Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway – How I became a Pilates Instructor by Trish Robinson
The traditional path to a career, school to college to work, didn’t exactly pan out for me. In my first year of college in London I found myself pregnant and running home to my Mam with no degree but her first grandchild on the way. To be fair, I had gone to do a course that I wasn’t even really sure I wanted to do but hadn’t gotten enough points to get into anything else. Once I had had my baby I needed to go out and work to support us both and so any career goals or dreams were not even on my radar, I just had to work. I did whatever computer courses I needed to, to enable me to apply for any office/admin type role. Let me just add here that even if I didn’t know what my dream career was then, I certainly knew that my nightmare career was a desk job but it had to be done.
Fast forward about 16 years and I continued working in that type of desk job and had had three more children now. Having just had my fourth and last baby, my body was badly in need of some tlc. I was suffering from symptoms of prolapse, pelvic floor dysfunction and separation of my abdominal wall. It was safe to say that with those physical issues and the fact that I seemed completely stuck in terms of a career or anything beyond my family, I was at a one of my lowest ebbs. My body was, as far as I was concerned broken for ever more, my job was just a means to support my family, there seemed to be nothing for me. At the advice of a women’s health physio I went, pretty reluctantly, to try Pilates. I had never done anything like it before and was fairly terrified. I walked out of that first class like a different woman, in so many ways. My body had done things in the class that I never thought it was able for and the effect that that began to have on how I felt about myself was pretty big. I continued to go every week and grew in strength and confidence. I knew that this was also something I now wanted to work at. I wanted to be able to create a space for people to come and remind themselves of just how capable they are, how amazing our bodies are and how much we all deserve to carve out that bit of time to invest in ourselves and no one else.
I had never had a dream career before but now that I had found it I held onto it tightly and allowed myself to imagine how it would be. I decided to make it a side hustle first and did my training in mat Pilates right at the start of the pandemic. We got one of the weekends of training done in the studio and by the time the second one was due to happen, two weeks later, we were in lockdown. We managed to get it completed online and I was now a qualified mat Pilates instructor. And then… I did nothing. I stopped dreaming and starting letting fear into the driver’s seat. I listened to the voice that kept telling me I wasn’t ready, wasn’t good enough, and should wait until my youngest was out of nappies (not a joke). I gave so much energy to worrying about what people would think about me. Eventually, that internal voice, my gut, or whatever you want to call it decided it had been kept quiet for too long. I started to listen to it and believe in myself and started teaching classes alongside my full time job. I was so happy and people came and even better were enjoying the classes and, most importantly were reaping all of the rewards for consistent practice.
As with most good things, once I got a taste for it I knew even more so now that teaching Pilates was where I needed to work full time. I went on and trained in teaching reformer Pilates too and finally in February of 2022 I took the long awaited leap away from that desk job and into the big scary world of self-employment. And it is scary, there had to be many conversations between myself and my husband about taking the leap, we were both way out of our comfort zones but equally both knew that we had to trust that everything would be ok. The time was now and I could wait no longer.
And so, here I am, a self-employed Pilates instructor. One of the things that worried me most before taking the leap was the feeling that from a financial point of view I would now be contributing less to our home than what I was when I was in employment. It’s funny how we measure so much in terms of finances. I can’t escape the fact that, financially I am contributing less but the reality is that the way I work now contributes so much more to our family. I can drop and collect my kids to school, something I used to wistfully watch other mothers do. Things like housework and laundry that can take over the precious two days off at the weekend are now spread over the week. As Eoin works from home a bit more now there are pockets of time for a coffee together and time to talk properly to each other rather than those rushed chats, in grabbed moments before being interrupted. The biggest benefit of doing this big scary leap has been that now I have a career that is not just serving the purpose of paying bills; it is allowing me to be more than a mother and a wife, but to be Trish again.
