Put a price on your life

Money isn't everything. Many of us, including myself have a tendency to chase the sparkly, shiny things. This has proven time and time again to deter us from what is really important. Why do we chase these things? What's in it for us? The answer is very simple and two-fold. We chase these things because we are Americans and Americans are a country founded upon the very belief that we should all have the best and should accept nothing less. What's in it for us is the thumb to the nose we get in saying that we have the shiny sparkly thing that no one if not few have (don't forget to stick out your tongue).

I come from meager backgrounds. My mother divorced when I was young and for awhile, we were all we had. She worked her butt off, sometimes with 2-3 jobs just to make sure we had new clothes every school year. She was a tough woman and I have no doubt she learned that from her migrant worker mother who saved all her money to send her to America on her own to live a better life than in Jamaica. We never had much, but we didn't need much because we loved each other and did not really know any better.
Flash forward through college and into my first real job. I was a behavioral counselor in a middle school located in an urban area of Philly where the population was 80% Spanish and 19% black. I helped to run a successful pilot program that targeted at risk students and helped them by providing personal on site therapists. Because of the relationships I built with the families in starting the program, I was given the opportunity to help them using my own personal perspective from my past while I managed the daily task of keeping the program in step with the standards and regulations set forth by the Department of Health Services. I learned a lot from these kids, but mostly that they were almost frighteningly similar to me. They loved their family, they didn't have much and all they wanted was a comfortable life where they could succeed without having to look over their shoulder every day that they did succeed.
As the program grew and became more successful, I decided to go my own separate way and looked to take on what I thought would be a completely different set of challenges. Sitting in an office and visiting with families was not what I envisioned myself doing for an extended period of time. Although, life changing, this experience was not doing wonders for my physique and I found it harder and harder to fit into the clothes that I had purchased the previous year. I had to find something that required more activity fast. So I decided to become a personal trainer in 2005.
As a personal trainer I found what I had originally loved about being a counselor. I got a chance to help people, but I was even more hands on because my clients worked directly with me. I found it very easy to get close to these families and found that these families had many of the same aspirations and issues that every other family had in my previous job. My clients told me about problems in their lives and told me of the hopes they had for themselves and their families. I even had the chance to help some of their children in making their respective teams and some even got scholarships.
What I learned was that even though these families had more money and therefore more opportunities than the previous ones, they still wanted the same thing for themselves and others. They all wanted something that money cannot buy. You can try, but you cannot buy a healthy lifestyle or healthy life choices for that matter. All of these families have taught me that the basic element of happiness is not money or even the awesome stuff you can buy with it, but the feeling that comes with knowing that you do not need these things because you are living a happy, healthy lifestyle.