September 25, 2024 • 49 mins
Erin Power delves into the challenges of starting and scaling a health coaching business while balancing a full-time job and family life. She shares practical strategies for building a sustainable coaching practice, highlighting the importance of finding a unique coaching style and tailoring services to individual expertise, whether in fitness, nutrition, or a combination of both. Erin offers insights on structuring client protocols, delivering effective sessions, and adapting to the evolving wellness industry, where a more holistic approach is increasingly emphasized.
Erin also tackles time management, providing tips for carving out time in a busy schedule and avoiding burnout. From the benefits of weekly check-ins to determining program lengths, she guides listeners on building strong client relationships. As the episode closes, Erin reflects on her own journey from one-on-one coaching to group engagements, underscoring the necessity of scalable business models and the transformative power of perseverance in achieving long-term success in the health coaching field.
The book that Erin mentions: Motivational Interviewing in Nutrition and Fitness - https://amzn.to/3TtB2KP
Episode Overview:
0:00 Welcome to Health Coach Radio
13:38 The Evolution of Health Coaching
15:55 Diving into Q&A
27:19 Tips for Balancing Coaching and Full-Time Work
38:18 Structuring Your Coaching Programs
46:55 My First Client Experience
Connect with Erin at:
- Submit your questions to hello@primalhealthcoach.com
- Website: primalhealthcoach.com
Instagram: @primalhealthcoach
---
Health Coach Radio is a podcast that dives deep into the world of health and fitness coaching, brought to you by Primal Health Coach Institute, founded by the renowned Mark Sisson. Join your host, Erin Power, a proud graduate of Primal Health Coach Institute, as she shares inspiring stories and expert insights on elevating your coaching practice.
If you're curious about transforming your life through the power of health and/or fitness coaching, visit primalhealthcoach.com/hcr/. Discover the transformative journey of Primal living and explore how Primal Health Coach Institute can empower you to make a real impact on people's lives.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Greetings, coaches and coaches-to-be. Nice to be here with you.
I'm Erin, and I've got a Q&A episode for you today, which I'm really excited
about because I got some great questions submitted, almost too many to tackle today.
So I'm going to just sort of cluster a few like questions together.
Today, we're going to talk about how to tiptoe into your health coaching practice
(00:20):
if you're still managing a full-time job and maybe still in the throes of raising your family.
So you have limited time, how do we do this?
I've got a couple of questions that came in about programming and when I say
programming, I'm referring to kind of the delivery of your client protocol,
if you will, or your signature methodology.
So I call that programming and I have a few programming questions here,
(00:41):
which is one of my favorite things to talk about actually.
And I got a couple more questions too that are just kind of fun.
Hi, I'm Erin Power. I'm a health coach, a health coaching educator and mentor
and your host of Health Coach Radio.
This podcast delves into the art, science, and business of health coaching.
Whether you're aspiring to land a coaching dream job or to embark on your own
(01:04):
entrepreneurial adventure, we cover it all.
Our mission is to help you grow your career, elevate your income,
change the lives of the clients who need your help, and leave a lasting mark
in this rapidly growing field.
It's time for health coaches to make an impact. It's time for Health Coach Radio.
I wanted to start with a really interesting article that i came across once
(01:27):
again this comes from athlete tech news and
this is a great um i get this email summary every day of articles that they've
sort of aggregated from the fitness and wellness industry and this one really
excited me the title of this article is wellness redefined the fitness industry's new focus now,
(01:48):
I come from the fitness industry. I've been in the fitness industry for 30 years,
which is so long. It's crazy.
In my health coaching practice, I actually just parenthetically don't factor fitness in.
I focus squarely on nutrition and lifestyle in my health coaching practice.
But the fitness thing for myself has been something that's always, always been in my life.
(02:09):
Maybe you're the same. Maybe you are a health coach that came from a fitness industry background.
Okay, so we're going to, we're going to talk about fitness. Now,
maybe you're not a a health coach who came from a fitness industry background, that's okay.
Because first of all, you don't ever have to fold fitness into your health coaching program.
I just want to normalize that. If you don't want to have exercise programming
and prescriptions in your coaching methodology, you don't have to.
(02:33):
I mean, the industry is enormous.
The resources for clients are immense, innumerable.
So you can send your clients away to get their fitness training from other coaches, other programs.
You don't have to have it in your program. But if you are a fitness-oriented
health coach, I really, really am excited to talk through this with you a little bit.
(02:55):
So this article sort of starts off by setting the stage of what personal training
kind of has been up until recently.
And if you're a personal trainer, this might hit home for you.
I personally was a personal trainer as well.
I've worked with personal trainers as a client forever.
I love personal training. It's awesome.
(03:17):
And there's, I've always felt that there was a gap in the personal training,
trainer client relationship.
So the article starts by saying, you know, trainers learn early on in their
career that setting exercise goals with clients is the easy part.
The hard part is that traditional exercise programming
(03:37):
only considers one dimension of wellness and that's
the physical aspect whereas optimal wellness
requires a more holistic approach so we know this
on some level right we already know you can't go
to the gym and undo your bad food decisions or your dodgy night's sleep that
you're having or the immense stress that you insist on putting yourself under
(03:58):
we know that exercise isn't a band-aid that can solve things it has it's it's
a factor that's folded into a greater wellness paradigm and.
