MEET THE TRAINER – DEAN

Growing up – sorry to name and shame, you Mum! – but she would say, “You have more ability in your little finger than most people have in their whole body”. Call me cocky, but Mum was right. Generally speaking, anything involving a ball or coordination came very naturally to me. In a sense, that summarises my visual learning style throughout my career in the fitness industry. If I see something once or twice, I put it into practice straight away, play with the variables, and decide what works best for each intention. I always encourage clients and my associates to be curious and experiment with different techniques and variables hence my belief applied knowledge trumps theory.

The dream was always to play professional sport for a living – firstly chasing cricket and secondly football. Confidence in my natural ability lead me to believe that these dreams were going to just happen…but, guess what? They didn’t. This had nothing to do with not having the ‘ability’ or enough ‘talent’ to make it happen but I just didn’t have the work ethic to match. My emotional maturity was not developed enough to handle the expectations others had on me to perform, let alone the pressure placed upon myself and my own personal expectations to excel every lunch-time, every training session, and every game. To say I didn’t work hard at my craft would not be fair. However to say I was dedicated, grind and hustled to leave no stone unturned would simply be a lie.

In the end of this chapter, it was like standing in the middle of a shopping mall with no clothes on in freezing cold weather (use your imagination) and with absolutely no idea where the exit is. It’s fair to say, I felt ashamed, I felt like a failure, I felt I felt like a failure, I felt embarrassed, I felt angry about it and, to this day still, it burns me up inside and pisses me off that I wasted what could have been an unbelievable opportunity.

It took a while to see this but mindset is a choice. I could sit in my own filth and tell myself the world’s against me – but this is bull shit. Sure, I might be better than half those blokes playing at the elite level and still be miserable forever about it. Still, when one door closes, another opens. My failures have taught me a pretty valuable lesson. The more time I spend sooking about my failures, the less time I’m spending being productive and executing something else. So, in the words of Snoop Dogg, drop it like it’s hot, move forward and stop stressing the dumb little shit, day in, day out, because I am playing in the big game and that was just a bad quarter.

The concept of facing a reality that looked like 9-5 work days for someone else at a desk is a nightmare to me. I couldn’t do it, I’d rip my hair out and be fired before lunch-time on my first day. I had been personal training for a few years, I was good at it, I learned from my mistakes and failures, accepted them as my wrong moves and made a decision to bet on my strengths and create something in an opportunity I couldn’t see before because I was focused on my failures. I understand now that it’s my failures that motivate me from underneath, knowing how much it sucks to not get something you wanted so bad.

I believe in my purpose.
I am lucky to have DNA that permits confidence and ability.
But now I also have the missing pieces.
Hustle and hard work.
GRIPT was born.