Emma Farmer

I would attribute my success to, one, just all the people that came before me - any good supervisor, coach, teacher, professor that I've ever had that has pushed me or seen something in me that they knew I could do what was being asked of me. So definitely that, just anybody who has seen that potential and kind of pushed me to the next step. But then also, I think just my own internal motivation to be better, especially for these clients that I'm working with. It's my job to help them reach their goals, but you have to have that internal motivation to just want to be better for the people that are coming to you for advice. Whether that's taking time off the clock to do a little bit more research for somebody that asks you a really niche question, or staying later to help out, or just really giving a lot of detail for coaching or cueing somebody who might need that little push of extra help. So yeah, it's my clients and my participants that make me just want to be better every day for them.

I would say just go with your gut. If you think that this is something that you're passionate about and that you want to do, then just go for it. I know it's a lot of work - you have to go through all the courses and learn a lot, and there's a certification exam at the end. It's okay if you don't pass on the first try. I've never had a client ask me what my score was on my certification exam. I think that's something a lot of people are scared about, not having all the answers. As a beginner in my first few months as a trainer, I felt like it was my job to have all the answers and I wanted to give everybody all the answers, but now I've grown a little bit and I've realized that sometimes the best and right thing to do is just tell people, hey, I don't have the answer for you right now, but I'm gonna research this, I'm gonna look it up for you, and then I'm gonna give you the answer that you're looking for. So I would say just go for it, and it's okay to not have all the answers right away.

The biggest challenge right now is a lot of people who are claiming to be fitness influencers and things like that - they're not always credible or backed by science and research, even though they look credible or they look really good or they seem like they know what they're talking about. Clients come in and they say, oh, I saw this thing on TikTok or Instagram, like, can we do this? And you kind of have to be the bad guy for a second and be like, oh, that's not actually a real thing, or that's unsafe, or this person doesn't actually look that way, they're just presenting themselves that way. So as social media and especially AI gets more popular, it can be very difficult to kind of break through that misinformation and tell clients, this is how it really is, I know what you're seeing, but that's not real life. On the opportunities side, there's always opportunities for growth. I always think about when I started, the first time that I walked into a gym - it's intimidating, you don't know what's going on, you see all these machines, you don't know how to use them, or you think maybe everybody's looking at you. So there's really an opportunity to remind yourself of where you started and that you were in this person's shoes at some point. There's an opportunity to make sure that nobody else can feel that intimidation - how can we get them out of that headspace? I think there's a big opportunity for me as a trainer and even other trainers to kind of help break through that gym anxiety or that beginner anxiety, and it goes back to the community of just making people feel welcome and like they have a place there just like everybody else, that they're allowed to take up space.

Definitely having integrity is a value of mine. This can be academic, work, personal - to me, that's just doing what you know is right, even if nobody's ever gonna know about it or is gonna see you do it. This can be something as simple as your homework - it's coming from your own brain. Now we have chat GPT and all that stuff, maybe you could take the easy way out, but you're gonna do it the right way because you know it's right. Same thing with work - maybe there's a cut around or an easier way to do something, or maybe a client's not understanding something and you just say okay, never mind. But it's taking the step to go, okay, no, this is the right thing to do. I'm gonna work at this until this person understands. We're gonna get on the same page no matter what it takes. So I would say integrity for sure. Definitely community too. It's important to make people feel included wherever you are. If you see someone in the gym working out alone and they look a little nervous, just go up and start a conversation, say hey - you may be the only person that that person gets to talk to that day. It just takes a smile sometimes to get somebody to not feel intimidated or scared about where they are, so I think community is definitely an important one as well.