by Phil Kaplan

HERE ARE THE 8 REASONS.

Note: This article, addressing the ONLY 8 REASONS Trainers Fall Short of Their Potential, is the second article in a series.  If you haven’t read it yet, you can access the first one, The Bug Bite and Three Chapters here.

I explained in the first segment that the “8 Reasons” were originally compiled when I was asked to host a roundtable group for physicians who were falling short of their goals.  These weren’t random physicians.  They were physicians who enrolled in a coaching group with the desire to change their lives.  They were soured on the conventional medical model and sought to establish new client relationships where personal medical coaching was exchanged, not for insurance, but for cash.  And they were failing.

The 8 Reasons weren’t new to me, as I am not a stranger to coaching in a group setting.  Over the course of years during which I conducted roundtable groups, mastermind sessions, and explorations achievement and limitation, these 8 factors revealed themselves to be present in the life and psyche of virtually every health practitioner who acknowledges a gap between career reality and potential.

Let’s get right to the list, each “reason” with some added insight.

The Eight (8) Reasons You’re Falling Short

1. Fear

This isn’t a shock or surprise, as we’ve all confronted the fear of confrontation, the fear of stepping outside of our comfort zones, the fear of failing, and as odd as it sounds, the fear of achievement.  Interestingly, even the achievers living their potential experience those fears.  The difference between the “ascenders” and the “restrained” isn’t whether or not fear is present, but rather whether the individual has the inner drive to face the fear and move forward despite it.

There are two forces that play into this “tension” between fear-based paralysis and evidenced courage.  They are the Emotional Experiential Memory (EEM), the control center within the mind/brain that prompts avoidance emotions and the Pre-Frontal Cortex (PFC), the frontal brain center where imagination rules.  Although these mindset players are not actual muscles, we can “work” them as if they are.  The more we learn to access the PFC, the greater strength we develop related to envisioning new outcomes and driving action emotions.

Those who “stall” along the road to the Pinnacle are limited by what we might call their EEM-wiring.  Rather than creating thoughts of thrilling outcomes, they create “what ifs,” cyclical thoughts that play out worst case scenarios.  In essence, when you cycle thoughts of distress, you’re experiencing the emotions of internally distressing outcomes that haven’t really happened.  As these thoughts create neural bridges, without a willingness to engage in mindset exercises enhancing the PFC, emotions of embarrassment, rejection, and inadequacy rule, and when you live in those emotions, even when they’re based on a “concocted worry,” you freeze up and stop progressing.  You’ll choose momentary comfort over risk and find yourself locked in to career stagnation.

2. Failure to Regularly Assess and Redirect

 As you embark upon your career, and pursue what you accept as your goals, you amass a library of “filed” experiences.  You begin to acquire a sense of “cause and effect.”  “If I do this, I’ll get that.”  Those among us who are most likely to ascend resist the thought that whispers, “this is how things are.” 

Those who fall short of their Potential are accepting of stagnation and mediocrity.  After amassing their initial lessons, they “buy in” to the landscape they see before them as opposed to embracing an ability to creating a more attractive landscape.  With acceptance comes “mental hard wiring.”  Neurons that fire together wire together, and you arrive at that all-too-common place where you do what you do, you accept the response, and you instill habitual behaviors that limit your willingness to experiment.

For entrepreneurs who hire staff, the “this is how things are” mindset leads the entire team to accept the habitual behaviors and stagnation is a near certainty.  Those who ascend beyond the norm have developed an ability to re-view actions and outcomes, assess the behaviors and consequences, and ask the question, “how can I do this better?”

For those immersed in fear, that question can be plaguing, but for those with an open mindset and hunger for growth, the ritualistic confrontation of that question almost guarantees growth and escalation.

It all comes down to the way in which you communicate with yourself, and as every one of these limiting factors, your present reality is changeable . . . if you believe it is.

3. No Consistent Coaching, Leadership, or Accountability

I’m thankful.  I’ve had awful bosses who provided me an education in what I never want to do or be, and amazing incredible coaches and mentors who not only led with an air of excellence, but were also willing to invest in me.

Your best coaches will be those who walked where you walk and climbed to where you want to be.  They don’t always show up on Facebook or in your Instagram Feed.  They are not likely to show up through a solicitation.  Sometimes all it takes is an open mind, a perpetual set of driven actions, and a willingness to see opportunity even when its hidden in plain sight.

Every great achiever was inspired and in the great majority of those cases, inspiration came directly from a chosen coach or mentor.

The belief that you know enough is in itself a blockage.  The pursuit of “betterment” is always best embarked upon with another set of eyes upon you, and I’ll add, at the risk of sounding repetitive, they should be the eyes of one who has been where you walk and emerged where you want to be.

