Meet James Goodlatte | Fitness Professional & Continuing Education Provider

Meditate and intend to be great at the things that life brings my way.

I realize this may seem unusual, but my “decision” was to go with the flow of life. How I do this is: Meditating with the intention to get beyond that mind chatter, to actually feel the mental and physical peace that rises naturally once my mind chatter has subsided.

I started meditating perhaps a decade ago, but spent the decade before that “knowing that i should start meditating”, just not quite prioritizing it into my life.

Although there are an infinite number of ways to focus one’s mind, and just as many ways to sense the outcomes of doing so, recently one of the ways i know it’s happening is when i actually find myself watching the “kaleidoscope” of shadows behind my closed eyelids for several seconds in a row. This coincides with such an inner stillness that it has now – finally – become self-propelling. (I now, finally, feel what it’s like to not want to miss it, because, well, “why wouldn’t i want to feel inner peace in all that i’m going to do today?”

This is now appearing to be my “most important decision” in part because I believe that how a person feels, moment by moment, is the ultimate determiner of “success” on the planet. It’s cliché, yes, but i’m thankful to now actually feel like i’m starting to actuallyknow this in my life. As the saying goes, “What’s the point of having money or things if you don’t feel good?”

To explain this a bit more, my younger adult life was filled with examples of life bringing opportunities, but in my middle-adult life, i started trying more to coerce things into place, which definitely didn’t work as well (led to a lot more hardship), before now returning to going with the flow. Now, at the age of 45, I can look back and see the trend of surrendering, versus pushing.

For example, when i was at the University of Maryland, my guidance counselor said, “James, it’s been nearly 2 years, you have to pick a major!” I didn’t yet “know what I wanted to do”, but told her that I just don’t want to be in a wheelchair later in life (my grandmother had just had this kind of seemingly limited existence, and it was fresh in my head). She said, “OK, just go to Kinesiology,” happy to be done with me. Well it turned out to be a perfect fit! I couldn’t believe that I could get actual school credit for learning about Anatomy and Physiology, and I not only loved learning, but got great grades as well. Later, as i graduated in December of 1999, I had no idea what job i was going to do; i only knew that personal training did not occur to me as a “real job.” So, I moved back into my parents basement, and took a two week vacation, assuming that i would come back from it and start sending resumes to various government agencies and such. But, in the midst of my vacation, i got a call from someone managing a gym in DC, and he said, “James, i know you just graduated. We’d like you to come work as a trainer for us in DC.” This wasn’t a “real job,” I reminded myself. But i didn’t yet have any job so i told him OK, assuming that i would do this until i found myself a real one.

Of course, I’ve been full-time into personal training ever since.

In fact, the birth of Fit For Birth was just as serendipitous. I and my wife at the time (who was also a personal trainer) were pregnant, and i excitedly wanted to find out all that i could about fitness and wellness for pregnancy (ultimately setting up www.GetFitForBirth.com at a time when there was really no information readily available on this topic). Within 6 months, our “mom & pop” website was being visited by 150 countries, doctors were asking me questions, and then fitness professionals were wondering if we would create a Continuing Education Course for them (which was its own serendipitous event). A few years later, a small group of fitness professionals in Hawaii found out about Fit For Birth while we were on the big island, and asked us to come into their gym for a weekend and present everything we knew for them – this ended up becoming our first ever Pre & Postnatal Corrective Exercise Specialist course!

All of this is to exemplify that I didn’t really do anything other than be passionate about health and fitness and sharing information – everything came to me easily. But shortly after, i started getting ideas about “how things should look” and “what kind of business it must be” and – long story short – entered a phase of many more challenges, filled with marketing disaster after disaster. Thankfully our products and services continued to generate nothing but 5-star life-changing reviews, but this entered the “dark age” of not only my company, but my life…

Thankfully i write this now from a place of having emerged far enough from the dark ages – by actively surrendering to life’s nudges – that i can see this pattern rather clearly. Recently, it’s not just about making the time for meditation, but it’s really about how the inner peace generated from it is helping me to go with the flow of what life is naturally bringing. One of our graduates in India was so passionate about bringing this to his homeland, that he is not only our ambassador in the country, but is now being invited to consult for hospitals on behalf of Fit For Birth. My son choosing to go to school in another state – something I initially preferred not to happen – opens my life for a completely unexpected kind of travel-the-world adventure. Just today I signed a contract with an international gym-chain to provide continuing education for their fitness professionals.

If there’s a piece of advice in all this, it’s to do whatever you need to do, mentally, to figure out how to love & follow the opportunities that are in front of you, while simultaneously not paying any attention to those other seemingly important opportunities that may be leaving your life (even if they seem like the best or most important ones).

There is always another opportunity coming in, but I wasn’t so easily able to see them when I was so focused on what I thought “should be” instead. And the best way I’ve found to achieve this state of “surrender & going with the flow” is to meditate. But not just meditate…there are times now that i do not get up from that meditation until my mind has literally changed something about who i am.

That’s my advice. And that’s the most important decision I’ve ever made that contributes to my success.