Introducing: Kirsten 2.0

This is a great place to start if you have only just found me. Or if you have known me for a while, I hope that this post will give you a clearer picture of my crazy dreams, and maybe you will know why I sometimes do the crazy things I do!

So, without further ado.

Hi! My name is Kirsten and I am your coach! Ok, maybe not yet! ;) Though whether or not I become your coach is irrelevant to us having conversations based on trust, openness and respect. It’s a relationship where I see myself sharing my experience and hopefully compelling you to do the same - either with me or with others!

Yes, this is 2022 - a month and a half away from Christmas to be exact. How has your year been for you? I hope it has gone well so far!

I write from Scotland - HULLO! - and looking out of my window, a familiar wintry, grey and windy Scottish day greets my garden and the woodland beyond. The summer birds that come to bath in our stream are perhaps choosing to be tucked deep in the denser trees. Every so often, I hear an energetic chirp followed by a flutter of red, yellow, white and black across my window pane. It’s a good day.

Having settled in a beautiful city called Dundee, I find myself self-employed for the last 6 years since arriving in 2016. Time flies! 6 years - 3 visas, 3 jobs and 2 dogs later, here I am writing my first blog on this Aikki website.

While the view outside my window looks comforting as I sit here with my nutmeg coffee and my ‘Fluffy’ (dressing gown), the global outlook if one were to take an economic perspective is bleak, to say the least.

Post-pandemic and Britain is now facing one of its longest recession in history. The recent articles in the newspapers talk about “businesses losing their fight” and losing their confidence in even the government’s understanding of business and economics.

When I speak to people I teach, coach or hang out with, the general feeling is one of anxiety and stress. Everyone seem to feel overwhelmed and near exhaustion. The few things that are keeping everyone going are their families, their children, their faiths and their belief that they will survive the impending tough times.

I can’t help but think of the people that I don’t get to speak to - some of them might not have the same sense of hope. Some of them could be struggling, paralysed with fear and completely catatonic because their minds and their hearts have shut down. Truth is, how many of us are actually in this latter group but doing our best to present ourselves otherwise?

It’s not a bad place to be in - that latter group. We all have that feeling one time or another. We are but human.

So, the main point of this ‘introductory blog post’ is to point out the main focus of Aikki - of what Aikki is about, of what Aikki hopes to achieve for every member of the Aikki Family.

To properly describe Aikki’s ambition, I need to take you back to May 2011, to a specific day - the 19th - the day Aikki was conceived. Having lost everything through a horrific near-fatal accident, over the course of 4-5 years, I had to relearn how to walk again, run again. Over the course of the last 11 years, I had to work out how to function with a different body at work and then I had to work out how to complete my PhD and other studies with a different mind.

Having been stripped of my old physical and mental selves - the hardware and software - I started my own Aikki journey in 2011 to rebuild Kirsten so that Version 2.0 will be my highest, fullest self. I’m not at my highest self yet but I the highest version of myself I have ever been!

2020 - I was still in the midst of working out my 2.0 when the pandemic hit, but because I was coaching the Dundee University Triathlon Club, I knew I had to put on my coach’s cap and help my student athletes maintain some semblance of a daily routine to help these aspiring 20-somethings build their resilience and grit to get through what I already knew was going to be a long-drawn out pandemic, not aided by the government’s lack of leadership that was even more distracted by the farce that was Britain’s Brexit process.

Two years were spent guiding student athletes and then I invited working adults to join me in daily morning routines of strength and conditioning work. We were there every morning and we were there to support each other through some of our post morning training breakfasts together. Having spent all these mornings doing Aikki work, I realised that I was onto something - something that needs to be shared with the world immediately - extensively and ‘intimately’, for want of a better word.

It has always been my dream - Aikki. I didn’t know it was going to be Aikki back then and I didn’t know how I was going to get ‘an Aikki’ entity started but I now know I want to and I need to change the world.

Aikki is my contribution to this world.

We need to create the world that we dream of, and so my dream sees Aikki as a thing that every family knows and loves. I properly started building the methods of Aikki two years ago and now with this new website, I am only starting to take on the world. It is scary but I now know that is completely and utterly where I want to be. It has given me the biggest and clearest sense of purpose, joy and a feeling of bliss doing the work that I have always wanted to do and achieving the goals that I’ve always wanted to achieve.

So, as my first Blog post, I would like say it again - this time much louder!

HI, MY NAME IS KIRSTEN AND I WOULD LIKE TO BE YOUR COACH! TOGETHER WE WILL CHANGE THE WORLD!

Love and Blessings,

Kirsten

p.s. Call me ‘crazy’ but I believe I can change the world!