4. Habitual Neural Wiring

 Just a moment ago I told you that neurons that fire together wire together.  The first time you tried to tie your shoes you were awkward, but the neural dendrites in your brain started to form “links,” touching other dendrites until they formed a neural bridge, and that bridge became the pathway by which you learned to automatically (thoughtlessly) tie your shoes. 

Repetition of action activates this process of neural connection, and you’ve no doubt noticed that many people are predictable in their behaviors.  They seem to run limited programs that lead to habitual behaviors.  Just as tying your shoes created thoughtless habit, sitting at your desk each morning checking emails creates the habit of sitting at your desk every morning mindlessly checking emails, most of them mundane, many distracting.  You “wire in” the proverbial waste of time.  Ditto for the repetitive action of playing video games, scrolling through Instagram without intention or reason, or engaging in daily conversation with others dragging you into distraction or prompting your mind to run negative thought patterns.

Perhaps you’ve developed your present brain wiring for some of the reasons I already mentioned, or perhaps they’ve been ingrained by past experiences or emotions.  The challenge is, if you aren’t presently finding yourself drawing your desires closer, you’ve got to change something, and that something must begin with your thoughts.

I’ll spell it out simply.  Your emotions and behaviors have formed bridges that create patterns.  Your thoughts are habitual, thus your actions are habitual, thus your outcomes are predictable.  In order to find thrilling new outcomes, energy must be invested in building new bridges.

 5. Failure to Create an Ideal as an Outcome or Future Memory

I learned some lessons early in my career, and when “client acquisition” became something I mastered, I became consumed by a sense that I was a slave to my business.  I believed I had to accommodate my clients’ schedules, be flexible for the sake of their busy lives, and live by a calendar that was always in flux.  During a period of what I can only describe as the brink of burnout, I went to the beach with a notebook and pen and designed my ideal calendar.  It was extremely challenging.  Thoughts of “but Michael can only train at 5:30 AM” and “Jackie doesn’t get home from work until 6,” revealed how “stuck” I had allowed myself to become.  I gave myself permission to dream of a true ideal.  Removing any perceived obligations, I created what started as an imaginary calendar, using “Client A” and “Client B” rather than considering existing clients.  Here’s the point of that short reflection.  Within 90 days I was living my ideal.

I teach health practitioners, doctors, and trainers to periodically go through that exercise.  It allows you to sidestep the feeling of being a slave to your business, but more importantly, it helps cement the fact that you CAN DESIGN YOUR FUTURE!  The two keys are, you have to be willing to imagine it, and then you have to turn it into a “future memory,” a certain outcome that simply hasn’t happened yet.

In every one of my fitness programs, I have clients create their Future Memories.  These imagined outcomes are more than goals.  The idea is to create a multi-sensory experience that you shape in your Pre-Frontal Cortex and instill in your Hippocampus, the part of your brain where memories are stored.  Here’s why.  When you access a memory, especially one that’s tied to a powerful set of emotions, you “see what you saw,” “hear what you heard,” and “feel what you felt.”  As a result, you internally “view” the memory with certainty.  You know it to be “real” because your brain summons it up with visions, sounds, and feelings.  When you imagine an outcome repetitively, when you “color it” with sensory stimuli and emotional triggers, it takes on a subconscious position in the realm of certainty.  Invest 5 minutes daily in summoning the “outcome” as an imagined experience and . . . well you know . . . your wiring changes.  Doubt goes away.  You think differently, thus you act differently, thus you achieve differently.

If you aren’t moving toward your ideal, you’ll create turbo fuel to get you moving in the right direction when you can not only articulate, but also “experience” the inevitable thrilling future.

6. RAS Focused on The Same Element(s) of the “Field” or “Industry”

I began this article revealing the 8 Reasons by referring to a recent roundtable meeting via Zoom.  On my computer screen were individual doctors aspiring to move away from conventional billing and operate cash businesses with a focus on patient satisfaction.  It didn’t take long before I noticed a commonality among those who were not moving at the pace they’d hoped.  Without prompting, they continually searched their micro-universes to find evidence that their efforts were sound, and their limited outcomes were simply the result of the four winds, the stars, or the “way things happen.”

Finding evidence to support the belief that “the outcome you experienced is all that is possible” is an ego-protective mechanism.  By finding others who suffered the same fate as you, you can embrace the mantra “it wasn’t my fault.”

In order to prevent what they likely would identify as “self-blame” (I’d call it self-power or self-accountability when its positioned properly), those who are habitually landing short of their potential turn their attentions toward “evidentiary support.”  The Reticular Activating System (RAS) becomes programmed to find what you determine in your conscious and subconscious awareness should be noticed, and it ignores everything else.  Rather than recognizing that industry leaders are achieving impressive results, they commiserate with the “eighty percent.”  They begin to identify with those who, like them, are limited in their scope and their outcomes.

