How Simple Goals Can Change Your Life

Ashley: What 20 Certifications

Diving deep into Mindset: how Simple Goals Can Change your life

Ashley’s beginnings in fitness are so familiar: she struggled with childhood obesity, only to become a health and fitness expert with over 20 certifications and an expert in the fitness mindset.

With a bachelor’s and master’s degree in the sport and fitness.

And years of experience as a personal trainer.

And is national-guard and army-trained.

Needless to say, there’s a lot to learn from my discussion with Ashley. I’ve always been a huge fan of people who can really capture the essence of what they do and how they think that helps them succeed. Ashley brought this energy to our chat, and now I want to share it with you.

At 16, Ashley came out of her upbringing with significant unwanted bodyweight. She started training at 16, making friends with trainers at the gym and immediately striking up mentor-mentee relationships.

In the 3 years between 16 and 19, Ashley lost an incredible 80 pounds. Through this whole time she was working multiple part-time jobs where everything was about service: a philosophy she’s kept with her as a trainer and group exercise class coach.

Now she’s got 20 certifications, a master’s degree in sport and fitness, and is leading the charge on habit change and fitness in her Central Florida community. I had a sit-down talk with her about mindset and how simple goals and habits can completely change you – and your client’s – life!

What it all means for Ashley

Ashley’s mentors were one of the defining features of her trajectory through fitness.

Making friends with trainers made it a social and guided process to get into fitness, lose weight, and move into serious work in the industry. She took this lesson with her through life: a reminder that we all have moments of self-doubt and need someone to believe in us when we don’t.

This kind of support network is great for all of us. It could be a mentor like Ashley’s, it could be your spouse, parents, friends. Just have people around who can give you the pick-me-up you need when you’re feeling down, and your motivation is low.

These people see the best in you when you don’t, and they’re going to keep you going on your journey. Equally be that person to clients, friends, and loved ones. Pay that support forward!

Serving Clients: Giving Mentality and Remembering the Individual

Working in service brought Ashley into fitness with the philosophy that personal training is about serving clients. Fitness isn’t about ego. Especially as a trainer, it’s all about improving lives!

Coming into each session for yourself or with a client is always about what that person and personality needs. Your personality – or your client’s personality – has to come before your method.

You need to build your methods around that personality and it’s challenges, rather than just applying the same approach to every situation. It’s easy to get locked-in on one way of doing things, but this has clients slip through the cracks because they have different needs.

Sometimes you or a client might be a talker – too easy-going and in need of some aggressive motivation. On the other hand, many of us are too harsh on ourselves and need to hear some positive words: sometimes it’s not about going hard and we have to forgive for bad choices.

The point is a simple one: it’s about adjusting for every individual. Ashley strikes this balance, just like I do, just like all the best coaches do: you’re aiming for a sweet spot of “I can do this, and I’m going to give it my best – but I’m not going to beat myself up if something goes a bit wrong”!

Military Training: Fitness, the Military, and Personality Traits

Military training is tough, and Ashley brings out this mindset when it comes to fitness, too.

The best things about fitness for so many of us is who it turns you into as a person. The character traits it develops are great. Military training is this exact same thing but turned up to 11!

The can-do mindset and approach to problem solving and self-improvement comes through with the hard work Ashley’s put into the field. And clearly it’s paying off, with 20+ certifications and a master’s degree.

Ashley reminds us it’s all about the people: her work as a coach is adapted to young teens and 90+ year-old seniors. The point is that it’s about finding what works for people and making exercise accessible but beneficial, whatever their experiences or strengths/weaknesses.

Everyone wants to come out of a workout feeling better; feeling improved; feeling fulfilled. It doesn’t have to be fun, it has to make them feel like they’re making meaningful progress!

Personal Training: The Balance Between Cuddled and Pushed

We go to train for a reason – we use Personal trainers and coaches for a reason.

We all want that cuddled feeling, that sense of support and appreciation, from a trainer. But it’s key to remember that trainers are there to push us to do things we wouldn’t motivate ourselves to do if we didn’t have that guiding voice.

Mentors and personal trainers and coaches and loved ones and everyone around us can do this. The important part is to be receptive to both the support when you feel self-doubt, and the push to work hard when you’re feeling lazy!

What’s your Why?

“If you don’t know where you want to be in 5 years, you’re probably already there”

Ashley reminds us – as we should all know – that why you started is more important than just getting you started.

Your “why” sticks with you through the whole journey and provides some of the support and motivation you need when things get difficult. It’s also something you should be able to remind yourself of regularly, whenever you feel like making bad choices.

Your why also directs you from point A to point B. How can you plan to get to point B if you don’t know what it is or why you want to get to it? This is just one more way people sabotage their own goals!

