Prefer to read? Here’s the transcription of the video:
.
Today’s thought of the day is being helpful. Hey, I’m Sarah from mostmotion® and this weekend I’ve been pondering, shall we say, on the idea of being helpful. Now there was a recent survey that I did with some personal trainers. And one of the questions I asked was, Why do you want to be a personal trainer? and 57% of the people who answered said, I want to be a personal trainer, because I want to feel helpful. But what does being helpful actually mean though?
For many coaches, the idea of being helpful means that they need to be the solution, or they need to have the answers. And it’s really my experience that the most help that you can give people is when you ask questions, and you connect people with the solution. Now that solution can be you. But it can also be somebody else. And when it comes to injuries, particularly, we don’t need to know all the answers about injuries.
The questions that we need to be asking people and the observations that we make can be helpful enough, if we can connect people with the right solution. So let’s say for example, you had somebody in your session who had been coming regularly, and all of a sudden, you noticed a change in their body language, you noticed a change in their behaviour in their posture. For example, maybe they’re standing with their arms crossed, like all the time, they just can’t seem to relax their arms. Now if you’ve noticed that, you can ask questions around the idea of stress in their lives, you can ask them if they’ve been doing something out of the ordinary, that is leading them to not being able to relax their arms, and just asking questions around that topic might lead you to get some answers from them. That gives you an idea of where you might be able to send people next.
So if they say to you something like, Oh, I’m going through a really stressful time right now, then you could direct them to somebody who they can talk to, if they’re saying to you, oh, I did, I don’t know a body pump class yesterday or two days ago, and actually have really hurts to straighten my arms, then, you know, you can start maybe guiding them towards some stretches that they could do or something like that. But if we don’t ask the questions in the first place, or if we don’t notice these observations in the first place, then we can’t really be that helpful to them. You know, if we don’t ask those questions, and we don’t notice those things, we could just end up being part of the problem, because we could just add more stress to their lives by pursuing the intense exercise session that we that we were planning to do for them.
So I don’t know how you feel about that. But too many times I think coaches feel like not knowing or not being the solution for people is some kind of weakness, when actually it can be much more powerful when we say to people, or we admit to ourselves, actually, I don’t know the answer here. But I can connect you with somebody who does know more about this than I do. And that is in no way at all a weakness. That is literally you stepping up and being able to help them in a different way. And that’s way more powerful than feeling like you need to know the answers all the time. I don’t know how you feel about that. Put your comments in the comment box below. And let’s just get the conversation started.
And if you want to hear more kind of conversations about different ways of being able to help your clients, your participants, and you want to kind of tackle the really different conversations around topics that you don’t feel like you know much about maybe it’s mental health, maybe it’s parents in coaching something like that, then I would really invite you to come and listen to the podcast.
The new unlocking fitness podcast is totally free. You can listen to it at unlockingfitness.com/podcast. So I hope you come and join us over there. And of course, you can always comment and give your ideas and helpful solutions in the injury hackers Facebook group as well, you can join us there at injuryhackers.com so thanks for watching, and I’ll see you again next time.