15 Oct Priority of Exchange
By Will Kuenzel
This article will get a little personal. I’ll use this to give a little perspective and hopefully it’ll be informative in the process.
We talk training and nutrition all the time. One of the aspects that comes up to make these things happen is time management. How we manage our time is critical in getting everything done that we need to do. As our time becomes more precious and our free time more scarce, we start to organize priorities. These choices we make sometimes will have a larger impact than we first thought.
I hope everyone has heard the analogy of time to a jar of rocks. Big rocks go in first. These are your biggest priorities. These will take up most of your time. At first it may seem like the jar couldn’t hold anything else, but we’re able to fill in the gaps with some smaller pebbles. We find a bit more time to do little things. Even then, we can fill the jar with sand. My guitar teacher has a sign up on her wall, “you’ll never find the time to practice. You’ll make the time.”
When I was in college, I thought I was busy. I was going to school full-time. I was also a member of the track team. I also had 2 jobs. I somehow still managed to find time to play video games into the wee hours of the morning, sleep until noon, and go out with my friends.
When my wife and I first got married, I was working at 3 different gyms and had just recently stopped bouncing. I took my first clients at 7am and my last clients at 7pm. I’d work long days. Just getting started personal training you’ve got to put the hours in. Some of it was just spent walking the floor and talking to clients. Maybe making a few cold calls. All in between traveling to the different gyms and training clients. I still managed to find time to compete in powerlifting, play video games, spend time with my wife and dogs, and meet friends out fairly frequently.
Years down the road and I’ve built a successful personal training business. I ended up buying a lot of my own equipment and have moved into a large space with a very successful MMA gym. It was at this point that my wife and I would decide to bite the bullet and try to start a family. The process was not easy. We had some early difficulty and some major heart break. We unfortunately experienced three losses, and the second one was far enough long to have found out the gender and picked out a name. This was 5 years ago and still to this day will bring a lump to my throat and tears to my eyes. Love is a tough thing to understand. How does it develop? When does it take shape? This was someone we were never able to hold, but I would have given up everything for a chance to do so for even a second. I would have done anything for that outcome to have been different. That event changed me. It wasn’t that didn’t want to be a dad. I did. But now, I really wanted it. I was ready.
That scared us. We went through a series of screenings, tests, anything that we could think of to try and figure out what was happening. Not to mention we sought counselling and support groups. Death is never easy. Death of a child…just for lack of a better phrase, “f- that.” There were times where the thought of going through that again was unbearable. I wasn’t sure I could do it.
Why is all this important? The birth of my first daughter changed that jar of rocks. I dumped the entire thing out, and put in a boulder of a rock that took up almost the entire jar. That boulder is my family. That is without a doubt my number one priority. The things I do, while sometimes appear to put family second is only because I think it will have a bigger beneficial effect on family down the road. It was then that I realized that I might not always be the powerlifter I wanted to be. That’s not to say I won’t be a good powerlifter, nor a successful business owner. I will not however do anything that would make my family a secondary priority.
The challenge now comes from trying to be the dad/husband I want to be while being a coach/athlete/trainer/business owner. How do I juggle those responsibilities? I am fortunate beyond belief to have a wife that understands my desire to compete. She makes it much easier. I’m also fortunate that I’m a personal trainer. I work in a gym. My second home is at the gym. I’m fortunate to have training partners that have days off to come in and train with me in the late morning so I’m free to either train clients, or go home in the afternoons. Life could be unbelievably more difficult. Despite my good fortunes, it still takes a lot of work and communication to make it happen.
Now that my oldest is 3 years old and we’ve got a new little one that’s 4 months old, my time is becoming more precious. I was once able to go home at lunch to see my oldest. Now that she’s in school, I only see her briefly in the mornings before I leave for work and hopefully I get the chance to see her in the evenings before she needs to be in bed. Once or twice a week, I’m at work until past her bed time. Those days are tough. I know they’re necessary, but they’re still tough pills to swallow. To help with that, I only work half days on Fridays. (No clients really want to train on Friday afternoons anyway). I never work, or train on the weekends. Once upon a time, I’d compete 3-4 times a year. Now it’s only 2 competitions at the most that I will compete in. The training and time away is just too much. I will help at meets because that’s only a minimum requirement. Other than meets, or the occasional in-house fun days, weekends are off limits. Those Friday afternoons and weekends are only reserved for family. Priorities.
My offseason training revolves around family. I will undoubtedly spend more time at the gym during meet prep. To help offset that, offseason time is family time. Not that training isn’t important, but I will purposely change training to either accommodate being at home more, or break it up and spread it out much more so than I would with meet prep. For example, during the summer I might train early in the morning to have more time at lunch with my girls. If it were meet prep, I can’t do that. I fit my training within my life. I don’t plan life around my training. That shows my priorities.
I’m 37 with two daughters (a 3-year-old and a 4-month-old) and a wife. I have my own personal training business and find time to compete in powerlifting from time to time. I still enjoy my video games and time with friends, but those are luxuries that are slightly different than they were when I was 27. My life experiences have managed to put my priorities in perspective. While they might not always align with what others think they should be, they are my own priorities. Your priorities can be different. Whatever they are, know why. Be honest with yourself. Are they the priorities you should have?
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