Matt the trainer and industry innovator
I had a dream one night that woke me up and I couldn’t go back to bed. I knew from my dream that I wanted to be a trainer. So I left my corporate logistics job of 10 years.
It was a big risk. Personal training was a really niche market when I started. Only wealthy people could afford it. It could have been a fad and I didn’t know a lot about it. But I figured, now I’m going into something I really like, it will be a lot easier for me to learn. And I had a goal. My goal was always to buy a house for my Mum and me.
The thing I love about my job is helping people. I think that partly comes from my upbringing. My Mum was a nurse. She had a job in a rest home in Ponsonby. We were fortunate that her boss wanted to help her and her two sons. We were able to live-in so the rent was manageable. Having a really caring mum and living with elderly people who need help has an impact on you.
I’d been a PT for about 5-6 years when we found a house in Grey Lynn. We had my Mum, me and my partner living under the same roof and we quickly figured out that that wasn’t going to work! I’d always wanted to work with like minded people from different sectors, either western practitioners like physios or eastern philosophy practitioners. Back then there were no wellness centres. So we spent the next six months doing up the house, creating therapy rooms upstairs and a gym downstairs for me. It was our first wellness centre called Seven Senses.
When we finished doing it up, we bought our next property. It's much bigger. It was a client’s father’s property. My client said “you got to go look at it. It's perfect for what you need”. It’s got a three bedroom apartment and a cottage for Mum! It’s become part two of Seven Senses.
The direction I really want to go in now is more holistic. I’ve seen over the years that so much attention goes into physical fitness but not enough attention goes into mental wellbeing. Things like how to rewire defaults that aren’t helpful. It’s normal to say “I'm off to the gym” but “I’m going to a class on mental skills” isn’t. I want to be part of making that the norm.
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