Some of the early discussions in this roundtable group pointed directly at those on the lower levels of achievement.  “Dr. Sharkey’s office only sees 4 patients a day” or “the doctors I talk to are facing the same struggle” are near-actual quotes from this group-think.

Commiserating is equal to committing to fall short.  In fact, the word commiserate means to join a community in pity.  It’s literally a pity party.  In medicine doctors refer to the collective of shortfalls by generalizing and identifying “others in the medical field.”  In the world of fitness, those trainers seeking evidence to massage their egos refer to it as “the industry.”  In both cases, those who seek out others who fall short as evidence of what is possible will continue to live in a community of pity.  Those who set their Reticular Activating Systems upon achievers, and follow the recognition of achievement with productive thoughts, actions, and outcomes have only the sky as the limit.

7. Shortage of Evidence and Confidence

Seeing clients (patients) and treating clients (patients) are not the same as thrilling clients (patients).  When we strive to rise above “field norms” or “industry standards” our greatest differentiation power lies in the outcomes we deliver for those who seek us out as coaches and healers.  Before and after photos are valuable, but not as valuable as they once were.  They’re overused, often fraudulent, and people have become calloused to their emotional impact, but don’t mistake that for suggesting that you shouldn’t document thrilling outcomes.  If you are to reach the pinnacle, documentation is vital. 

The challenge for most practitioners stuck between the walls of mediocrity isn’t failure to document, it’s failure to thrill.  Unfortunately (or fortunately for those who seek differentiation) both the medical and fitness fields allow for a very low bar.  Most people suffering with the most common chronic diseases (hypothyroidism, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome) are satisfied with a drug prescription.  Not thrilled.  Satisfied as they’re led to believe it’s what they need.  It doesn’t make them well, it doesn’t “fix” the problem, but it allows the medical field to thrive in a sea of indifference.  Few blame the doctors for their inability to reverse their disease operating within a flawed system.  They accept the disease as their burden and the doctor’s job is to “hook them up with the right drug.”

Personal Trainers who fail to understand the complexities of restoring mitochondrial health, reversing weight loss resistance, and “fixing” a maladapted stress response are not equipped to reverse chronic disease and restore the afflicted to health.  They’ll happily provide workouts, nutritional suggestions, and motivation, but without an understanding of the inner workings of chronic disease, they’re ill equipped to thrill.  This doesn’t present a problem, as most clients will blame themselves, their genetics, or their inherent lack of willpower as the reason for their failure.

Create “thrill” moments.   Bring about the change that people seek, and by documenting labs, emotional expression via word or video, self-assessments, and statistics, and know beyond doubt that your approach is not only sound, but effective.  Only then can you make a strong promise with confidence.  Once you’ve built up a small arsenal of evidence, you stop relying on external materials as your passion combines with your certainty to make you, far and away, “the best option” for any client seeking the type of change you provide.

8. Failure to Master Influence

Most technicians are not salespeople.  At least, not innately.  Personal Trainers love to learn, to master new techniques for postural correction, performance enhancement, and physical betterment.  They operate under the paradigm, “I can only sell what I believe in,” and follow it with “and I only want clients who are motivated.”  These are limitations, and in many cases, they may be the most crippling limitations listed in this piece.

I’m not suggesting you become a salesperson.  I’ve maintained a distaste for conventional selling since I purchased my first car, but I learned.  Conventional sales are designed for people who are bold, brash, aggressive, and, to rely upon common tactics of overcoming objections requires a thick skin most health practitioners simply aren’t equipped yet.  The idea, however, that “influence” requires pushy tactics or a twisted moral compass is just plain wrong.  You influence people every day.  If, however, you limit your attempts at influence to those who show interest in your services, you’re missing out on the hundreds, perhaps thousands of people who would become your clients if they understood what you can do for them.

Understanding an individual’s perceived need and guiding that individual to discover your value has very little to do with the type of selling retailers and insurance companies lean upon.  The reality is, it’s a skill set, one you can master, but you have to be willing to admit you need it, confront the fear, and begin to learn, experiment, tweak, and ultimately arrive at mastery.

Many of my workshops and programs incorporate my fail-proof NAVAQA influence strategy, and my newest program for trainers, T.R.U.E., The Road Underlying Excellence, shares vital strategies for mastering mindset.

Is it time for you to discover your potential?  If you haven’t already registered for my T.R.U.E. Course for Personal Trainers Seeking Excellence, you'll want to watch the replay of my Ascension Webinar.  WATCH IT NOW and together we’ll obliterate any and all of the barriers that might have kept you from truly living your best life.

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