Creating a Personal Mission and Vision Statement

The reason I started writing is because I want personal trainers to become successful Health and Fitness Professionals (HFPs) as fast as possible, but also to have a career that they could retire from later in life! I had many fumbles along the way and do not want anyone to have to go through the same things I did as a personal trainer or a personal training manager. Over the next few blogs I will discuss a study that I conducted that lead to identifying the seven “Critical Areas” that all HFP’s and HFP managers should focus on.

These seven areas lead to the development of a management/development system that has helped increase client retention, attracted new business, decreased turnover and built true Health and Fitness Professionals. This system helped develop over 30 future fitness managers and leaders, and increased financials by over 150 percent — increasing monthly revenues from 160,000 per month to over 250,000 per month.

Critical Area One — Have each HFP develop a meaningful personal mission and vision.

This is the starting point for anyone who wants to be, and remain successful! If you do not sit down and decide on exactly what you want and have a clear vision of what it looks like, you will never know if you get there! That is the purpose of a mission and vision statement. This also is very different than setting short- and long-term goals! Some ask the question, “What is the difference?”

A short- or long-term goal can be any objective you are trying to achieve. A mission and vision are similar, but the BIG difference is:

1.     A mission and vision will have your CORE values attached to the goals.

2.     They also should elicit a STRONG emotional attachment that will keep your thoughts and behaviors in alignment with achieving the objective!

Here is how I would define them.

Vision – the end result that you are aspiring to achieve.

Mission — adds focus, direction and a sense of purpose to your daily decisions to help achieve the vision.

Ken Blanchard listed three things that every great vision must have.

1. Significant purpose — What business are you in?

2. A picture of the future – What will the future look like if you are successful?

3. Clear values — What guides your behavior and decisions on a daily basis?

I can assure you that you will face many challenging times along the path to achieving your goals and vision. If you do not have a “Strong Emotional” attachment to your goal, you will probably make decisions along the way that will not be in alignment with achieving the results you want! If that is the case, you may need to start over and create a new mission or vision that elicits this type of response.

Creating a mission and vision must be the first step in helping a personal trainer develop themselves into a Health and Fitness Professional, and should be something that a personal training manager develops for their entire team. Without this, there will never be alignment or excitement around accomplishing something bigger than hitting a revenue target, which in most cases de-motivates most personal trainers.

If anyone is interested in finding out more information about the entire system, please contact me at jasonstella23@yahoo.com.

Jason Stella is the National Brand Developer of Fitness for Life Time Fitness. He is also a certified personal trainer, and specializes in muscle activation techniques. He can be reached at JStella@LifeTimeFitness.com.

Rachel Zabonick-Chonko

Rachel Zabonick-Chonko is the editor-in-chief of Club Solutions Magazine. She can be reached at rachel@peakemedia.com.