For the last 3 years, I have been struggling with my career identity. A job and a career path that were once so fulfilling have left me feeling drained, sedentary, and unhappy. When I started working in higher education in 1996, everything was so different. Students were in college by choice, and they were much more mature. Parents are overly involved now, and at the particular university where I work, the blame game happens a lot. I am the lone student athlete advisor for 300 student athletes, and I am blamed for everyting that happens academically. I am blamed because the overall student athlete GPA is not a 3.00. I am blamed by athletes and parents for their grades and for not graduating on time. I am blamed by coaches when their star players struggle in classes because I did not give them an easy schedule. After 13 years, I am tired of the blame game.
I have always had a love and passion for health and fitness, which is one of the reasons I became a Team Beachbody Coach, and I will be a certified holistic health coach in 2014! Over the summer, I made a life changing decision. My days of sitting in a cramped, windowless office are over. I am studying for my personal trainer certification, and I will move into health and fitness full time at the end of this school year, once I find employment at a local gym. I hope to do an unpaid internship in the evenings in the spring, so I can learn the ropes from an experienced personal trainer.
Truthfully, I never thought this was an option for me. I always thought of personal trainers as former high school or college athletes. While I have always loved sports and participating, I was never good enough to make my high school teams and only played intramurals in college. After going to gyms and getting to know personal trainers, I realized that people come from a wide variety of backgrounds, so why not me too? 🙂
One monkey wrench in my plan is my husband’s unemployment. He retired from the Coast Guard, and as it turns out, that line about people hiring veterans is bullcrap. They don’t. He has applied for many jobs and has been turned down. This is wearing heavily on both of us, but I have to believe everything will fall into place. I am anxious to leave this job behind and move into my dream job, where I won’t be stuck behind a desk, expecting to wave magic wands and solve everyone’s problems.
Starting over is scary, but also exciting. I need a change and something to be excited about when I wake up in the morning.
CFDShark 