Dr. Darian Parker: To Say "I Don't Know" is a Powerful Tool.

At the Podium with Patrick Huey

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The Mind of an Athlete. Show Up and Do the Grunt Work.

Here we are in February. How are those New Year’s Resolutions going for you? Fortune.com tells us that by the second Friday of January, most people have already missed the mark on their resolutions. It even has a name – “Quitter’s Day.”

Dr. Darian Parker, the 2023 IDEA Personal Trainer of the Year Recipient, is a multihyphenate entrepreneur, athlete, and a man of faith. And he is breaking open myths. On what it takes to be a Division-1 Student Athlete competing at elite levels (he was a sprinter at James Madison University). On the interior work he has to do to be a good father (as he says, “I’m always working on the inner me, so that I can help develop a better inner person for another person.”). On the reality that life is lived at its best and realest without guarantees or known outcomes but is founded on authentic love for our fellow human beings (as a professed man of faith, he is looking to love people authentically). And a question that I have pondered often – do we have to love our jobs, or is something different going on in respect to what we do versus who we are in our souls?

Through his work with clients over the last two decades, Darian has learned that all we can rely on is our ability to build true relationships with one another and to make a commitment to show up every day even when the outcomes are unknown or don’t go our way. In his work as a personal trainer, he won’t promise his clients that they will get that long sought after six-pack or hit that number they are looking for on the scale. Oftentimes, those type of results are based on circumstances that only the client can control – the quality of their sleep, what they are actually eating, how are their personal relationships impacting their lives? Darian will guarantee that he will show up every day and be ready to face the challenge of working out alongside them. The bigger factor in the equation is will they show up for themselves.

In a time when so many seek quick results and instant fame, IG likes and the social media viral moments, Darian believes that one’s life doesn’t bloom under the bright lights of fame, accolades, or ego. Instead, it is a nuanced dance performed in the powerful spaces of the admission “I don’t know.” It is facing, even removing what he calls the Friction Points in our lives. For Dr. Parker, the real champions show up daily and do the monotonous grunt work that is a major and essential part of what we call living.

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