Change can mean a new start, motivation, health, happiness, success, direction or something as basic as losing weight or improving relationships. The aim is self improvement, breaking free from old habits, attitudes and beliefs. If I can help one person beat depression, save one person from the miserable effects of obesity, or perhaps prevent a suicide, it will be worth it. Most of the topics will be in the realm of health, fitness, self improvement/development and motivation, however from time to time I will write about other areas of interest.

The last 10 years of my life have been consumed by a burning desire to help others -clients, family and friends, and ultimately a soulful journey within myself as well. I’ve worked with approximately 300 individuals primarily for weight loss, recovery from injury and motivation. Others needed to improve general fitness for entry testing into police or military, or to improve performance in a sport. Many at the end of the day didn’t need a trainer, they already knew how to exercise and eat, they just simply needed to redefine their priorities and get some better organisation and management strategies for their work/life/exercise/family balance.

I’ve gathered information from a vast array of people, topics, talks, books, blogs and experiences – the common theme is that a change was needed somewhere. This might be stating the obvious, however many of these people I have worked with easily became so fixated on their goal/result that they lost sight of what they had to do and change about their behavior or thinking on a daily basis to achieve it. I hate to be the one to break it to you, you can want it more than anything or anyone else, and it still won’t fall on your lap. There is real, sometimes hard, often challenging work required to get there. It often means you have to really change your priorities and get them in the right order, and this can be confronting for many people as their ego gets in the way of making the change.

The one thing I want anyone who reads this to take away, is that there is a method, tool, technique or exercise for everyone who wants to or needs to change. There is no one size fits all option but it isn’t that hard to find the one that fits either. I want to teach you how to initiate real, tangible, mind blowing change that will excite you and help give you direction and success in many or all areas of your life. I don’t care what background you came from, what country you live in, how much money you have or what illness or injury slows you down, there is a solution for you and I am dedicating this blog to educating as many people as I can.

My motivation to start this blog came about when recently I was reading one of the articles on stevepavlina.com. He gives you an exercise to help you discover your true purpose in life – this is what I came up with:

” To be a catalyst for change in the life of as many people as possible.”

That statement will be the basis for my blog. Without realising it, is has been a mission of mine for quite some time and I had been somewhat subconsciously integrating it into my coaching methods with clients.

Spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle says “Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally.”

It is something that I personally took my whole life up until recently to realise. Your focus, no matter what you want to achieve, needs to be on the present moment. It is the only thing you can utilise! You must change, stop, start, begin, finish, win or lose NOW.

This doesn’t mean to say you shouldn’t have a goal, just that you need to spend a small amount of time to decide what it is, then put all your energy into the “doing”. If you procrastinate for days on end about cleaning out your car, or put that workout off “till tomorrow”, or say you will stop smoking “after christmas” you are setting yourself up for failure. You are creating habits and attitudes to life that require a lot more effort to reverse, than if you could just nip them in the bud early. If you fail to educate others those closest how to support you, and get away from those people who drain you, you are again setting yourself up for failure.

If you have made it this far, there is something that I want you to do. I want you to throw away the life path you think you are supposed to have, or the one your parents set you up for, or the one your friends think you should follow. Forget about the typical pattern of school, university, job, retirement. It doesn’t even touch the sides of what you can and should experience in life. So much of what you are conditioned to think is “normal” or the way things are, has come about from centuries of corruption, greed, control and blind acceptance through lack of knowledge and education. How different things would be if individualism, creativeness, freedom, resource based societies and sharing of information and technology was commonplace rather than the institutions we are currently governed by!

I will be writing fairly constantly over the coming weeks to get this off the ground, and am open to requests on topics mentioned in this post that you would like more detailed advice on. Thankyou for taking the time to read my introductory post, I look forward to interacting with you, teaching you and learning from you.