As coaches that help women get certified as fitness and nutrition experts, we often get this question: Do I have to quit my full-time job in order to get into the fitness industry?
They feel as though it’s either black or white, that there’s no gray area; it’s I either have to completely just jump in full-on into my fitness business, or I can’t accomplish anything at all. And we’re here to tell you that’s not true at all.
And this is one of the biggest mindset shifts that women need to get over and that’s why we’re talking about it today because you can be thinking this too. It’s this idea that you have to give up your entire job, get into this uncertain area, and then not know if you are even going to get clients. Women think “I don’t know what I even want to teach yet. I don’t know how I’m going to do this “, and then expect to be successful and feel like a failures if they aren’t right away.
But when in reality, you need to think about it from a different perspective and do what we did – create your fitness job starting as a side hustle, which essentially means part-time.
When we first started FIT CHICKS, which was our bootcamp company in the beginning, before we started FIT CHICKS Academy, we both had full-time jobs.
We were working corporate jobs nine to five, and then we were teaching every single night and we were working on our business every single weekend. We were putting up posters in the middle of the night and we were crying when we were doing it because we were tired and we were cold. We were volunteering at every event that we could. We were literally putting our blood, sweat and tears into FIT CHICKS.
We made it our mission to make this our career.
But you might be thinking, “Well, I don’t know if that’s what I really want to do. That sounds stressful.”
It was super stressful, but that was our mission. Our mission was this huge, big picture of creating this fitness empire. This was the idea behind it. You might have the same idea, and that’s cool, but if that is your goal, you need to take in stride.
The first step is figure out what your end result is. What do you want to achieve? If that’s what you’re looking for, if you are trying to build and empire, then you’ve got to put in the work. If you are doing something to just do on the side, if that’s all you want, and you still want to keep your nine to five job, that’s an awesome goal too. But you still have to have an end result in mind and you still have to put in the work to get there because it’s not going to happen overnight. It’s not going to just happen.
The most important thing is first getting clear about the end result. Get clear about you really want to do and what you’re willing to do to get there because we have a ton of students who never want to quit their full-time jobs. Like one of our students Cheryl, she has had a very successful, full-time career. She’s been in if for 30 years and had no intention of leaving it, but she got certified and on the side, she has a super successful training company that fills her passion, brings in extra money, and she still gets the security of her full-time job.
You could totally do that or you can do like we did and just go all in and have that plan of something like: “Okay, in a year I want to exit this grown-up job and do the super fun job where I get to work out all the time and help people get healthy and fit.”
You have to make that choice and you have to get clarity. You have to know what your end result is and once you have that, you will act and you will react with confidence. As opposed to if you just feel like, “No, no, I have to quit everything or else I’m a failure.” If you go in with that mentality, you’re going to come out and you’re going to attack everything with anxiety and stress and it’s going to show. It’s going to show in your marketing. It’s going to show in your messaging. It’s going to show in the way you interact with your clients. You’re not going to like it.
Just have clarity. Have an action plan. Know what you want at the end. What is your end result that you’re working towards and then, once you have that in place, you can then start actually figuring out, “Is it a side hustle or is it full-time?”
And both are great. Really, it’s all about what you want. So just get clear on it.
Laura & Amanda