Weaponizing your WHY: Goals and Guidelines

I couldn’t agree with this point more!

If you’re not locked into your own goals then you’re going to have a really fuzzy, unclear idea of what to do to get to them. Goals don’t just motivate us: they let us know what we should be doing and allow us to compare different methods for chasing goals down.

If I say I want to get healthier, a lot of Personal trainers are going to come back to me with a really cookie-cutter approach. Because I didn’t say anything! It sounds like “I want to improve, I guess”.

But if I go to a personal trainer and say: “I want to lose 10lbs in 2-3 months”, then I’m going to get some really good guidelines. That’s because what we know about a goal decides how we approach it.

Ashley uses SMART targets for these kinds of goals, and recommends you do the same. Goals are only going to be useful if they’re:

Specific: you need to be able to aim at something very specific to guide your methods and habits.

Measurable: you need to know whether you did it or not. This helps you measure progress, too.

Attainable: it has to be something you can do. I’m not going to the Olympics, so it’d be a silly goal.

Realistic: you have to be able to give the goal the effort and time it needs, or you’ll be disappointed.

Timely: it has to have an appropriate timeline that motivates you to get moving but is realistic.

You have to do different to become different.

I couldn’t agree more: you have to change what you do to change the results you get, and these behavioural changes come way before your experience changes.

Your results are based on what you’ve been doing for the past weeks and months; a strong why motivates these changes and sets the stage for better habits. As if we needed to mention it, habit change and mindset are absolutely key to success in any area…

Habits, Change, and the Mindset that succeeds

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

– Albert Einstein

Ashley’s main thing for most people isn’t about which program is best or how to structure a diet. Rather it’s about changing behaviours and habits to change outcomes.

For most people, the health and fitness they’re searching for isn’t a Rocky montage away. It’s not about running in the snow dragging a log. It’s not about 1000 sit-ups a day.

Usually, it’s just fixing bad habits and living a more balanced life. After all, most people don’t eat so much in one day that they get fat – and they don’t ruin their fitness in one day. It’s about long-term habits that build up and produce negative results.

You’re not going to change your health and fitness if you don’t change the things that ruined it in the first place. And this is where Ashley says we all need to start: what’s your personal weakness? What bad habits are you still doing that are sabotaging your health and fitness?

Do you over-eat fast food?

Are you too inactive – spending your spare time on the sofa?

Do you drink too many sugary drinks?

Do you constantly get take-out?

Are you grabbing whatever you can for lunch?

Are you only ever eating processed foods?

These are all examples of habits that millions of Americans act out without any thinking. It’s easy to fall into these habits – but much harder to get out. They’d not be a problem if they weren’t so stubborn and sticky.

For most of us, we could identify these bad habits with just a bit of time and attention. They’re the things we do to undermine our own progress in life, whether that’s business or health and fitness.

Being humble enough to ask what you’re doing wrong – and mindful enough to note it down – is a huge change.

If you start with your weak link(s), you can make enormous change to your life in a short space of time. You just have to be willing to step back and look at your current habits and where they fall short of the person you want to be.

Habits are where it all starts and ends; the choices we make determine our results. What do yours say about you, and your results?

Journaling: an Amazing Habit and Example

One of the main things Ashley and I discussed was how important it is to have a plan and really be involved with it.

Ashley’s favourite way to do this is to write it out: start journaling! Even if it’s a simple thing like writing out your why, or writing out small goals to do today, it turns goals into something in the real world. Not only that, but it becomes a great little feeling of achievement to cross them off.

You don’t need to set out huge goals: you often just need to take a small win. This helps the way you feel, which helps you achieve more things, and it snowballs from there.

Ashley’s examples are simple. It could be making your bed, it could be doing your nails, whatever. Good mindset starts small and builds up from there; it helps you make small wins, then slightly bigger ones, and so on.

Setting good goals is step one in achieving them. Most people forget their goals until it’s too late, but writing them down and journaling your way through each day helps you set out small tasks that make you better and get you another step closer to the big things you want to achieve.

Ashley’s take-home message

The final thing Ashley and I discussed was her take-home message: never stop learning.

We did the podcast together because her approach to mindset is something I value – I wanted to learn from Ashley. Even after all these years, we’re both still trying to get better. And that process is what we should all be doing.

Fall in love with learning: knowledge drives progress and the person who asks questions will always learn more than the person who thinks they know everything.

The best athletes, businesspeople, and coaches in the world all have coaches and mentors of their own. Because getting better never stops and you can never know too much: if you want your life to keep improving, keep on learning – and join me for another podcast and article, soon!