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Hello. Hello. Hello? Oh my God, it is good to be back, back into your ear holes. Yes, that was weird. I just realized how weird that fricking was when I said it, but too bad I’m here. I’m weird and I’m in your ear holes. So I feel like I’m talking to a long lost friend. But if you’re new to me then hello new friend. You’ll get to understand my weird dry humour as we go along. So I’m Nardia and this is the first episode of my brand new creation baby, The Fitness Legitness Podcast. Before I dive in to telling you what this is all about, I have to share with you that I’m still giggling and am also a little bit amused at myself for creating a show called The Fitness Legitness show here’s the reason why. I have this weird Kiwi hybrid Aussie accent.
So I’m from New Zealand originally, but I moved over to Australia when I was 24. So I’ve spent a majority of my time, actually equal parts of my time here in New Zealand and Australia. So I’ve got this weird accent, but the words, fitness and legitness are really difficult for me to say and I find myself sometimes going into Kiwi, which is like fatness lagitnass and then sometimes I’m full Aussie fitness ligitness so I feel like I’m just kind of doing this hybrid thing. Who knows what it’s going to, how it’s going to sound every time I say it. So just kind of buckle in because the chances are I’m going to say it differently every time I say it, but I really liked the name of the show and it speaks volumes about what this is all about.
So as you heard in the intro this is a show where we’re going to be talking all things fitness business-related specifically to you, female fitness professionals out there who want to grow, you know, a badass profitable and impactful business. So yes, I’m going to be talking all the typical conventional fitness business-related topics, like we’ll cover off things like sales and marketing and strategies and building funnels and brand awareness and lead generation and all of that good stuff. We’ll also cover off on some of the lesser talked elements of running a successful PT business or fitness business such as like communication and leadership skills and how to program and how to work with women. So it really is a smorgasbord of ideas and topics but with one thing in mind and that one thing in mind is a dedication that I have to helping more female personal trainers create and grow businesses where they are successful whatever that means to you and that you thrive in this industry. Right.
And let’s be honest, you know, this 2019 marks, the 20th year of me being in the fitness industry and it has been one hell of a ride, one hell of a journey, but I’ve got to admit as much as I love this industry, it is fucking crazy, right? Like there are so many weird parts of this industry and there’s, at the moment I feel like there is just so many people out there with so many different ideas and strategies trying to tell you the best way to grow your business or do business. Especially now that we have this huge emergence of the online space, that it can be really confusing and overwhelming. And what I want to use this platform for also is to talk about, well one of the realities of running a fitness business and how to also stay and feel connected in this industry. So that’s kind of where the show is going to be headed over, you know, the following months and hopefully years. And I’m really pumped to have a platform that specifically speaks to the ladies.
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Now of course, if you’re a dude and you’re listening to this, like absolute, I welcome you in with big open arms and I want you to be here because the information I tell you, the advice or the guests that I have on the show, the stuff that we share is also going to be very relevant to you as a dude. But the reason I want to hone my focus into women is just because I feel like there needs to be more shining examples of women in leadership who can help lift and elevate other female professionals in our industry. And also because I am a massive believer that we do do business differently and this is not a sexist thing. I’ll go into some of my background in just a moment so you can understand the context from which I am coming from right now. But I’ll speak to my experience of business and I’ll just kind of relay the story of how I got to where I’ve got to in my business right now. Now don’t worry, I’m going to have lots of seemingly unconnected stories but trust me when I say it’s all going to come together and it’s going to make sense for you. And of course it’s going to have relevance to you because it’s the only important thing right now is making sure the information I share with you is relevant to you and where you are at.
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So to start with, let’s start with the end in mind. And the end right now is I’ve created this brand new show because in the last year and a half, I have specifically been working with female fitness professionals as a fitness business coach. And this is a relatively new thing for me. Obviously I just said a year and a half ago. It’s new in the sense that I decided at the end of 2017 to step up and claim my role, my leadership role to claim my space as being that person who’s going to say, yeah, this is what I do now. And let me tell you, it was a scary moment in my business to step away from what I had been doing into really putting a stake in the ground and saying, yes, this is what I do now. And the reason I was kind of resistant to claiming that space for so long was I think one of the reasons why a lot of women in business don’t step up and claim their space. If I pull all the bullshit and kind of dig through all the stories I was telling myself fundamentally there was still this worthiness issue or this not-enoughness issue that I had that was preventing me from doing the very thing that I was put on this earth to do, which is to teach coach, educate and lead women.
