June 29, 2021
By Paden Hughes
What was your “thing” in high school?
You may not know this about me… but when I was in high school, I competed nationally in speech and debate. I have always loved to talk. And to combine speaking with competing for a shiny trophy was quite literally my dream event.
I spent many high school years traveling around the country, geeking out on policy debate topics like agriculture or U.S. protectorates….. okay, I’ll stop there. But you get the picture.
I was very competitive and I liked winning. I stayed out of a lot of trouble simply because I was absorbed in finding evidence to support the arguments I wanted to make.
That was my “thing”: I won arguments.
I might as well also share with you that I displayed my trophies in my room, and I used to sit and look at them to make myself feel better about myself.
Already by the age of 15, I’d bought into the belief that my worthiness had to do with metrics, achievements and accolades.
I wish my 35-year old self could go back in time and print out a HUGE version of this graphic and tape it next to all those trophies as a healthy reminder.
I wanted to share this story with our fitness community because when it comes to WHAT motivates you to workout, I think our sense of inherent value is a key piece of that motivation.
People work out for a whole host of reasons. That’s part of what makes it so much fun for our coaches to coach each and every one of you.
But to be honest, most of our industry and the way we market is designed to attract those people who do not believe in their inherent value.
And over the years, we’ve tried to differentiate Gymnazo’s marketing and culture to be less focused on looking better and more focused on feeling better.
Now, I’d bet that 9 out of 10 people walking into Gymnazo ultimately want to feel good in their skin.
But here’s the thing about “feeling good” – it’s a feeling that only you can determine for yourself.
There’s no argument in the world that I could present to you to change your mind and make you feel good in your skin.
Each of us, no matter whether it’s trophies from speech tournaments or earning a 500 shirt or a 1500 shirt, or, or hitting that goal weight, I can’t tell you how many people hit the goal weight and still feel empty inside because it was supposed to feel better or bench press the amount of weight that they can brag about us on social media and think that that’s somehow going to fulfill a piece of us.
Most of us, at one time or another, have placed an emphasis on something outside of ourselves, no matter whether it was trophies from speech tournaments or earning a 500 shirt , or hitting that particular goal weight. I can’t tell you how many people have hit their goal weight and still feel empty inside because it was supposed to feel better. Or they had the goal of bench pressing a certain amount of weight that they could brag about on social media and think that that’s somehow going to fill a piece of them.
The truth is that only your inner pride in the person you become through your fitness journey is going to really show up anywhere on the metrics of self-worth, happiness, and success.
There is something more powerful than hitting your goal or reaching a milestone. It’s about the person you become on the journey.
It’s about you.
And if there’s one thing we pride ourselves on, at Gymnazo, it’s the journey.
It’s through partnering with you in the journey and doing what we can to support you, even in emails like this and remind you that we can tell you you’re amazing every day, but YOU still have to believe it.
Our hope is that the work that we do in this world gives people the permission they need to stop working out as punishment, to stop obsessing about their weight. Those are simply distractors from the real truth of why we even discipline our bodies, which is to feel really good in our bodies. And to honor the bodies that we’ve been given in this life.
And so if you are reading this email and thinking about your body and how you feel in your skin and whether you want to be supported in feeling good in your skin, I just want to remind you that…
… you are already worthy.
You already are inherently worthy of happiness and success in your life.
Just by being alive.
And with that out of the way, fitness becomes a heck of a lot more fun.
By believing you’re worthy AS you are, you just get to obsess about the process.
You get to focus on BEING not DOING.
Being athletic. Not doing a lot of workouts.
Being energized.
Enjoying movement.
Appreciating your body for doing hard things and getting stronger each time.
We don’t want you to feel pressure to have to hit some metric in order to be valuable, or to justify your fitness journey. We want you to step into your potential, to honor what your body is capable of, and to feel encouraged about the person you are becoming in the journey.
Because THAT is the very best success story.
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