Fitness Business School – The 3 Keys to Playing Bigger

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here. And in this episode, I want to talk with you about three keys to playing bigger. There are some things that maybe have been holding you back that I think we can break through and help you level up.

Welcome to the fitness business school with Pat Rigsby, the podcast for fitness entrepreneurs who want to make more income, have greater impact, and enjoy more freedom in their ideal business. If you’d like an accelerated route to these goals, email me at [email protected] and put BGA in the subject line and I’ll get you all the details about our business growth accelerator program.

After 15 years of coaching business owners, or I guess a little bit more than that. And after 20, I guess, 26, 27 years of coaching people, whether it be sports or team members that have worked for me or business owners or franchisees you know, there have been so many lessons learned, so many things that I’ve recognized that hold people back, things that go far beyond the, the actual tactics they’re employing the strategies that they’re using the, the skills that they have. It’s often a lot about what’s going on on the inside than it is about any of those sorts of things. So I want to talk about three things that I see hold people that have plenty of potential that maybe aren’t performing in the way they want. They hold those people back, that if you can break through, if you can get those things out of your way, so they’re no longer roadblocks you’re going to immediately start to play bigger. You’re going to level up and really start to see more success.

So the first one is I think we have to eliminate labels that hold us back. And it’s amazing how often people let these, these kind of stamps that they put on themselves, or maybe other people have put on them stand in their way. And, you know, I think there, there are people in our industry, especially because most people who are small business owners in the fitness industry, they didn’t get into the fitness industry because they said, man, this is a, a great business opportunity. They got into it because they, they liked fitness. They liked being in the gym. They, they may have liked the idea of helping people. They wanted to build a career around something that they were excited or enthusiastic about.

So it’s very common for somebody to say, I’m bad at sales or I’m bad at marketing, or I’m bad at business. And it really is a stumbling block because it gives them a reason to justify their, their failings. It gives them kind of this identity that validates any sort of shortcomings they have. And it also is, is kind of a crutch so that when something doesn’t work, there is no expectation that, well, Hey, if I just kind of stick to it, if I, if I put in the time, I’ll get better at it. It’s just an identity. And I remember early on in my professional life, I or in my business life, I thought, well, I’m bad with, you know, I’m bad with the back office stuff. I’m bad with accounting and finance. And I handed that stuff off and I would overpay at every end to, to really hand off the things that I had kind of labeled myself at, being bad at. And it cost me plenty of money over the years, because instead of paying a reasonable rate to get help in those areas, I would give up equity on things that I, it just didn’t merit, that kind of equity. Right.

And so we’ve gotta be willing to say, look okay. I have the, the aptitude and the attitude to get better at this thing. So I’m going to do it because what’s great is we live in a world with almost limitless information. If you want to get better at something, the opportunities there that doesn’t mean we’re all going to be world-class at everything. But if you’re choosing to be bad at something, it’s a choice. Like we’re, if you were bad at selling out, it’s already, you haven’t done very much to be good at selling. If you’re bad at marketing odds are, you haven’t put in many hours to be good at marketing. If you think about the things you are good at, you’ve probably put in some time and some effort you’ve probably persevered through being average or below average at some things before you got good at them.

And then along those same lines, when it comes to label saying, well, I’m only this, right? Like I’m only a trainer. I’m only a small business owner, you know? So, so it’s okay if I don’t do big things and really kind of this, this idea that you have to settle because of the career path you chose or the upbringing you had or where you’re from, or the education levels you have. But I think we can all look and it doesn’t take too long to find people who came from similar or far worse circumstances that have gone on to do great things that you’re saying you’re incapable of doing for these same reasons that were never limiting factors for that person. And, you know, I mean, how often did, and this is kind of not exactly the same thing as a label, but it’s kind of this limiting belief, like, you know, this mindset that money’s hard to come by, or because I’m from here, I couldn’t do that.

You know, just having these limiting beliefs that it’s fiction, right? Like you are fully capable of doing great things now, does that mean we can all kind of do what? Hopefully some of our parents might’ve told us when we were a little kids, Oh, you can be anything you want. You can do anything you want. No, I mean, I’m five-nine. I’m never going to be the center for them, but they’re, they’re still, so a few of us that get anywhere near our potential in whatever our chosen pursuits are. And a lot of times it’s just the labels that we give to ourselves. We, we tell ourselves that we’re not good enough. We’re not capable enough. We have these limiting beliefs where we, we let them get in the way. And you know, what’s great about this is, is there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary. If you’re willing to see it, you know, if you think you’re bad at business, and you’ve been doing this for a few years, well guess what? Over 80% of small businesses fail within the first five years. So if you’ve been around for five years and you’re still exist this thing, then you’re probably pretty good at business because you’re in that 20%. If you’ve been around longer than that, maybe you’re in the top 10%. Right. And if you’re doing anything that stands out, you got to give yourself credit. Like we, we tend to look at all the reasons why something won’t work, but we don’t look at the things that we’ve done well, and we don’t validate ourselves that way. And that, that was one of the great lessons that I learned that I was able to apply in business whenever I would come up against something and it seemed challenging and it seemed like maybe I might not succeed or whatever else I could look back at other successes that I had had. I said, well, I did this. And this thing that I’m facing now is no harder than that. Or I did this and these traits or these tactics helped me. So how can I apply those here? So that’s the first key.

