Tell them you’re done. Stop wasting your energy motivating fitness clients. It doesn’t help them and it doesn’t help you.
They, nor you, don’t need motivation. They don’t need someone to be a cheerleader or to sell them a bunch of hooey about being a success story because they lose weight or fit into a size they haven’t seen in decades.
What they need is to understand commitment.
Show them how to commit to the actions they have to take. Before you do that you have to know the reason why this is important to them. If you haven’t had a long conversation with them about it then starting to exercise will get you absolutely nowhere.
And it’s likely to get them sore, and or temporarily inspired by a sense of achievement that they haven’t tied to anything that they want in life that really matters.
If you didn’t sleep through that lecture way back when you remember it, safety, shelter, food, love… and then… self-actualization.
So figure out what they are willing to commit to if not to themselves. The only way you can stop motivating your fitness clients is to start securing their commitment from the beginning.
The moment you begin to think of yourself or your job as a motivator, you lose any long term influence you might otherwise have on a client. You’re not with them the other 23 hours of the day or possibly the other 163 hours of the week.
It’s not you. It’s them.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a health coach. A bad health coach is available 24/7 to his or her clients. Because that’s hardly drawing the boundaries that you want a client to draw for themselves.
That’s playing God.
The job’s already taken.
To stop motivating fitness clients you first may need to visit how you stay committed to your personal fitness. They’ll ask. But they’ll ask how you stay motivated.
You should tell them you don’t. Do you? I’m not motivated every day. But I’m committed.
“The way you do anything is the way you do everything.”
If you aren’t committed then you miss a lot, you do more when you feel like doing more, do less when you’re hungover, on vacation, or faced with things to do at home.
If you are committed, and not obsessed, you do it no matter where you are. You don’t need the mirrors at the fitness center you’ll do it in your basement. You don’t need to wear flashy skin tight clothes you’ll do it in sweats. You don’t need an hour you’ll fit in 20 minutes to be consistent.
Why do you do it?
That’s the question. If your client doesn’t have the answer to that question, then January 7th you’ll have a full schedule and February 7th you won’t. Those three trial sessions will be done and so will they.
Motivating fitness clients is not your job. Helping them identify what in their life makes committing to exercise and healthy lifestyle worth it is your job.
That makes you and your client successful. It eases the burden on you. Now you can do everything you’re really trained to do during sessions and tie them to that anchor of an individuals why they’re committed. Find their why, their “cry why,” because if they haven’t then definitely a lack of motivation matters.
If you’re committed, a lack of motivation is just a temporary thing trying to get you to hit snooze, go for the cocktail instead of the workout or convince yourself you have too much to do to exercise.
If you’re chasing motivation, an exercise session is not yet a habit and not likely to be one.
Stop motivating fitness clients: start interviewing them better
- Why is this important to you?
- Why is that important to you?
- What’s important about that?
- What will that mean to you?
- Why is that important to you?
A redundant line of questions is a big part of asking and listening. Start there. Make it clear that you don’t work with anyone that doesn’t know exactly why they want to work with you.
Still motivating fitness clients? Have you already stopped? Do you catch them asking about “motivation?”
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