From chasing my dream to crashing and the 1 major learning!
My time in Amsterdam, between 2012 and 2018, was without any doubt the most challenging time of my life to date!
I got to be shareholding partner in a distribution for functional fitness training equipment for BeNeLux. Together with 2 partners we set this company up in 2013 with me being the one involved operational.
in 2014 (while having a lot of success with the distribution) another opportunity came in the form of the idea and dream to build my own personal training gym in Amsterdam.
In 2015 my daughter was born and about 2 months later my now ex-wife any myself opened the doors to our gym which we invested in and build from scratch - believing in this concept with every cell of our existence, chasing a dream.
From scratch to a fully functional gym, while running the distribution and expecting my daughter about 2 months after the opening:
Things went wrong:
after about 1 year of having opened the doors to our gym we did not meet our needed memberships, cash was getting low, very low
on a private level things did not work out and we got divorced
I failed to adapt in how to run the business(es) and be able to see the right steps necessary to do
I ended up with 2 companies, and a lot of debt on the horizon
way too many things on my plate, feeling like escaping from this planet
on top of this crisis I feared of not being able to be the kind of daddy I wanted to be in terms of time, dedication and energy
Until that point I was under the impression I was in relatively good shape with my organizational skills like getting shit done, keeping things under control, sorting issues out and turning them into opportunities.
I was close to €200.000 in debt from opening the gym, the distribution demanded my full focus which I clearly could not give as I was just trying to avoid more shit hitting the fan with the gym running low numbers and more and more troubles arising from that.
After another few months I really felt like there is no way I can sort this out (while acting mostly calm and cool on the surface), it was just too much to handle. It felt like the pile of things to urgently take care of was getting bigger and bigger by the day and the overall impression of the things I needed to take care of had me at what I nowadays consider one of my lowest points on life, really not knowing how to go on from here.
The Learning:
While the troubles kept building from not being able to pay bills and even considering filing for bankruptcy (almost monthly court hearings for financial things etc.), on one day a metaphorical solution came to me:
While the pile of unpleasant things (and at that stage in my head I really I was under a huge pile of shit) kept growing, BUT I also felt that if I can just get rid of one tiny thing each day, there is gonna be a time when all things will be taken care of.
Knowing that there will be one day when this is over was the thought that gave me the strength to just keep digging myself out with my tiny shuffle, out of this pile of shit, day by day, by just focusing on one thing at a time.
This simple and yet effective strategy has helped me to eventually sell the gym and get out of this situation in Amsterdam with a new life.
This reducing of your focus to just the one thing that is under your control, that you can solve on this day, helped me to see the light in that time in Amsterdam, and has helped since some of my friends I got to see loose control over their situation.
This narrowing of my focus was the only option I had at that time to solve things without loosing my mind and turned one of the most difficult situations of my life into a time that I now look back to as one of the biggest learning opportunities for how to handle things when shit gets tough!
Simple and effective - reduce your focus to the one thing you can control and keep going!
If you like this post, join me for weekly strategies and methods on how to progress and grow in life.
Until next week - Sascha