In honor of Transformation Thursday, we offer ourselves up for a peek behind the curtain.

Change is a constant companion whether we like it, seek it out, or avoid it like crazy. While that fact might seem dissatisfying to some, it is a truth that can serve us deeply when we accept it and learn to use the transformative power that change can bring to our lives.

Those of you reading this post are all part of the fitness industry in some manner…whether you are a seasoned professional leading your own groups or gyms, recently certified as a fitness professional, or considering getting started with your training curriculum…but that hasn’t always been the case. In order to get to your current position, you had to change something!

NAFC is in the same boat, and we want to share our new approach to transformation with you. We are all about moving forward into our mission and goals in a big way, and that means we had to take a hard look at the things we were doing and ask ourselves some tough questions. We didn’t like all the answers…so we had to make some big decisions. Part of that work involved our overall mission, and since that directly impacts each of you, we want to share the process and the outcome with you…as well as our new approach to change that we are implementing into our daily processes.

Here’s our new mission statement:

We are changing the way the world does personal training instruction and delivery. We do this by adhering to a strict set of educational standards, creating and administering curriculum that truly prepares our students to succeed in this industry, and influencing the industry to require a higher level of regulation regarding training adherence and body movement science.

We give our students the education to become certified and to have an advantage that others don’t in the fitness industry. NAFC, with its higher standards and focus on practical application, helps our certifieds to be truly respected and relevant in their newly chosen career. And, we provide several career pathways and training depth for our certified trainers that continue to challenge and create opportunities for them in their chosen career!

When NAFC certifies trainers, we not only teach them how to train, we provide them with the skills needed to succeed in the business of training.

How’s that for some big goals?!

Working through this along with all the other changes we’ve implemented over the past year, helped to remind us all realize that we truly are part of something special. And, what’s most awesome…this is something we each chose, and we each get to create it every day!  

That’s truly what transformation is…a conscious choice in our daily practices toward a defined outcome with a close look at how those actions line up with our goals. It’s true for organizational development, and it’s true for each one of you reading this post. The process laid out below has worked successfully for individuals, families, groups, and organizations from all industries. When approached in this systematic manner, it’s awesome how seemingly huge decisions and tasks can be divided up into manageable chunks and tackled quickly!

Here’s the process we followed:

• Define the desired outcome
• Assess the current condition
• Define the reasons for achieving the desired outcome
• Make the decision to achieve the desired outcome
• Communicate the decision to all appropriate stakeholders
• Measure available resources to appropriate toward the effort
• Define the timeline and milestones (basically map the path from current condition to desired state)
• Begin

Pretty simple. And yet, as you know, simple doesn’t necessarily equate with easy! It’s a new approach to goal achievement for us. And it’s based in change management science…behavioral change is a science after all, though it isn’t rocket science! It’s been our experience that every goal can be broken down into a project and stepped through in this methodical manner. If we can do it at the organizational level and achieve massively positive transformation, how much simpler is this process when applied to personal goals for yourself or those with whom you work?

We’ve adopted this approach into our organization and we are looking forward to measuring our progress as we move into 2020. We’ve got big work to do, and we are committed to achieving the goals we’ve lined out for the next many months! You’ve likely got big goals too, and we would love to know if you choose to use the process outlined here to get after them. Let us know in the comments or shoot us an email…we are all in this together, after all!