Every Conversation Can Change A Life by Pat Divilly (Full Transcript)

And I tried to keep it together on the phone, and swallow my pride as I told him that I wasn’t doing that well, and I didn’t have the €12 to get the bus fare home.

I’ll never forget the bus journey home. For three hours I cried, it’s Christmas Eve, the time everyone is excited to go home and see their friends and family, and here I am, the biggest failure, the biggest loser. I put my hood up, I put my head down, and I just cried. Usually if you get the bus home from Dublin to your hometown, you meet people you know. There was probably people I knew on that bus, but I just didn’t know what was going on in my head. And I couldn’t even buy a small gift for my mum. So I got a card and I wrote: “I’ll take you out to lunch on the new year when things are better” and it broke my heart.

Lucky for me, a friend of mine offered me some part time work in a pizzeria. People on Galway will know the place. It wasn’t the dream for a personal trainer but it got me out of the house and it got me out of my own head a bit. When I wasn’t working as a waiter, I’d walk up and down the beach for hours everyday, just looking for some revelation, some inspiration, some glimmer of hope and some light at the end of this dark tunnel. More often than not, I’d have tears in my eyes or tears streaming down my face, still feeling like a failure. And if I’d bump into someone I knew I’d wipe away the tears and make sure they knew that there was nothing wrong.

And on one of these walks, I had a little bit of a breakthrough. I realized, yes, I failed on my first personal trainer business. Yes, it’s a recession, but there are other people that are doing well. So there must be a way.

And I headed home, and with nothing to lose, I jumped on my dad’s computer and emailed some trainers in the UK that looked like they were doing really well. I said, I’m a young trainer. I’d appreciate any advice on how can I get this thing started. And to my surprise, one guy got back to me, a guy called Mark Tregilgas over in Cardiff who was doing really well as a trainer.

Mark said later that day he would hop on the phone with me and give me some tips, some advice and some encouragement. And he did that, and it amazed me that this stranger was reaching out and taking time for me. That little bit of belief that he instilled in me prompted me to give it another go, to give my dream another go.

I advertised the fitness class down on the local beach and people later told me that was genius, outdoor training. But I had no money for rent, so it was genius. And I remember turning up the first day, and I turned up an hour early and I had no equipment to cycle down and I put cones on the floor. That’s all I had, the little bit of equipment I had and for an hour before the class I walked back and forth and visualized 20, 30, maybe 40 people turning up to my class, and come seven o’clock, as it was due to start five people turned up, only five. And to anyone else that might have seemed like a failure and they might have felt dejected by that, but I was over the moon.

I cycled home faster than I’d ever cycled before, excited to tell my mum about my new business and my five clients. You see, I was coming at personal trainer now from a different perspective. When I lived in Dublin, I was caught in my head, I wanted to be a superstar and I thought fitness was about push-ups and sit-ups and broccoli and spinach, that’s all I saw.

And now I’d come home and I’d hit this low point, I realized it could be so much more, and it should be so much more. I think we have all got three places: our home life, our work life, and then our third place. So for some people, the third place is yoga class or a meditation; for other people it’s, I don’t know, the pub, for some people. Everyone has got somewhere they go to escape, because the home life is not always happy, and the work life is not always fulfilling. We’ve got stuff going on, we want somewhere to escape.

And I knew the third place for the five people on the beach with me was the beach with me, that was their third place, their place to get away. I didn’t know what was going on in other areas of their life, but I knew I could be a great part of their day. And I set out to try to be the best part of these people’s day. The same way Mark had instilled a little bit of belief on me with that phone call when I needed it, I said I’m going to pass that forward to these five people.

And I came back the second month to the beach and I’ve got 20 people on the beach. And they start instilling this belief in each other, it’s not just me passing it over, everyone is starting, it’s reciprocal.

And then I come back the third month, there’s 100 people on the beach. When I came back from Dublin, said I was going to do a boot camp on the beach. People told me you are not in California. Now Pat, you are in the west of Ireland, no one’s going to train on the beach.

And with 100 people things are going so well. I get a visit from the guards in the middle of a session. And they tell me, Pat, at what time is this over, we are coming back for you, don’t go anywhere. You can imagine my clients are wondering what I was doing at the weekend or what was going on. And the guards pull up at the end of the session, put down the window and they say, Pat, lock your bike, grab your things, you’re going to have to come with us.

And my heart sinks. I turn around to pick up my things and as I do they start laughing hysterically. They say we have a big guy in the back that needs to get in shape, will you look after him? So I’ve gone from this guy with no belief to five clients to twenty clients to a hundred clients, now I’ve got the guards on my side. Feeling indestructible.

