We were lucky to catch up with George Pagan Iii recently and have shared our conversation below.

George, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’re complete cheeseballs and so we love asking folks to share the most heartwarming moment from their career – do you have a touching moment you can share with us?

Oh, I have a good one. It’s one of my all-time favorite client success journeys and one of my favorite moments since becoming a personal trainer. It was my second year of full-time training on my own in Miami, FL when I started training Jasmin. She was the ultimate beginner, but she was the wife of a client I was already working with, so I had a little bit of help building some trust because her husband had a great training experience with me. After getting to know her, I discovered that while she was a novice with her exposure to formal exercise, it wasn’t because she did not have any active or sports background; she used to be a competitive athlete! She was going through her adult life away from athletics because of an injury she sustained while competing. That significantly hindered her confidence in her body’s abilities; she mentioned that some doctors she worked with at the time spoke negatively about her ability to ever be athletic again. She took that to mean that she should probably just stop altogether, even after healing well enough to resume. Before she and her husband moved away, I had worked with her for just over 2 years. Slowly but surely, she not only became comfortable enough to go to the gym on her own(without her husband or myself there with her) to perform a workout, but she started running, jumping and lifting weights to build muscle! You might think that being a personal trainer, the goals I was most satisfied with were the weights lifted or how fast or long she was able to run, but it wasn’t. What made this one of the most impactful moments for me as a personal trainer was when she thanked me for helping her re-discover her confidence in herself and what her body can do. It’s been about eight years since I have worked with her, and we are still in touch. Even through multiple moves, she still seeks to work with a personal trainer to stay active and will find ways to increase her activity independently. Moments like these fuel me and refill my tank when I’m struggling.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am a personal trainer 14 years into my career, helping local Miami business owners and entrepreneurs find the same success in their fitness as they’ve had in their professional lives. I am also the owner of FITLETE, an education and business resource nexus for personal trainers. Most of the personal training clients I accept to work with have all the tools, skills, and abilities to achieve their goals; it’s my job to help them realize how to use these skills and abilities to make beneficial changes to reach muscle-building, fat loss, strength or movement independence goals. The people I work with don’t want to make fitness their hobby or have their fitness goals consume every aspect of their lives, so I have developed specialized methods to allow fitness goals to live within their current lifestyle demands. As an entrepreneur, I understand some of the pressures you deal with every day and respect that no matter how important we say our goals around fitness are, they can’t consume our lives. I’ve taken this mindset and directly overlaid it into my work with FITLETE’s resource nexus. It’s all about being more efficient, making informed decisions, and preparing, which are things personal trainers often struggle to have, given our industry lacks a formal structure. Everyone runs their business differently, approaches problems differently, and needs different tools, education, and assistance to maximize their ability to reach their goals. I’m not organizing resources to tell you which is better or worse, but instead to help you find the one that best fits your needs.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

It is, without a doubt, honesty and transparency. There’s no quicker way to lose a client than to be caught lying or over-promising your ability to help them achieve their goals. If you are a personal trainer promising the world’s best results in the shortest amount of time and fail to deliver on them, then you set yourself up to be one of the 80% of the field of personal trainers that leave the field within the first 2 years. Building trust in our field is paramount to your ability to be successful, and for me, trust-building begins with leading your practice with honesty and transparency.

Other than training/knowledge, what do you think is most helpful for succeeding in your field?

Being open-minded is a requirement for success as a personal trainer. Why? The people we work with all start from different levels and sometimes need the most nuanced approaches in their training and habits to reach their goals. While most of the goals people will come to us with are fairly simple and straightforward ( build muscle, lose fat, lose weight, get stronger, etc.), the pathway that leads them most optimally to their goal will have many twists, turns, and surprises that you will need many “tools from your toolbox” to help them. This was one of my main motivations for building FITLETE’s resource nexus because it allows personal trainers to search for and find solutions by learning from other successful practitioners in our industry. The worst trainers are the ones that only have one tool and try to apply its use to many situations. What’s that famous saying? If your only tool is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://fitlete.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fitletenation/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Fitletes/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgepagan3rd/
• Twitter: https://x.com/fitletes
• Other: Weekly Newsletter: https://thisweek.fitletes.com
  My Photo Journal : https://unsplash.com/@gpthree