Gym Owner Anxiety
Two simple mental frameworks to help gym owners manage stress and stay steady when things feel out of control
The new trainer that you thought for sure was a star ghosts you halfway through onboarding.
The favorite lifer client not only terminated… but is now prominently featured as a client testimonial on your biggest competitor’s Instagram.
A missed clause on your lease that didn’t cap HVAC and now has you personally responsible to cover a 5-figure bill.
The paid campaign that’s worked like clockwork but suddenly falls off a cliff in the same month you have a strangely high number of terminations.
Some days, running a gym feels like snorting big fat elephant rails of crushed up crazy pills.
Not every day, of course.
Some days things run smoothly. Some days are even fun!
But into each gym owner’s life a little rain must fall. And gym owner anxiety comes to us all.
The good news is this: if you’re a human, you’re used to dealing with things going wrong. That’s kinda the deal.
And one does get better at managing this over time. Because you can’t help but collect reps.
Personally, I’ve made great strides here. But I confess; I have historically been on the higher end of the anxiety spectrum.
Am I having benign heart palpitations? Or is this a clear marker of impending cardiac failure?
Is this the normal ebb and flow of human history? Or is it the beginning of a spiral into social collapse and civilizational chaos?
Will the impending Artificial Intelligence overloads be friendly gods? Or will they slaughter us with the same regard we give a wasp’s nest when knocking down a tree to put an extension on our house?
Being a human is not for the faint of heart!
Age has softened some of these fears. But I’ve also cultivated techniques. Practices of action and habits of mind to calm my internal stormy seas.
Leaving aside the obvious plays (meditation, good sleep, physical activity, etc)…
There are two frames that reliably help me.
Not always right away. If I’m in an acute flare-up, sometimes I need good ol’ fashioned time to downregulate me and create an opening.
But once I can breathe through it,
I have two paths to soften the grip of anxiety.
1) ZOOM IN
Zoom into this moment.
To who’s in front of you.
To the task at hand.
To whom you can help right now.
This is not quite the same as meditation, which also serves its place.
But the antidote to helplessness is hyper-local action.
If you’re dealing with a situation that you can impact,
Even a massive project solution is just a series of small steps.
And if you can’t impact the situation?
Then obsessing does you no good anyway. May as well get your mind off it by doing something useful.
As the saying goes
“When you’re nervous, get in service.”
2) ZOOM OUT
Forgive me for getting psycho-spiritual in an email about the business of gyms.
But our other solve is zooming out. WAY out.
“Universal consciousness” out.
I don’t know your exact religious beliefs. I am, myself, a step short of an atheist. But the universe is too big, too mysterious, and too unknown for me to have any strongly held opinions. So I land in a humanistic agnosticism.
Or, as my fellow science-led and arcane-knowledge-curious Burning Man campmates refer to ourselves,
I think of myself as a “Rational Mystic.”
I don’t know the flavor of your particular relationship with the universe.
But I’m sure you’d concede we’re all playing a microscopic part in a story of unfathomable scale.
For my part, I’ve always been taken with the work of philosopher Alan Watts.
Watts conceived of every living being as an aperture of an infinite and unknowable God; each of us playing our roles to perfection, engaged in a mutual deception. I pretend I am in “here” and you pretend you are out “there.”
We’ve intentionally forgotten we’re all drops in the ocean, temporarily floating above the wave, ever briefly, before rejoining the eternal oneness.
And so it goes.
Again, your views may be different. Fine. We’re in the land of unfalsifiable claims.
But however you get there,
There’s a Zoom Out available to you.
If nothing else,
You can find your Zoom Out from the ultimate Zoom In:
Awareness of a single breath.
A moment of no-mind.
And a realization that, if your thoughts are the clouds, then you are the glorious fucking sky.
I like the Zoom In and Zoom Out paradigm. Because all of the sturm and drang is in the mid-range.
So the next time you’re flaring up,
Managing the inevitable slings and arrows of gym ownership,
And of human being-ness,
I hope you think back to this framework.
I hope you can Zoom In and/or Zoom Out.
I hope you find peace.
I hope you stand reassured,
That no matter how crazed it all gets or how crazed it all feels,
On a long enough timeline…
We’re all walking each other home.
Love,
Mark
PS This is usually where I make a soft CTA.
Here’s the real CTA in my heart today:
Put down your phone. Walk away from your computer. Take 10 deep breaths.
Love you.