And so for me, it took me a little while to recognize the nonworthyness. That was really good English. Took me a little while to understand that my reluctance to step up was coming from that lack of self-worth. And I think in a lot of the dealings that I have with my female fitpros and the women that I work with that really sits underneath, there’s an undercurrent there that kind of runs through our veins a little bit where it does prevent us and it does have an influence on the way that we do business. Classic example, if we take men for example, and you know, if there’s a leadership role or a, what’s the word when you what’s the word when you say, when you want to kind of go for another job, a higher job? I can’t, that word totally escapes me right now. But if somebody is going for a new job or a new role, a man will go, well, I think I’ve got about 25% of the skillset, or let’s be generous, I’ve got about 50% of the skillset. Yeah. I’m going to put my name forward, I’m going to give this a crack. I’m going to put myself in the ring there and see what happens. Like that’s good enough.
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Whereas a woman on the flip side, will look at a new role or look at this high-level job and go, ah, I don’t know if I’m qualified enough. Oh, I don’t know if I’ve got enough experience. Oh, maybe I need to go away and do some more study to get the relevant qualifications to do that. So a woman won’t apply for something unless she’s like 99% sure, 99.999 that she is sure that she has got all the relevant skillsets to get that job right. And I have seen this play out over and over again with the women that I work with. It plays out in my life quite regularly, hence why I’m sharing what I was thinking a year and a half ago. So it was, there was a moment in 2017 where I was, I’d created the Female Health and Performance Course and you’ll hear more about that as the series goes on. And I was doing mentoring for everyday women. Now to take a further step back in 2014, I was working at a club, a small gym in the CBD of Sydney. I’d gone there after working at a big commercial club in the city and early 2014 I had kind of realized, or I was getting a little bit frustrated with the business that I was running.
So I’ve always been a conventional one-on-one type trainer. So from the first time I started personal training, that was the model that I was taught. And so I stuck to that model for a really long period of time. And as we know that there are some many disadvantages to sticking to the one on one model. And by the way, I love PT. I love one-on-one. Like I am a purist when it comes to that, but I realized that I was not having the impact that I wanted to have. Like I wanted to reach a whole lot more people and obviously I couldn’t because I was only working with a select group of trainers, oh sorry of clients who could actually afford me and they had booked me out so I couldn’t put up my prices any higher. Like it was ridiculous what I was charging. I couldn’t open up any more spots because I wasn’t willing to give my time anymore. My time, I wasn’t leveraging my time.
And so I was getting super frustrated and I felt really stuck. And it was around that time that I started exploring the possibility of shifting my PT business into a more hybrid approach and the hybrid approach being I shifted my clients into one to twos and one to fours and that was revolutionary. Like that made such a huge difference. I was like, ah ahhhh, this is amazing. And it was at the same time that I was like, you know what, now I want to create some digital products or some other products that can add to a revenue stream so that I wasn’t reliant on my face to face clients, but I also was just get a little bit done with being in a gym right.
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And so that was the year that I also launched my first online product and it was an epic launch. And the interesting thing was I wasn’t super clear on what my brand stood for or what my core message was. So I kind of just haphazardly fumbled my way through this launch and I, my copy wasn’t good at all. Like there’s a saying that ‘if you’re not embarrassed by your first product, you’ve waited too long’. And I can hand on my heart, look back and say, oh my God, I am so embarrassed by that product because I just was like, I’m just going to go for it. I’m going to see what happens. And so you know, [inaudible 00:11:57] is a beautiful thing. I just made shit happen. And I did this launch and it was all around body composition and fat loss, which right now it is just so not in alignment with who I am as a person and as a brand. It’s not, my thing, it’s definitely not my jam, but because I didn’t have anyone guiding me, I thought that’s what I had to do. I was like, right, the market’s going to want fat loss, so let’s talk about fat loss stuff.
And so basically between 2014 through to the end of 2017 when I went into the online world and I was doing products, digital products as well as like information products and workshops and so forth it was still very much based around physique and body transformation. And I was using that as the vehicle to get to the deeper stuff, like the mindset stuff, the personal development stuff, the performance stuff, which I really, really enjoy. And I kept doing it, like I said, because I thought that’s what I had to be doing, even though it was really out of alignment with me.
