Most of us work in one way or another and it is through such work that we learn.
Over the past decade I have experienced different stages of development where my career is concerned.
At first my objective was to find a job, any job.
Which I did.
Then I found a job that really suited me in training clients at the gym.
After that I spent the next couple of years as a Personal Trainer, making good money whilst also having fun with my clients. I even found myself considering, at that initial stage, whether my clients might stop using my services, as I assumed they would no longer need the support of a Personal Trainer once they became established in the gym.
As it turned out, on the whole this has not happen, and today I continue to offer personal training to a wide range of clients.
But looking back I can also see that after 5 or 6 years of personal training I started to experience a feeling similar to lassitude or even boredom as I fell into a predictable routine where the gym was concerned. It was also at that time that I started to learn sign language to challenge myself because of how I was feeling and in order to keep moving.
Which I did.
Today, now that I have concluded my first decade as a Personal Trainer, I feel truly comfortable in the role and I fully understand it's significance. My belief now is that the position of Personal Trainer is more substantial that many people (including those that work in the industry) might think.
I have also come to believe that we are increasingly living in a society that is dominated by contradictions and challenges, something that I found myself thinking about more recently as I watched a compelling Netflix documentary called The Evolution of Us.
Telling the story of our journey as a species, this series explains how it came to be that we originally stood on our feet and how that movement changed our bodies. For example, and as explained in the series, it is because of the development of our gluteus muscles that we became able to hunt, as human beings could then run long enough to catch and kill their prey.
Today I find myself thinking of all the people I have seen in the gym developing their upper bodies whilst abandoning their lower body and leg muscles. They do this mainly for aesthetic reasons, but I can't help but think that this approach is a misunderstanding of how we have developed as a species.
There is also an experiment in The Evolution of Us that involves primates and which shows what happens when one chimpanzee is fed 30% less protein than another. The result of this experiment is that the chimpanzee that eats less protein then goes on to live longer than others that eat more.
Which leads me to consider how many guys I have seen over the years, following a diet that involves eating 5 or even 6 meals a day in order to make themselves bigger.
Aesthetics again, and another confusion over what should be the medium and long-term principles of healthy exercise and physical growth.
We can all develop through what we learn, either whilst working or when using our free time to move forward. We can also develop our convictions and make positive changes to the perceptions that other people have about their lives or about our shared society.
What I have learnt over the years is that our way of living has changed dramatically since we initially stood on our bare feet so many years ago. For example, I now believe that we are a lot more human when we try to make sense of our place in the world in a considered and meditative manner.
When we exercise or work out, however, we can sometimes get lost along the way.
What I have come to understand through my career as a Personal Trainer is that I best help people to look forward when I encourage them to employ a holistic attitude and a balanced approach to their health and fitness.
Because not everything we do in the physical world or on the gym floor should be focused on our paid labour or our physical fitness.
We should also make time for our mental and development of character if we want to evolve and move forward.
Julien