A TOTAL LIFE TRANSFORMATION – Shontelle Dubois

BY: ALYSSA MAHADEO

Strength, power and agility. These are just some of the traits possessed by powerful women who understand what it means to do whatever it takes to make it through life, and also survive even the toughest of times.

Shontelle Dubois had a rough start in life. Many of those who meet her today wouldn’t know it but her journey was a trial she had to endure to make it to where she is today. Born and raised in the GTA Shontelle has few memories of her childhood. Raised by a single mother of four, Shontelle shares that what she remembers from her early years was the pain brought on by many instances of emotional and verbal abuse.

“We had Children’s Aid visiting us all the time, our teachers would call the office because we would have to be interviewed to explain bruises or lacerations on our skin,” Shontelle recalls. “It was really bad, and so when I was around eleven or twelve I called my dad and he finally came to get me.”

Shontelle practically raised all four of her siblings during, learning adult responsibilities at a very early age. Her mother was rarely at home so she would have to take over as head of the household, going to the bank to pay bills, having to cook for herself and her siblings.

“By the time I was ten I was making full course meals, I grew up far beyond my time and so by the time I was of age to move out I already had responsibilities of someone who was thirty years old,” she shares.

Shontelle lived with her father until she was nineteen, before moving out and figuring it out on her own ever since. After moving out, she started University, having to work three jobs in order to pay for tuition.

“I didn’t have OSAP or a loan or anything to help me,” Shontelle says. “I was always busy and difficult to reach, but I managed to graduate on time in four years.”

In her final year of University, Shontelle gave birth to her first child. Fresh out of University she had to do whatever it took to provide for her daughter. Shontelle continued to work tirelessly and just when things in her life were starting to look up, she met with a serious car accident, that left her severely injured with a long path to recovery ahead.

“After the car accident is when life hit me again,” Shontelle shares. “I got fired from my job, I went broke, and I had to do 3 years of rehab.” Her daughter was still just a toddler, but just like that, everything that she had worked to build for herself seemed to be pulled out from beneath her.

“I gained so much weight from being on painkillers and I was bedridden for a year, so when I decided to lose a 105lb that’s when people went crazy.”

Prior to her accident, Shontelle had been working at a private gym as a personal trainer. Unfortunately, she lost her job after the accident, but she still had a child to take care of and bills to pay.

“When they fired me, I was also in danger of being evicted,” Shontelle says. “I didn’t know where I was going to make money and my mentor at the time told me that I was a trainer, I should train people, but I would have to figure out how.”

Shontelle found herself in the most unbelievable of situations, training people in the stairwell of her apartment building. “I was hungry for people to come in the stairwell so I could train them, I training them for free just so I could have some transformation pictures to show people how my method was working.”

At first, people didn’t believe it. Her 30-day transformations didn’t seem real to people, and she realized that if people were going to start taking her seriously she needed to have more clients with unbelievable results.

“I had to go through a lot of criticism and people making fun of me because I was working in the stairwells at Jane and Finch which isn’t the cleanest location,” Shontelle says. “I would sweep and mop the stairwells myself.”

Shontelle says there are multiple times when her daughter helped her to see the benefit in what she was doing. There were times she wanted to break down, watching her clients do their routines in the stairwell with her daughter sitting on the stairs watching every single day.

“Sometimes she would get up come over and show them how they were doing the exercise wrong, correct them and demonstrate additional workouts as well,” Shontelle says. “Watching her I would gather my emotions and realize I got this.”

Eventually, even after getting kicked out of the stairwells, Shontelle still found somewhere some space no matter how small to continue training her clients. She worked her way up showing the world unbelievable results until finding herself one as of the most in-demand trainers in the GTA.

“A lot of people look at me now and say how you have it all, but they really have no idea where I’m coming from this struggle that I’ve gone through. When I share my story with people there are so many horrific details that I exclude, so many things that I didn’t say I would need hours to make them understand how I’m so strong because my whole life I’ve had to hustle to get through.”

Shontelle says her dad gave her some advice which she continues to pass on to her clients. “My dad had this saying, ‘A bad thing never happens,’ he would always say it whenever I was upset about something and now that I’m older and I’m in the field that I’m in all the stuff that my mom put me through it made me strong enough to be the woman to handle the multitude of things that I’m doing right now,” Shontelle says.

“If she didn’t do all that she’d done, I wouldn’t have been able to handle all that I’m getting right now and be level headed and humble about it. My whole life has been a journey, even now, for the first time I’m finally breathing, I’m living and I’m actually happy.”