I was going to title this blog ‘When one door closes…’ but to be honest, it’s me who has closed the door to open a great big french window on a brave new world. 

So to say when every door closes another opens would be slightly misleading in the context of this post.

Today I have handed back the keys to my lonely office.  I have taken all my posters down, packed up my posessions in three large boxes and removed my kitchen gagetry from the corner, where they have been for the last 2 and half years.  As I cleared out the office this week, I found things that I had brought with me from the last office that I’d not looked at in all that time. Needless to say, there has been a lot of decluttering going on, and I have found it so very cathartic, almost as though I am cleansing the stress that this place has imbude upon me from my whole system.

While the job has been great in terms of money and experience within the office and the Higher Education environment, it has also been slowly sapping all the joy out of the bulk of my day.  I have to be honest, I had come to seriously dislike the person it was turning me into.  I suppose I have learned that to be happy, I do not need material things that a well paid job will bring.  I have more spring in my step now that I know I will be helping other people change their lifestyle habits with food and exercise; that hopefully some of my passion for fitness and activity will rub off on those who employ me to work them in the gym/outdoors on a regular basis.

For years, while I was on this journey of re-self discovery, I strived to find where my happiness lay and I think that it is something all of us, at some point in our lives, will go through (not necessarily the weight loss but definitely the seeking of happiness).  I honestly thought that by losing some weight I would suddenly turn into a happy person and be completely content with my life. And for a little while it did and I was.  Once the inital ‘yes I’m now a normal weight’ honeymoon had worn off, I realised that I was still as miserable as sin on the inside.  No matter what I was doing, I was just desperately unhappy.  Now I had to look less on the surface and start really doing some hard work on the inside.  And that was when the lightbulb moment hit. Work was making me unhappy. Every day I would whine about things that had happened at the office or that someone had done that, while to me common sense said otherwise, they had done the exact opposite.  I realised that I was at the head of culture change in an environment that didn’t necessarily want it. Now for those who know me well, you will know that change is something that doesn’t frighten me in the slightest.  If it did I wouldn’t have lost the amount of weight I had, and I would be still sat on the sofa indulging in 6000+ calorie meal on a Friday night.  I had to accept that while I embrace and welcome change, others view it with distrust and in some cases distain and no matter waht I did to help make the change easier to swallow, it was fought against in such a way that the anger and frustration was directed at me on a continuous basis.And that was where the unhappiness stemmed from. While I know their anger, frustration etc wasn’t about me as a person it got to a point where it had become too much.

This realisation that change was the over arching factor, lead me to look at what change I really needed to make to find my own happiness.  After a set to with a colleauge one summer and really assessing what I wanted to do and who I wanted to be in life, i realised I had to sit back and take stock.  And I think that is something everyone must do at somepoint in life.  Whether it instigates a massive life changing event or just allows us to continue on the knowldge that we are excatly where we should be is neither here nor there.  The important thing is that we are able to accertain that we are happy or not. If we are happy, more power to us, and if not then a change, on some scale, needs to happen.  For me a big change needed to happen.  I needed to find my bliss, something that would make me wake up looking forward to the day, not filled with dread and loathing. And boy have I found it.

I start officially on Monday (April 8th) when the final website goes live (only 16 months after I purchased the domain) but I’m already excited. I have 3 clients already, and a few more that are meeting me to see if I’m the trainer for them.  And while I have been offered jobs at gyms (and big gyms at that), I don’t think that is the path for me.  I joke a lot about wanting KrissieKirby.com to be a global brand name…. but what if it was?  I may as well give it a shot, because what do I have to lose? Nothing really, but everything to gain. And I have never been one to live by ‘what if’.

So the door on the office has closed, and here I am, hands on the push plate, ready to throw open the french doors on a brave new world.

This should be fun, hard work and long hours, but fun.

Be kind to yourself, as always

Krissie
xx