Addressing Stress and Client Empathy

Yeah, well, look, the first thing is you have to admit that there's a problem. You know, it's just like anything else. And a lot of your clients will come to you and they'll say, you'll say, hey, Ben, how stressed are you? Well, I don't feel very stressed, Luke. And you say, well, OK, let's talk about it. And what I find is that coaches don't spend enough time actually talking to their clients. They're too busy doing, using special programs and calipers and doing all this other stuff that the clients hate instead of sitting them down and going, let's get to the root of what's actually happening. And let's find out if I'm qualified to even help you or if we need to bring somebody else in. Because what I've learned is there's a ton of psychological things that people are going through. There's a ton of like really messed up childhood trauma that you're just not able to deal with. there's a lot of things you're doing with work and relationships and things that a personal trainer can't fix with sets, reps and time under tension. So we have to start, we have to start admitting that there's some, some other things going on that we have to address. So the God gave you two ears and one mouth for a reason. You ask questions and you let your client tell you what the problem is. And the only way you're going to do that is if you sit down, talk to them and actually give a shit. And that's what a lot of people don't care about anymore. That the industry has gotten too much about money and nobody actually cares. And I think it's, it's, you know, the, the, you know, the kind of my past life and where I came from, there's no empathy, especially with male trainers. Male trainers have a really hard time with, with empathy and actually like understanding what your client's going through. And if you want your client to give it their all, if you want them to stop self-sabotaging, if you want them to learn how to eat correctly, you have to sit down and find out what's actually going on or you can't really move forward. and you'll get really good success with 30 or 40% of your clients. But what about the 50, 60, 70% that you're not doing anything for? And when, when you're trying to do everything right, but they're self-sabotaging, when you're trying to do everything right and nothing works, you know, when, when, when they're lying about what they're eating, or sometimes they're not even lying, they're just not losing weight and they're eating the way you tell them to, there's underlying physiology where something's just not, not clicking inside of them. And so that's kind of what we talk to our guys about. We talk about a lengthy interviewing session, like sit down and find out what the problem is. This is the questions you need to ask and find out about their sleep, find out how they're pooping, you know, let them understand what a proper poop is. Most clients don't know even what they're supposed to be doing. They don't understand that four or five hours a night is not adequate. And they also think that just because they're in bed unconscious that they're asleep. And that's not the case. You have to be getting good restful sleep. They need to understand that a peanut is not a quality protein. They need to understand, you know, there's a lot of stuff they need to understand. And, you know, we have to get trainers to the point where they understand that they're not just a personal trainer, but they're also a mentor and a teacher. And part of their job is teaching their clients how to change their lifestyle. You know, I have a lot of appreciation for that perspective, which has taken both me and you, I know, years and years to establish and appreciate. Because, you know, one of the things about empathy is, I feel like to a degree, it has to be experiential. And we have to go through all of these stages in our life and our career with our own personal struggles to be able to understand what our clients are going through. And that's seemingly a very difficult aspect of training the trainer, because you have so many trainers that are so young and full of testosterone and and you know want to just hit the gym and eat clean and not understanding the implications of stress and lack of sleep and family and lifestyle and they have no responsibilities and all of these things. But genuinely, when we can sit down and listen to our clients and then, you know, empathize with where they're coming from, understand with where they're coming from, and then provide experiential feedback, it's extremely, extremely valuable. So, you know, I appreciate you sharing that. What do you think are the tools that are going to be necessary to help trainers, you know, better start to instill those, you know, those necessary components into their coaching?