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Now fast forward through to the end of 2017 and we just got back from travelling Cambodia and Mexico and America and the States, and we were, sorry, Canada, we were just testing to see whether both myself and my husband’s online businesses were robust enough for us to travel, right? Because for a long time we had read and we have been told that living the laptop lifestyle was the definition of success. And so I was like, wow, if this is what we’re shooting for, if this is the goal for our business, then we need to test this out to see if it works. And interestingly enough, and I’ll save the story for another time, but interestingly enough, we got to the end of nine months of travel and we were like, yeah, Nah, no, it wasn’t really our jam, which is why we arrived back on the Gold Coast. I will save that story for another time.
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But what had happened in that year was, I was really struggling to do the work with my female clients. Like I just, it just didn’t feel good to me anymore. It was at the same time that I also started getting lots of inquiries from trainers who just happened to be women who are interested in doing my mentorship, but were all trainers. And I just had one of these big Aha smack in the face moments where I was like, oh my God Nads, why are you denying these messages from the universe or from the higher self or from wherever you soul, whatever language you want to use there, because this is what the work needs to be. This is where you should be positioned your business. And I had denied it. I had resisted doing what I knew wholeheartedly I should be doing for so long. I don’t know why, I’m just stubborn sometimes, but it would just, it was ridiculous to me that I hadn’t considered doing that. And I think a big part of not wanting to go into the space of working with trainers is because my entire career has been spent working with trainers.
So I don’t talk about this very often. I don’t talk about kind of this part of my professional life, but ever since I started personal training at the age of 22, I’ve always been in a position where I have educated trainers, I’ve helped them build their businesses. I have mentored them with both technical skills and business skills. I was a Fitness First PTM. I was also a cluster manager. So and also when I was working at Fitness First running my own business, I also with my business partner at the time, had my own mentorship apprenticeship program in the club as well. So running and building and guiding people into building to creating, sorry, fitness businesses has always been my jam.
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Okay. So remember how earlier I said that when I thought about coming into this space, my not-enoughness came up. Like I was questioning myself. I’m like, you don’t have experience. You don’t have a business degree. Okay, I don’t have a business degree but I do have a degree and a ridiculous ton of other qualifications and I have 20 years of experience of doing the thing that I thought I wasn’t worthy to do. Duh. Right. I shared this with you because I think these parallels, you can probably resonate with elements of my story in your business today and you know as I was explaining this to a friend because I was like, ah, I think I should switch or pivot my business into specifically niching down into female personal trainers. And she was just like, well Duh. When I said this to my husband, he was like well Duh. And I was like, ah, okay. All right. This is the feedback that I’ve been wanting. But she also says something to me that really stopped me in my tracks. She was like, if you don’t do this, then who will do it? In other words, if not you then who, and I love that statement.
It is such a powerful statement and I really want you to tune into the power of that statement, especially if you are one of those trainers that I’m kind of like. I’m talking about myself here, but I’m thinking that this could be relevant to you, if you are one of those trainers right now who is on the precipice of change within your business. Perhaps you’ve got no direction, you don’t know what you want to do with your business, but you know that you want to level up, or you want to change it or you want to pivot. Maybe you’ve got a specific niche that you want to start working with in your business, but you’re fearful because you don’t think you know enough. You don’t have qualifications, you don’t have enough experience the not-enoughness is coming up, then I’m going to ask you this question. If not you then who? Right? And the other big learning from this entire situation is the fact that after she said that and I kind of went into this mode of reflection and I was like, hell yes, exactly right. If not me, then who else is going to do this? I realized that I also had to step up and claim the title that I wanted to be, right. I had to own calling myself a fitness business mentor or a fitness business coach. I couldn’t wait for somebody to take this crown and put me through this amazing regal ceremony and go, I now crown the a fitness business coach, I had to crown myself. And the same goes for you, right?
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If you want to be the best fat loss coach in your area, let’s just say in Toowoomba, I don’t know, if you want to be known as you know, the go to female performance coach. Or if you want to be the authority on strength and conditioning for pre and postnatal women, then no one is going to turn around and gift you this title on a platter. The only person who can give you this role who can give you this status is you. Right? And I know I’m coming across as possibly coming across as a little preachy because, actually you should see me right now, because I’ve got a big wand in my hand and I’m kind of like banging it like, oh my God, like I’m preaching to the masses, but I feel preachy because I want to preach this shit right. In the industry at the moment we have a chronic lack of amazing women fitness professionals who are confident enough to step up and own their shit. And I 100% believe that the world will positively change, their health will change, relationships will change when women step into leadership roles.