There was a man that used to walk his dog up and down that beach every day and always looked over and he was too stubborn to come and ask I think. But eventually curiosity got the better of him. A hundred people on the beach, what’s this all about? And he came and asked, he said what is this? I said it’s a fitness class, we train three times a week, we give nutritional support, we give online support and we make people strong, we make people feel good. It’s €75 a month.

And his jaw hit the floor. He said, you mean to tell me you expect me to pay €75 to train in the cold, in the rain, on the beach when I could pay the same thing and get a hot shower, and a pool, and a sauna, and a jacuzzi in his local gym, because what he didn’t understand that it wasn’t about the push-ups, and the sit ups and the squats. From a distance you saw a group of people doing these exercises and running between cones. But really what it was about was the words that were being said and the belief that was being instilled.

I knew that the people that were coming to train needed a little bit of encouragement and acknowledgements and they needed compliments and they needed just little things. Again, maybe there was other stuff going on in their lives that I didn’t know about. Maybe they were the same as me walking the beach lost, isolated, lonely and depressed, wiping back tears when I met people so no one would know there was something wrong.

So I made a conscious effort: every time they come and train with me I’m going to make them feel good. And it became like I say, just this culture of belief. Everyone started thinking they could do anything. I’ve got hundreds of people down the beach.

And people started achieving amazing things in fitness, which is to be expected with a fitness class but more than that we started seeing people leaving abusive relationships and starting new relationships, and starting new careers, and starting new businesses, and the confidence was just amazing.

And with the fitness improvement some people decided to set a big goal. Well, I set the goal for them and pushed them. I pushed them out and told them 22 kilometer obstacle course, I’d like you to try it. There’s some barbed wire, there’s some ice baths, there’s some climbing walls, there’s some climbing ropes and some other obstacles along the way but you’ll be fine.

I get a handful of clients that jump on this, say they want to do it. But I stand back and an amazing thing starts happening. The little nudges that Mark gave me on the phone four years ago prompted me to start with five people and now I watch my clients start to nudge each other and suddenly it’s well, if I am OK to do this, you’ll be OK too and it just starts to grow. We’ve got a hundred people for this MOB Run we’ve got 200 people for this MOB Run, we have 300 — a small gym in the west of Ireland, end up bringing 540 people to an adventure race, the biggest team ever worldwide for an adventure race and raised €165,000 for cystic fibrosis in the process.

I told you about promising my mum lunch in the new year when things were better. I finally got to bring her for the lunch and it was the Best of Galway Awards and they acknowledged me as the best gym. But I never had a gym, I didn’t have saunas, and steam rooms and hot showers. I didn’t have marketing budgets and teams. I had nothing, only a beach and a whole lot of people that felt like they belong to something and they felt the sense of belief in themselves. And that’s what it’s all about.

Four years ago, I was at my lowest point – lost, isolated, lonely, depressed, the mostly broken, walk on the beach not seeing any hope, desperate and a stranger made a phone call to me and that gave me the belief to try something one more time, to give my dream one more chance. And I went to the beach and I tried to give that to five more people, that one conversation resulted in hundred of clients in Galway, and that one conversation resulted in thousands of clients online, that one conversation resulted in a quarter of a million for charity, and that one conversation resulted in 200,000 people a day that now see my updates about hope, and belief, and belonging and all these things every day. That’s the power that one conversation can have, and one interaction can have, because we never know what’s going on in other people’s lives, people mass things when they’re feeling lost or they’re feeling alone or whatever they’re feeling.

And I know that one conversation can change things. One smile, one compliment, one acknowledgement, something small to change someone’s day can change someone’s life.

So four years ago, Mark gave me a little nudge that sparked this domino effect that I’m hoping I can give everyone in here, a little nudge today to further the domino effect that we can change people’s lives. I thought going to Dublin, that you had to be a superstar and you had to be a celebrity, and you had to be all these things, a millionaire, then you can effect change.

I talked about my mum and bringing her to the Awards, and hitting my lowest point and not being able to buy her a present. And now I’d just share something my dad told me, again when I was at my lowest point. Dad told me that regardless of your current position in life, you’re in a position to help other people, so don’t wait. And that’s my prompt today. Don’t think you’re not good enough to effect change. Don’t think that you can’t change people’s lives. One smile, one acknowledgement, one compliment, taking an interest — that’s how we change lives.

I have learned a lot of things in four years, but the biggest thing that I’ve learned is that the world is a mirror and when you go out there and you smile at people and you take an interest in people and you converse with people and you believe in people, even when you don’t believe in yourself, your whole world changes.

So like I said, or like my dad said regardless of your current position in life, you are in the position to help other people. Don’t wait.

Thank you.

 

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