In my previous post on life balance, I identified 3 areas where I want to do more – mobility, client outreach, and family and friends.
Mobility is straightforward in many ways – I know what I need to do, I just don’t give it enough priority. My PT training has reminded me that it’s important for recovery and health. In the past I used to do a short yoga video before bed – having a fixed daily activity like this helps to establish a habit. It also ticks multiple self care boxes as it helps me sleep and deal with stress – I do like finding changes that do more than one thing at once! So I will try to start this up again, starting tonight with one of the 30 day sequences as I find this helps me be consistent.
Client outreach is more challenging as it’s new to me and I have lots of questions about how best to go about it. So a bit of experimentation seems important, as well as learning from other PTs how they approach it.
I enjoy posting here and hope that it gives a bit of a sense of who I am and how I help people to change. But I’d love to have a bit more interaction, so using my social networks to engage with people more will be important.
One consequence of moving out of my current job is losing access to some of the networks of coaches that I have been part of – I’ll have access to a PT community through the gym, but I should look out for a coaching community to join, and perhaps link up with some other people who are starting their own businesses too.
I need to do some research into good systems for keeping track of potential clients and what they’re interested in, so I can stay in touch and send them relevant material. Ideally this will also be useful for sharing their training plans and key documents from our coaching sessions.
Family and friends. It’s easy to take family for granted and let fun time together gets lost in the busyness of the daily routine. Improving this means trying to spend some meaningful time with my immediate family every day, even if it’s just five minutes. That means finding time to talk to my son in the morning that isn’t just getting him out of the door in time. Also making sure that I talk with my husband about more than the practicalities of living, and making sure my new schedule, with more evenings away from home doesn’t squeeze out time for us to do things we enjoy together.
Thinking about friends, I do want to do more to reach out to local friends and be the one who suggests meeting up. But lots of my friends live far away – they’re important people to me and some of my deepest and most longterm friendships. It’s really important for me to nurture those connections, making sure we have planned catch ups in the diary so we don’t lose touch.
Thinking about this also reminds me of the importance of not losing contact with friends from the job I do now. I know I have a bad habit of promising (genuinely!) to stay in touch and then not being organised enough to live up to those promises. Having a bit of a plan will help me to keep up contact and I think, as I move into my new life, having some contacts back in my previous life will help me move forwards.
Lots of ideas here – the challenge is now to turn them into action – which I’ll be posting about soon.
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