And us, as fitness professionals, we make such a huge impact. It is ridiculous, right? It’s not just about helping somebody with their physique while there’s a big part of it, but we are conduits for change. We help guide our people into making better life decisions, which in turn create better relationships, better health in general, more positivity, a more positive outlook on life. Like what we get to do for our clients is just mind-boggling. And every single day I’m like, I can’t believe that this is a career. I can’t believe that as people who are trainers who are in fitness who get to help people that we actually get paid to do this. Like it’s crazy.
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And so for me, running a really successful fitness business is a lifestyle choice. Like we get to have an amazing lifestyle doing the things that we love and having a huge impact on people. And there are not many industries in the world that can claim that, that can say that they do the same thing. So circling back, right, we’ve got amazing guys doing some great work out there, but I want to see more women and I want to see you be that woman who takes on that strong leadership role. Who becomes the queen, if that’s a word that resonates with you in your circle of influence. Now before you tell me that you don’t have a circle of influence, that’s lies. Okay. So if you are a personal trainer and you are working with other people, with other clients, you are directly influencing those people, your clients. However, your circle of influence extends past them. There’s like a ripple effect. If you work with a mum and she has all these positive changes and she starts to feel amazing about herself, then that’s going to trickle into and influence her entire family and her friends circle and her colleagues at work.
So your ability to influence, well extends past the people that you are actually working with. And that is why you can put your hand on your heart and say you are going to have a massive impact because you do. Yeah, I just felt like saying ‘preacher’. Yeah. That was me giving myself a preaching moment, preacher sister moment. Anyhow, what was I saying? So yeah, that’s what I decided to do. I decided to claim that space and that’s what I’ve been doing for the last year and a half has been working specifically with women in fitness to help them build badass brands and businesses that gives them the ability to have profitable, flexible and impactful businesses.
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And we talk some amazing, juicy things and I just want to get this information out there to you. Okay. Which is why the podcast is a beautiful platform. Now, it wasn’t long ago that I did have a podcast. If you are a long-time listener, you will be very familiar with The Well Collective Podcast and probably the number one question in your head is like, Nads, what the hell, what the hell happened to their podcast? Very simply, two things happened. One, I fizzled it. I ghosted my own show. So sorry and apologies to you avid listeners out there. But that was kind of because of what had happened. At the same time that I was going through this transition into claiming my space the podcast was really feeling out of alignment. When I first created the podcast back in 2015. It was because I just wanted to, it was purely selfish actually, I just wanted to spend time talking to amazing woman because I didn’t have that many strong role models in my actual place and so I was like, well, how do I get to be or think and have businesses like these amazing women.
So I just decided to create a podcast. And if you recall The Well Collective Podcast stood for women of wealth, wonder, wisdom, wicked and whatever other ‘W’ that they resonated with. And that really gave me scope to talk about all sorts of things, womanhood. And again, I loved it but towards the backend it was just feeling a little bit sticky. It just wasn’t feeling quite right. And I think in hindsight now because I was going through a very transitional period in myself, in my personal life and in my business life and so the motivation to do it wasn’t there. And also I fucked up basically. I tried to do some technical stuff behind the scenes. Long story short, I didn’t read all the instructions and I lost it all. I lost it. I lost it off iTunes. I lost all the data on it. So it just kind of disappeared. You can still find bits of it, but I’ve lost all the subscribers, the reviews, the ratings, everything went. And so when that happened, I was just like, well, maybe that’s a sign. Well, it is a sign. I could not bring that back. And the chick who was helping me try to find it all was like, you’ve got two options. We can either spend a lot more money and I’d already spent thousands of dollars on this by the way, or you start from scratch. And I took that as a sign.
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I was like, okay, it’s time. It’s time to create something new, to create something that is in total alignment with where I am at and where I am going. And sometimes in business I think we as women we’re quite intuitive, but we also have to be tuning into ourselves on a regular basis to make sure that the things, the decisions that we’re making in our business are in alignment with where and who we are, where we want to go and who we at. Right. So let me give you an example. When I first started personal training, I was all about the fat loss. I was excited by that. I wanted body transformations. Now I can’t stand it. I’d rather stab myself with a blunt spoon than talk about diet plans and fat loss exercises, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right?
