Strengths:
Development areas:
Countless times in my personal training career I would have potential clients come in for a consultation. After chatting to them about how it works, assessing their movement, and generally getting to know them a bit to see if we’d be a good fit, it would then be time to build their plan. Sometimes that plan included me training them, and other times I would have to refer out. On one such occasion early on in my career while I was still building a client base, I had a potential client who was looking to train for 5 times a week. They had some fairly advanced athletic goals that required periodised programming, nutritional support and frequent check-ins to ensure they would get where they needed to go. They were also willing to pay in advance for an entire month, which at the time was a heck of a lot of money. At this time, I was fresh out of study and hadn’t dived into enough detail to fully support their needs. The dilemma was; to take their money, scrape together a facade of professionalism while I desperately attempted to learn everything I needed to know and taking time away from looking after my other clients, but alleviating a lot of financial stress, OR, let them know I’m probably not a good fit and refer them on to someone who is. The plan going into business was to always remain transparent and act with integrity, so I ended up referring the potential client onto one of my colleagues who was better suited for this individual. In the end they signed up with them and my colleague passed some clients my way slightly down the line who he thought were a good fit for me. The clients got what they were after and I built some relationships that resulted in me still filling my roster.
A lot of my values around keeping an open mind and, ’to live and let live’, I would say come from growing up in a culture that stresses individualism. From kindergarten through to the work space there have been countless examples of how others have chosen to live their lives that have differed from how I go about it. All of this has influenced my open minded outlook on life, and built up my respect and understanding for how others go about making their decisions in life. That same culture has also sparked my curiosity in trying new things. Seeing how other people go about tackling situations and what values they hold dear has taught me to always try out new things and spend time in uncomfortable situations, so that they may be less uncomfortable in the future, and so I can see things from another perspective.
My strengths are; rational and decisive decision making, confidence in my own ability, focused and hard working attitude, highly organised, ability to set priorities, analytical mindset. These are going to benefit me during my ongoing learning and career development as they all work to help me mange my own time and set expectations of what I can achieve given the effort I put in. It’s useful in helping to set clear goals and in building a roadmap to my ideal scenario with clear steps along the way, and milestones to reach as I go.
My analytical mindset can also be a limitation at times. If I don’t fully understand why something is how it is, sometimes I can find it difficult to move on, and it can end up consuming too much of my attention. But over time I’ve generally been able to recognise when this is happening and peel to the next task.
In my 2nd year of university, and my 1st year flatting. Myself and my other two flatmates had a taxation group project we were doing together. We split up the work to do so that we each had about a 1/3 of the project. The plan from the outset was to do our segments, and then go over each others work to make sure everyone had done their part and that it was all ready to be presented. We would set times where we new we would all be at the flat so that we could help each other out if need be. The problem was we all had different abilities, and priorities. Two of us were often at the flat together when we had decided we should work on the project, the third however would turn down planned study time for usual uni shenanigans; partying, catching up with friends. When asked how he was getting on with his portion of the project the answer was always along the lines of ‘good’, ‘easy’, ‘nearly done’. Then it came to the night before presentation was due and the two of us who’d been working together at the planned times were quite stressed as we hadn’t actually seen any evidence of how the third flatmate was getting on with it. We stayed up until they got back from the end of a late work shift to make sure they were ready for the presentation, as it was marked as a group. 11:00pm the night before it was due, he hadn’t even started. So we had a bit of an argument about it, and then reluctantly caffeinated up and began helping him with his work. Finishing up the project by 2:00am. As I write about this I can see a lot of flaws with how the situation was handled. The strategies used to try and resolve the issue were no more than a quick message and then taking his word for it while we brewed over how annoying that was. I would definitely change it up if I could go back as they were not effective at all and only lead to excessive stress and lack of sleep. Now days I would have given him a call rather than a message, made sure I understood his situation and not just the fact that he hadn’t done it. I would ask if there was anything I could do to help rather than pushing him to just ‘get it done’, and just generally be a lot more accepting that his standard of work wasn’t necessarily the same as mine. I think this would lead to less overall stress (both in the flat and in tutorials) as I would have communicated with him that I was on his team rather than against him, and that I could help out if needed. I’ve communicated this way with group projects since and it’s always been very effective. Generally if everyone understands where each other is at and why, and problem can be worked around together, everyones happy.