IDENTIFY YOUR RESOURCES

Identify Your Resources

Careers progress in stages, and so does your value. 

By Eric Bugera

• Stages of your career will offer distinct resources for you to leverage and provide.

• Work, knowledge, and time are resources that you accumulate, master, and give back.
• Identify where you are in your career, what resource is the most scarce? What can you reasonably give to keep advancing and helping others?

Why Are You Here?

The common thread amongst coaches, clinicians, and trainers entering the fitness space is the overarching desire to help people. Whether you aspire to inspire, want to raise the bar on the standard of training, or seek to completely revolutionize the industry – you want to help people. There are countless people to help, but the degree to which you are qualified to do so may seem disjoint. The desire is there, but the qualifications? At base you are ready, willing, and able to help those you set out to help. As your career progresses, you will develop multiple avenues to give something back – but they may take on different forms as you yourself grow into your role.

Work, Knowledge, or Time

As you begin your journey through a long and fruitful career in fitness, you are as under qualified as you will ever be. Regardless of degrees, certifications, or fancy letters, you have no experience to back up your claims. This is the work phase. Your priority should be to work – a lot. Your greatest asset is your ability to work. A lot. You’ve got a ton of theoretical knowledge but more importantly you have time and a willingness to help. Provide a service, build your experience, and razor sharpen your craft. Work, a lot.

A few years into your career you’ll have developed systems, heuristics, and models that seem to work – particularly for the demographics you might start to specialize in. You have seen countless case studies at this point. Goals, injuries, or circumstances well outside of the box. No textbook could have prepared you, but trial and error and a ton of work has gotten you this far. You now have something of value to tell others. After years of honing your craft, you might be able to lend some knowledge to younger contemporaries or clients outside of simply trading time for money. You can leverage some of that time back by teaching or mentoring – or even better, massively improving your craft itself. Now you can give back by working (to a much higher level), or even spreading knowledge.

Time is a finite resource. It may not seem as such when you’re starting out, and that’s because it is much more plentiful at that stage. Once your schedule is packed, you’re a sought after asset for your floor skills and knowledge – time is what you can give. Time can be in the form of specialized services or extremely rare training sessions, teaching or mentoring others, or being a consultant. At this stage, you have become a finite resource with time being the limiting factor. Your scarcity and quality have combined to where your time is at its highest value.

What Can You Give?

The evolution of your career is a long game. Each stage may seem like an eternity on its own, but you will be constantly collecting value to give back. You will become an appreciating asset with a limitation on how much of yourself you can actually give. Time is a constraint that eventually squeezes us all. Start by leveraging your time as a resource, claw it back once you approach its finitness, then finally offer it as the ultimate form of giving back.

• Work until you reach a reasonable bottle neck.
• Refine such that you can claw back time for more efficient work or knowledge.
• Build value until your quality and scarcity converge for maximum value and demand.