The second one is taking personal responsibility. You determine the output. Now I’m not going to say you determine your circumstances. I’m not even going to say you determine the results because the circumstances definitely influenced the results, but you determine how you respond and what your output is to whatever situation that you were faced with your effort, your persistence, your consistency, what you’re willing to learn again, like mentioned with the first one, there, there is no shortage of information available to you. That’s, that’s free that that’s low cost now, Hey, I’m, I’m all for you buying coaching. And even more for you buying coaching from my, my company, but there’s plenty of information. I’ve seen people build six and even seven figure businesses and email me saying, yeah, I learned it from all the free stuff you posted, the blog, posts, the emails, you know, all that content. That’s what I needed.

Like there’s enough stuff out there that you, you could get spending pennies. And if you’re willing to put in the time, yeah, it’s available. I mean, you can go on YouTube and learn about anything. You can go to kids and get a few books and probably find everything that you need to know about building a six or even seven figure business. And sure, if you want to speed it up, if you want it customized to you, you probably need some coaching and some support. But if you’re willing to pay your dues, I know for me, when I didn’t have the budget to invest in things like masterminds and that sort of thing, there was no shortage of books. There were no shortage of eBooks. There were no shortage of blog posts being read, and this was pre-podcasts. So now, you know, I still, I’m listening to podcasts on a daily basis trying to learn, trying to get better and you’re listening to this. So I think you probably feel the same, but you have to take personal responsibility to determine your results. You have to say, Hey, you know what? If it’s to be it’s all me and I need to create the output here. That’s going to drive my business forward. It’s my responsibility to get leads. It’s my responsibility to get clients. It’s my responsibility to generate revenue, to help my clients succeed, help my team members succeed. If it’s going to happen as a business owner, it is on you.

And then the third key to playing bigger, accepting that progress matters more than perfection because perfection is fake, right? Like my, a younger son, Alex, has this wonderful mindset that perfection is not real perfect is not a thing. And I think that’s, that’s great because he has some OCD-ish tendencies where it seemed like, you know, erasing something. If the picture wasn’t the way you wanted, or he’d line things up in this very precise order, but just accepting that no matter how good you, you do it, like it’s not going to be perfect because perfect. A myth. Right?

In fact, most people that I know that say, well, I’m a perfectionist. What they’re really saying is I’m a procrastinator. And I don’t want to actually put my stuff out to the world because it might fail or I might be judged. I mean, it’s amazing to me, I’ll, I’ll talk to people. You know, I’ve got friends who were college baseball coaches that, you know, we’ve talked about info products and you know, they they’d put intellectual property out there and that hesitate because they didn’t want to be judged. They don’t want to be judged by their peers. And you know, there is no perfect, right? Like the idea is we continue to move forward. And in most cases, something being really good is good enough because anything that you’re putting out there, and this is what’s cool about the software world, right? They talk about the minimum viable product. And so some things in beta, so they, they kind of wrap their, their test in this kind of cocoon of safety where, Hey, don’t expect this to be perfect because it’s not. And I think all of us should embrace that. Like if you put it out there until it’s been stress tested by the users until people have given you feedback into it, you’ve actually learned from it being put to the test, you have no way to really know how good something is. So you can think it’s awesome. I, I can’t tell you the number of times I send out an email or promotion. I think, man, that’s really good. That’s going to be a home run and it falls flat. And you know, yet you’re still listening to this podcast. So I’m doing something right? Because something I’m putting out there is getting some attention. My businesses over time have done very well. And I’ve been very fortunate in that regard. But man, over the phone, 15 plus years that I’ve been serving the, the, the business owner community in our industry, the, the number of things that I’ve put out thinking, well, that’s pretty good that fell flat. I mean, hundreds and that’s okay because you learn and you test and you move on.

So understand that, just putting something out is progress in the direct response copywriting world. They call everything test because they don’t want to say, well, I put this out in it failed it flopped. They said, no, it’s a test. And then this is what I learned. So I’m going to test something new and that’s the mindset that we want to have. That’s that growth mindset. Everything’s everything’s in beta, in my mind, everything in my business, as long as I’ve been doing this. And at this point you know, I moved from being a guy I remember early on in my career being the youngest baseball coach in the country at the collegiate level to now being one of the seasoned people in the industry that are doing business coaching and that sort of thing. And it, I mean everything along the way, any success I’ve had along that journey, everything has been in beta because if there’s a better way, I want to move to that. If I can learn something from what I do today, that’ll make me more successful tomorrow. I’m happy to change and adapt because that’s kind of what business is. And that’s kind of what makes it fun. Like people that are unwilling to evolve, man. I mean, I think they’re missing out on a lot of the enjoyment that comes with entrepreneurship.

So three keys to getting bigger, removing those labels and taking responsibility for removing those labels because you may not have been the source of them originally, but you are the one in control of moving past them and releasing those. And then number two, taking responsibility, being the one to determine your own outcome. And then three understanding that progress should be the focus, not perfection, embrace those three things. And you’re on the path to playing bigger.

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