Today I want to talk a bit about dependency versus empowerment with your fitness clients.
Coaches in the fitness industry, the vast majority truly lack confidence in their own ability to deliver profound transformational change to their clients. Which is a sorry case of affairs, it’s a very unfortunate situation for both parties, because it’s what the client really wants. And for the coach, it’s a sad situation because if they can’t deliver that, they don’t get what they need, which is a professional income from that.
So the next best thing seems to be “if I can’t give them what they want, to the degree to which they want it, then I’m going to keep them happy and entertained”. And you kind of transform your role from the Merlin-like sage into the court jester, that just keeps people entertained all the time, where you’re just intersecting variety for variety’s sake into their routines, into their lives, to literally make it fun, because there’s no better idea.
And while that will work for a while because everybody likes fun and everybody likes variety, what the client’s actually came to you for in the first place was results. Make no mistake about that. And the results that they are after is profound physical, morphic, transformational change, i.e, muscle built, fat lost, look better without their clothes on, performing better as a result of that, feeling younger and looking younger as a result of that. Really, the truth is that 99.9%, if not 100%, want just that. Hell even athletes, who will make up a micro percentage of your total clients in the fitness industry, want that to different degrees, depending on the sport.
Building muscle is a good way to increase strength potentiation; a larger muscle has a greater strength potential, all other things being equal. And less fat is going to mean less useless weight on your body, so you can be faster, you can run faster, you can jump higher, and all these things are associated with speed, strength, and performance.
So even among the micro percentage that might want something different, looking better, is STILL highly related to to an optimal outcome, if indirectly. So why are you gearing everything that you’re doing towards stuff that isn’t directly achieving what it is that your clients actually want?
It doesn’t matter what the reason is that they tell you they’re there, when you take all the self-consciousness out of it, and you take all the social judgment out of it, and you take all lying to yourself out of it, with all the social pressure gone, and strip it back to what the honest truth actually is…People want to look better with their clothes off and with them on. They want to look better and as a result they will feel better both emotionally and literally from a physiological perspective, their health markers will be improved.
They want all this, people want to live longer and look better doing it. And if you’re not doing that in a profound manner, if whatever it is that you’re doing with them isn’t doing that for them, in whatever way it is that you’re serving your clients, if it ISN’T delivering that for them in a profound way, and doing so as promptly as can be achieved, then you’re offering them a sub-optimal service and it won’t take them long before they figure that out.
And the problem for most people from a client’s perspective is, they trainer hop from one guy to the next, always looking for the prize, always looking for the solution and never finding it, because it seems to be quite hard to do what they want. But when you learn how to do it, as I’ve said before in the past, it’s as easy as breathing, but first you need to know, you need to know how to do it!
They want to be empowered. And the best part about that is, if you’re the person that empowers them with this information, you don’t have to worry about retaining them as clients after the program is over. It doesn’t have to become a fear fest where you’re afraid of losing them. You don’t have to exist in a situation where you don’t know how to give them what they want, and only know how to keep them temporarily entertained. We don’t have to go to the circus to keep our clients. They don’t want to go to the circus. If they want to have fun, there’s better ways to do it. They’re coming to YOU for results. Let me tell you, the one thing that’s more fun than any variety, is maximum results!
The workout might not be fun, but the result is, and that’s why they’re there and that’s why they’re paying you. And if you want to retain them, the fastest way to do it, believe it or not, is to get them what they want as quickly as possible, because you will then become the person who has delivered huge transformational change for that individual and will become, therefore, a vehicle of happiness in that person’s life, and that will have a knock on effect on their family and then ripple further to their community, to their work, to their customers.
You will become an important significant person to them and rightly so. What’s the odds they’re going to want to leave your gym after that? Well, I can tell you through personal experience, that with regards to the A12, the problem isn’t retaining people after the 12 weeks, the problem is finding space in the gym for new people. And that’s not a common problem in the fitness industry. And the reason it’s not a common problem is because breathtaking results achieved really quickly, is also fairly rare. Outside of this program, you will find it, but to the magnitude which it’s found within this program, I feel confident in saying that it doesn’t exist anywhere else as of right now.
Empower your clients and set them free, because the fastest way to keep them is to let them go with a job well done.
Stay Strong,
Paul McIlroy.