So I, over my career I’ve evolved multiple times as my personal development has shifted and I as an individual have grown and matured as well. And hopefully in your business you are tuning into your pivot points, right? I think it is natural for a business to grow and evolve. I think it’s dangerous to stay the same, if the staying the same is no longer giving you the results that you need or is no longer firing you up. And I think that’s one of the best things about being in the fitness industry and especially when we run small to medium size businesses where we are working with humans and/or we are in the online space that we can pivot really quickly. Because most of the time we’re just like a one-person show or we maybe have like a VA or some admin people to help us, right? But most of the trainers that I’m working with don’t have large teams therefore it’s very easy to make changes and to make quick decisions in your business.
So I think that’s another big lesson that I’d love for you to think about today is do you need to pivot? Like where are you at in your business right now? Are you happy? Does it still fulfil you? Do you still get excited by what you do on a daily basis? Does it feel easy? Now, when I say that, I’m not saying it should be easy because running a business is not easy. It is simple, but it’s not easy. It is hard work and it requires time and constant effort to build a profitable functional business. One that’s not a hobby.
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And so if you are still in love with your business, you’re kind of more prepared to go through the process that’s required to get the results that you want, right? But if right now you’re feeling icky in your business or it’s feeling stuffy or you’re confused, you’re overwhelmed, you’re like, oh fuck it, I just don’t know what I want to do then I’m just going to invite you to take this opportunity to start thinking about, well, what do you want to do with your business? Right? Do you need to transition it right now? What needs to change? What’s something, and here’s a good question for you, what’s something that you would absolutely love to niche into or to do but you’re not because you’re scared? All right. Explore that question because that’s going to set you up for where you really need to be going with your vision and with your business. Okay. So just thinking about the circles that I’ve explained to you.
So yeah, that’s kind of where I’m at now. And I want to share with you some amazing guests, some people that I know that can bring you up to date, latest information on what’s working, what’s not working when it comes to running your own fitness business. Whether you are a sole trader or you run own business in a commercial gym or you’re outside doing bootcamp or whatever. The way that the show will work is it’s going to be a combination. So I’ll do some solo casts, which will typically be shorter episodes. I’m definitely going to have some amazing badass experts coming in, just kind of share their wisdom with you. And the thing that I’m really excited about is I cannot wait to showcase local ‘sheroes’.
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And this is where I’m going to ask for your help. So I know that there are a lot of women business owners out there who have got amazing businesses and do such a great job with their clientele, but they don’t necessarily have huge social media platforms or they might not be, you know, “well known” in the social media world. And I want to give these women a platform. I want them to be able to share their wins and share their insight and what’s really worked with them. So I’m also going to be interviewing those little local ‘sheroes’ who have got something of value to add and that we can all learn from as well. So if you know anyone that you’re like, oh my gosh, Nadia has to interview this amazing business owner, or you’re like, ah, that’s me Nards, I’m that ‘shero’, then reach out to me and we will organize an interview time and get you in. So that’s kind of how I aim to go and this is going to be a weekly to fortnightly show.
So you can get my, get me in your ear holes. It’s so weird. I’m going to keep saying it every single week. And also I just want to make sure that every time, you know, we have a conversation that it is a two-way conversation and I really do invite you to continue the conversation outside of this episode. So you know, if that means sliding into my DMs and leaving me messages or heading across to Facebook and leaving some notes on the show and you know, sharing your thoughts, that too would be absolutely amazing. So that’s it really. That’s all I wanted to share with you. Kind of like what this is, who’s it for kind of the evolution of why I got into this. I will be sharing with you all the insights, strategies, things, fuck-ups that I have gone through over the last 20 years in the industry. I’m also going to highlight some of the success stories that I’ve had from my mentorship group as well. And they’ve all been crushing.
But ultimately, you know, this is just a safe space where you can also ask questions about your business or specific to your business. And I can also run some podcast shows on that as well. So I’m super pumped. Thank you for tuning in, it’s only going to get better from here and yeah, if you love this, share it. Let me know what you think and I can’t wait to go on this fitness legitiness journey with you. Okay. Until next time.
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