It’s a Saturday morning at 9:30. The sun is shining. If there were birds around they’d be singing. I’m in a standardized testing center in who-knows-what-neighborhood on the outskirts of San Francisco, and I’m crouched on the freezing cold floor of a bathroom stall crying my eyes out.
Let me explain.
It was the day of my NASM Certified Personal Trainer exam and I had just been handed my results. The minutes between completing the exam and being handed those results were excruciating. Am I being dramatic? Maybe a little. But after four months of coursework and studying and cramming my brain with new information, the possibility of failing was panic-inducing to me. As soon as I saw that all-caps “PASS” on my printed results, I grabbed my coat, ran-walked to the bathroom and, well, you know the rest.
Crying may seem like an overly dramatic reaction to something as simple as passing an exam, and trust me when I say I am not a dramatic person. But this exam was different. In my previous blog post I unpacked my reasons for wanting to become a personal trainer. If you’ve read that post, you know that my reasons are deeply personal and close to my heart. Additionally, as someone who has officially kissed her 20’s goodbye, I am launching into a completely new career path much later than I ever would have expected. For those reasons (and for pure personal pride) passing the personal training certification exam was a big deal for me – I felt that exam success would mark the first step in solidifying my plans and serve as further confirmation that I was making the right choice. In my mind, failing was simply not an option, and the fear of failure was a constant anxious weight on my mind.
I have always struggled with self-doubt. It has been a constant companion to me ever since I hit my teenage years and left my bold and brassy childhood self behind. It’s the main driver behind my ironclad work ethic: I generally believe that I have to work twice as hard to be half as good as other people. It’s why I’m consistently shocked when I land a job (they want ME?) and floored when I succeed at, well, anything. It’s annoying as hell to be inside my head sometimes. All that being said, I was grateful for that particular irritating quality when I sat down and kicked off the first question on the exam – my total lack of confidence in my abilities had driven me to study my ass off and the exam material was engraved into my brain. I completed the test in half the time given and, after submitting my final answer, struggled with the odd emotional dichotomy of simultaneously knowing I had passed while still being terrified that I had failed.
Long-winded story short, I am now a certified personal trainer, but it’s only the beginning. I still have so much work to do (seriously, so much) and so many more things to learn. I will need clients, I will need practice, I will need further specializations (nutrition, here I come!) before I can hone my focus onto the niche I want to work in most. But the time will come, whether it’s in two months or twenty years, and while my self-doubt will make me question myself every step of the way, it will also make me work twice as hard to ensure that I finally get to where I want to be: sobbing on the floor of a bathroom stall somewhere because I just landed the job of my dreams.