Meet Jonathan Wiens

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Jonathan Wiens. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Jonathan , appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?

I think I get a lot of my resilience from having a learning disability; I have Dyslexia. Throughout my school years I had to work twice as hard as everyone else to receive half the grade. One day after getting my report card, knowing the work that I had put in, but seeing a majority of C’s, I broke down crying. My Dad sat next to me and said, “You have it hard right now, but you also know how to work harder than anybody else. When you get into the real world everyone else is going to be shocked at how much work it takes. But, for you, it will be easy”. Before starting my business, I found a book called The Dyslexic Advantage: Unlocking the Hidden Potential of the Dyslexic Brain by Brock L. Eide & Fernette F. Eide. The book helped me realize that my learning disability doesn’t take away from my strengths and they uniquely correlate with success in business and entrepreneurship.

I would of course be remise if I didn’t mention my wife and business partner, Anitha, who, when I’m in my low moments and I don’t think I can do it, she is the one who pulls us through and finds the strength for both of us.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

We own a boutique semi-private gym called Archway Fitness. Being a small gym, we can create a space and environment that is more intimate, and more friendly than most. Archway Fitness is a semiprivate gym, which means we take the best of personal training, the personalization, and the best of group training, the energy, and combine them together. The thing that feels most exciting is having a gym where people can get results, yet still feel good. There seems to be this idea (especially on social media) that to get good results you need to punish yourself in the process. I have clients who, repeatedly, are shocked when I tell them to do less, and they are even more shocked when doing less yields better results. We work hard, but we don’t punish ourselves. A common phrase at the gym is ‘I’m just one workout away from a better day’.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

The three qualities/tools that I make use of everyday are: persistence, patience, and a dedication to learning. Patience and persistence go hand in hand. When I was mapping out my business plan and model, I expected the journey to success would take a long time. I already knew my wife and I would need patience and persistence. However, things took much longer than we anticipated. Every day, I decided to believe in myself and be persistent. I knew the things I was doing would be successful in the long run, so I kept at it and low and behold they paid off. The need for patience never ends. I need patience for the things that have yet to work out, I plan with patience, and I try to be okay with not knowing what may come.

The dedication to learning is making sure you are good at what you do. If you want to be in any business for a long time, you better make sure that you are good at it, and you better make sure you stay on top of any of the new things that are happening in your field.

We’ve all got limited resources, time, energy, focus etc – so if you had to choose between going all in on your strengths or working on areas where you aren’t as strong, what would you choose?

For me as a person, I try to be as well rounded as I can be. For my business, I go all in with my strengths. I’ll use social media as an example: to get a following, you need to be very specialized, and in order to be specialized you need to be good at one, or two, things. For me that is knowledge and connection. I have dedicated myself to learning as much as is possible about strength and conditioning, and so I lean into that and show at every turn that this is a gym that knows what it’s doing. Connection is the other side that we lean into, one of the great strength coaches of our time, Mike Boyle says, “No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care” and so we put that human connection above all else. You have to have both in your life; leaning too much in either direction would probably send your mind spinning.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://archwayfitness.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/arch_way_fitness/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/archwayfitness

Image Credits

The personal photo was taken by a client named Sam Riley. All other photos were taken by Jonathan Wiens.