Fitness Business School – Investing, Learning, and Implementing

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here. And in today’s episode I wanna talk with you about the difference between investing, learning, and implementing. Let’s get started.

Welcome to the Fitness Business School podcast, the show for fitness business owners who want to grow their income, increase their impact and improve their lifestyle. Be sure to listen to the end of this episode because we have a brand new special offer exclusive for listeners. So stay tuned.

It’s always interesting to see how people operate the small business owners that I work with, but it’s not just them. I mean, it’s people who buy information
products, people who join gyms. There are different things that people do to try to solve their problems or reach their goals, and we all get some sort of validation or kind of a dopamine rush or whatever from doing certain things.

And one thing that you see a lot of is somebody gets this kind of internal positive response just by investing in something. They may join a gym, they may buy a book, they may join a course or a coaching program. And that alone, it makes them feel good because they feel optimistic. They feel like
they’re doing something that has the potential to help them change or improve, solve a problem. And so I mean, internally, they get some sort of validation or kind of this positive rush when it comes to their self-image, their self-worth, all those kind of happy chemicals, everything.
They’re happy about that. But remember, that’s kind of like the beginning of something, not the end of something. But in, in many cases, people they buy it and that’s the end of it.

They’ll buy a book and they’ll never open the cover. They’ll buy a course and they’ll never go through any of the curriculum. They’ll join a coaching program and not engage. So, there are people that, that kind of do that. And admittedly, they don’t get the outcome that they ultimately were looking for, right? They don’t get the result, the better business, the improved body composition, whatever their desired result was. And then the second group of people, they’ll
learn it, they’ll study it, they’ll research it, they’ll, whether it’s in a self-directed way, or as a part of a facilitated program or something like that, right? They’ll read plenty of books. They will scour the internet, they’ll watch YouTube videos, they will join coaching programs and attend all the trainings, and
they’ll know the stuff, but they don’t do it or do it consistently.

And again, they will get frustrated by their lack of positive outcome, by the failure to get the desired result that they were looking for. And then finally, there’s the implementers, right? There’s people that they’re the fewest and farthest between, right? I mean, on the front end, you, you’ve got kind
of the dreamers, and then on the back end you have the doers. And the implementers are the people who follow the plan. They go put the things that they’re consuming into action. If they read a book, they apply what they learn. If they buy a course, they apply some of what they learn. If they join a coaching program,
they take action. And they’re obviously the doers. They’re the ones who get the best outcome. So the challenge for us is business coaches, or is coaches serving fitness clients or athletes or whatever else, is to move as many people to that doer stage, that implementer stage as possible.

And it can be challenging. I mean, I’ve been doing this for, I mean, in some ways, coaching people since, gosh, the 1994, actually 1990, no, 1993. And, and that is I mean, it’s a lot of coaching opportunities, a lot of experience with people who are at kind of different stages on that continuum. And I think that there’s nothing wrong with somebody coming to you on the front end is a dreamer, so to speak, right? Like somebody coming to you with seeing all this stuff through rose colored glasses. I mean, it’s a little bit like people new to anything, to entrepreneurship. I mean, I remember when we would get these highly decorated freshmen coming into our fall when I was a college baseball coach, people who’d been Allstate or multiple time all conference, sometimes like conference player of the year, and then all of a sudden they’re having to play against guys who are three or four years older than them.

They’re playing against people who have a lot of experience playing at a higher level because they had already been in college and, and they don’t handle it well. So a lot of them would bail. I mean, 50, 60% of them wouldn’t stay the course. And those were kind of the dreamers. They had this optimistic, kind of
utopian view of how things were gonna be, but when they recognized what actually went into it they didn’t stay the course. Whereas the people that ultimately graduated and became the doers and they did the work in the weight room, they did the extra work to develop as
players. They got what they needed to get done in the classroom, and then they reached some on the field and off the field goals. And in the business coaching world, we see that a lot.

Just the number of people who buy a, anything from a workshop to a higher end coaching program, and they don’t fully engage or they don’t fully implement. It’s, I mean, it’s a battle, right? Like they, they already, if they own an active business, they already have a full plate. They have the
responsibilities of running a business while still trying to add new things or change things or whatever else, in addition to whatever responsibilities they, they have personally, if they have families or anything like that. So it’s, again, it’s one of the more challenging things that we do in a leadership or coaching
position. So how do we fix that? Well, the simplest thing that I know at this point is to get people to plan, number one, get people to plan. If they don’t plan, they’re not gonna succeed. And yeah, they may do things kind of one off a la carte stuff.

They may apply things in some fragmented fashion, but they’re not gonna follow the plan as intended and get the desired result as hoped. So they’ve got a plan because they’ve gotta control their schedule and their time to make sure that they’re consistent in what they need to do. The second thing that I believe has to
happen is there has to be human accountability. There has to be some sort of just, I mean, to make it simple, just to say they need to know somebody’s watching. And I think back to my best experience, like in my own personal kind of lifting journey was always when I had a good training partner
and you got somebody that is waiting on you, somebody you know is gonna push you, somebody that’s gonna challenge you, and that accountability, it was more important than the perfect program or the best weight room or anything like that.

So that’s the second piece, this human accountability. The third piece is, I think that we all do better if things are broken down into manageable steps. So sequential versus simultaneous. And some of it’s just common sense, right? I mean, we don’t ask people to do, if they’re gonna train five times in a week, we
don’t ask them to do all of their training sessions on Monday. We kind of disperse things out over the course of the week. And when we’ve done things with clients where it’s step by step, do this and then do this, they do better then if you just leave them to their own devices and say, Hey, here are the 10 things
you need to do. So guided implementation, guided execution, or facilitated execution, I believe tends to work better. Now, if you think about an offline training, busin business versus an online training business, some of these are easier in the offline training business, right?

I mean, having people have appointments. So there’s some accountability. Having people do things sequentially, Hey, you’re gonna come in Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I know that you’re gonna be here at this time. This is when your appointments are, somebody’s gonna be here supervising you to
execute the plan a little bit easier than if you say, Hey, here’s your program for the week and there’s no appointment, there’s nobody that’s gonna be supervising them, or at least they’re in attendance that they have to be accountable to. I mean, it’s a little bit tougher. So if you think about that, that that’s part of the
reason why it’s a little bit easier to get an outcome for somebody offline than online from a training perspective. But then if we think about nutrition, how do we do that? How do we keep people on track?

I mean, most nutrition programs that work are either kind of a sequential curriculum where habits are built one, one on top of another, or things that work in the short term are, Hey, here’s what you need to eat today, right? So there’s some accountability that way. Now obviously the latter is harder to sustain for
years and perpetuity, but the former, it isn’t maybe a specific. So there are pros and cons to everything. So if you want to help people do well, if you want to help them do better, we gotta move them. We can’t be mad that they’re at the dreamer stage. They, that’s just part of it. People I think hope for the
best, but the reality of the work in real life getting in the way and all that stuff is what slows them down. But we need to meet them where they are and then set them up to succeed if we want them to get their result.

And if we can do that, the better we are at facilitating this implementation stuff. And in some cases, that means doing some things for them or getting them as close to the finish line as possible. The better we are at that, the better our business is gonna be. So if you want to be better as a business owner, don’t assume
people will arrive at your doorstep as doers. Assume that they’re gonna come as dreamers and figure out how you can make them effective, is doers as easy and as low friction as possible.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Fitness Business School.

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