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How to Hack Your Clients’ Thinking So You Can Skyrocket Their Results (and make yourself look like an all knowing guru). Hey, I’m Sarah from mostmotion® and I’m here with a video for every sports and fitness coach who cares about keeping their clients injury free and doing what they can to help with the situation. So, this question came about this video came about from somebody who’s in the SMARTT® Folks Facebook group, if you’re not in there yet go to smarttfolks.com, that’s smarttfolks.com. You can ask ask any questions in there. This came from a question from Mulalo. I’m hoping I’m pronouncing that right. And he wanted to know, when is it a good time to meet up with your physio and stop thinking, no pain, no gain? So I’m going to try and answer that question in the context of the individual and in the context of the coach, okay, because there’s lots of things flying around with injury prevention, and that kind of thing. There’s lots of false ideas out there about what coaches can and can’t do. And it boils down to what the client is thinking, Okay, if you don’t know what your client is thinking, you don’t know how to help them. So this gives this question gives a really good insight into what your fitness clients are actually thinking. And that gives us a jumping off point. So we can start and make a solution. So if we can hack, what they’re thinking we can give amazing results.
So the first thing we need to know is what your client is scared of, and what they believe, okay, they are definitely scared of not training, okay, there’s the one thing they definitely want to do, which is why Mulalo said, When can I stop thinking No pain, no gain, because the first time they think about going to see a physio or somebody like that, then they know there’s the potential that they have to stop training, they don’t want to do that, they want to put it off for as long as they can. So they’re also scared of unearthing a huge problem that they’re going to be stuck with forever. Because they think that these issues are just going to be labelled, once they have a name for something, they believe these things stick around forever, which they don’t. But clients are frightened of unearthing these problems that they’re going to have to pay for for a long time. And avoid training for a long time. They also believe that you are not the right person as a fitness coach to do with that, which you’re not, but there’s stuff you can do. And that comes to my second point, is that know your own limitations and your capabilities. Okay? Once you know what they are and you can safely help out, then you can take appropriate action and appropriate being the operative word here. Okay. Anybody can take action, whether it’s appropriate or not, is depends on what you know, and your approach. Okay?
So I’m going to try and give you an example. It’s a first aid situation, okay. But it involves three people. There’s me a guy I’m going to call Bill, okay, and another guy called Johnny. Okay. Now, Johnny is type one diabetic. Okay, he’s had this issue for this whole life. He’s in his late 40s. And we were at a swim training session. Now this, Johnny has had this problem all his life. And Bill has known him for 20 odd years. Okay. Bill is the coach of the swimming session. And I was just there as a swimmer. Okay, so this Johnny has been going to swimming sessions every week for decades. And for some reason, whether he just not taken his insulin or something like that, during the day don’t know what happened the first thing in the morning, and he got out of the pool, got into the changing rooms. And I was just sitting in the cafe people came out going I don’t know if you seen Johnny is acting really weird, is he’s just saying strange things. And he’s taking ages to get changed. And when Johnny came out, the changing rooms came out into the cafe he’s normally business suit tied on up nicely, all this kind of stuff. His tie was around the back of his neck and you know, he’s slurring his words, and his shirt was all hanging out and things like this, and I’m thinking this looks weird. So he sat down with me and Bill at this table. And Bill is trying to respect the fact that Johnny knows his situation. He understands his condition. So he was saying to Johnny, are you okay, Johnny’s going. Yeah, yeah, fine. He’s slurring his words. He’s clearly not okay. But Bill didn’t want to overstep. He didn’t want to impose on the fact that Johnny knew his condition better than he did.
Okay, I had virtually no knowledge of type one diabetes, all I knew from experience of having watched somebody before, is that once they in that slide, of slurring their words, their arms can do strange things. They can talk rubbish. And once they are at that point, it’s a slow slide, or can be very quick into serious problems. Okay, so I knew he needed sugar. And I said to Bill, do we think we should go and get him a scone? Bill’s going No, no, I think he’ll be fine. Okay, so I’m sitting waiting, watching Johnny’s getting worse, okay, I have two options. At this point, I can sit and do nothing and wait for it to get worse, in which case, we might find ourselves in a very emergency situation. Or I can just go and get a scone and put it in front of him and see what happens. Okay, I went and did that. I just took the appropriate action that I could, because the other choice was to do nothing, and wait for it to get worse. And exactly the same happens with your clients, okay?
When they are injured when they have pain, we can either stand by and do nothing and wait for it to get worse, and accept the fact that they say that they’re fine. Or we can understand our capabilities of what we can do. And we can take appropriate action. Okay. If you don’t know what your clients thinking, if you don’t know the fears, and the worries about their injuries, and you accept the fact that they’re fine, you will lose them, because they will end up injured, there is no situation where leaving pain alone is ever going to help, it’s always going to get worse, most sporting injuries don’t come out of nowhere. They are what we call gradual onset, which means that they build up over time. Okay, if we leave a pain that kind of comes and goes alone, it will just be there all the time, once it’s constant, then it will stop you doing one thing, and then you leave it longer, you will stop doing something else as well. And then eventually it will stop you training altogether. This is the point where most clients have left it long enough to understand that it’s not going away on its own. And that’s the point that they go and seek help. Okay, but as fitness coaches, there’s actually more that we can do. And if you don’t know what that is, then you need to go and grab a copy of my FREE book, “The Coaches Guide to Long Term Injury Prevention Success”, because it will help you understand what your capabilities are, it will help you give you some strategies and some tips that you can apply straight away that you can start helping your clients appropriately. That’s not to say that they shouldn’t go and seek help and professional physio help. Of course they should, but you are in the same position I was with the scone situation, you can either go and get it and put it in front of them. You can do something appropriate. Or you can just sit back and do nothing. If you want to take appropriate action and you want to start helping your clients safely and maybe avoid the situation where they need to go and see the physio, then you need to grab a copy of the book, click the link in the description and I will see you next time. Thanks for watching.