So the personal trainer you know what I when I've had personal trainers I've
had wonderful experiences with them great results and I also kind of wanted more,
(04:19):
because I would I would come to the gym for my one-hour session call it three
times a week and we would exercise for one hour three times a week and then
that was kind of it there was no conversation about what else I was doing in
my life my trainer would talk to me about nutrition a little bit because because
my new trainers have always had a little bit of a background in like
macros and stuff, but I don't really need help with nutrition.
(04:40):
I wanted to understand maybe more about like, well, how is this movement style
going to help me with my greater fitness and wellness goals?
You know, what else can I be doing in my day-to-day life to support the efforts I just made in the gym?
Because that's not just food. It's not just diet and exercise.
And we know this because we're health coaches.
We completely understand this holistic realm. Well, interestingly,
(05:04):
at Primal Health Coach Institute, we created a fitness coach certification.
So it's called the Primal Fitness Coach Certification Course.
And we love it because, first of all, primal fitness is such a cool concept.
It's not necessarily about lifting weights in the gym, although that's a factor.
But it's also about how we stand, how we sit, how we move, how we tend to our
(05:27):
nervous system state. sort of, you know, that yin yang of intensity versus recovery.
It's an immensely robust course, and it's awesome.
Just the stuff you'll learn kind of the interesting more, I guess,
ancestral patterns of movement.
And when we created this course, we thought, you know, what the fitness industry needs is more coaching.
(05:52):
We need our fitness coaches to be having coaching conversations with their clients.
So imagine this. This was always my vision was like the client comes for maybe
two or three workouts a week because we do generally know that two to three
strength training sessions a week is sufficient for great fitness and beautiful
longevity and an awesomely healthy body composition with lean body mass.
(06:15):
You know, we know that. So maybe
you have two or three training sessions actually in the gym exercising.
And then maybe once a week, there's a coaching call, just like,
you know, just like health coaches do, just like I do with my clients.
They have coaching calls with me every week. So we can talk about what was going,
what happened last week, what's coming up next week, how do you feel about how
(06:35):
we're moving towards your goals, what's working, what's not working,
where can we make a small adjustment, let's set a small, a small goal for the
week. This is one of my favorite parts about health coaching.
I don't know about you, but for me, I love granular goal-setting.
In fact, when I train health coaches, I know all of my previous students are
laughing at hearing me say that because granular goal-setting is terminology
(06:58):
that I really drill into their skulls.
But the smaller and the more attainable and the more sort of precise and granular
the goal is, the more meaningful it is in the context of process Process versus outcome goals.
I hope that commentary means something to you if you're a health coach listening.
(07:19):
But a process goal is the tiny little steps we take to achieve the ultimate outcome.
So the top of the staircase is the outcome goal. We got to walk up this little
micro staircase bit by bit by bit. it.
So now I believe that fitness trainers, personal trainers, they have our programming.
In mind, they know what they're doing, they understand, I'm going to get I'm
(07:42):
going to get this client of mine to deadlift this much this week,
and the next week, we're going to add five pounds.
And then subsequently, we're going to add five pounds, the client won't necessarily
notice, but the personal trainer knows that they're, they're hitting that progressive
overload, they are making the progress goals in the strength realm and the client
doesn't really have to do anything.
They just have to show up. That's actually, by the way, one of the great benefits
(08:04):
of having a personal trainer is you just show up, you just walk into the gym
and say, all right, tell me what to do.
And people think they like that.
But what that doesn't foster is self-efficacy.
So, self-efficacy is the desired slash the necessary outcome that a health coaching
(08:28):
relationship must have.
And what basically self-efficacy means is the client feels confident.
They have the skills, abilities, knowledge, and resources to do it on their own.
And in some ways, the fitness industry...
Anchors to the lack of self-efficacy that a lot of people are left with,
(08:50):
you know, if you decide to cut ties with your personal trainer and just go off
on your own, they already know you're not going to figure it out.
Some people might, but most people aren't going to really do it on their own
anyway. They like the accountability. They like the programming that the coach did.
They're going to come back like I did, like I kept coming back, right?
And I know a lot about fitness and an exercise and I still am
(09:13):
better off if I have somebody to tell me what to do because maybe that
that's that sense of self-efficacy wasn't fostered so just
having the client show up and be and being told what to do
first of all clients really do think they want
that and on some level I believe them my clients have said that
to me too they said just tell me what to eat and I'll
say well I could do that but if I did you
(09:36):
wouldn't really learn anything and you wouldn't figure this out for yourself
and I have a hunch that you want to get on with your life right
graduate from my care and just go off and eat move
and live and feel healthy and great in your body so I'm not
going to tell you what to eat but I'm gonna teach you and guide you
as you learn how to eat to support your health goals right so I think the fitness
(09:56):
industry needs that too so anyway back to this article this is the gist of the
article again the title of the article is wellness redefined the fitness industry's
new focus and this is on on Athlete Tech News.
What's really fascinating in this article, just a small parenthetical,
is this paragraph. Listen to this.
(10:19):
"'The size of the wellness market worldwide "'stood at $5.61 trillion in 2022,',
"'according to Statista.
"'This figure was projected to grow at a compound annual growth
rate of 8.6 like hello
(10:40):
that's that's better than the stock market by orders of magnitude
reaching an estimated 8.47 trillion
by 2027 that's insane there's not
a bigger industry now i think the wellness market probably encapsulates things
like nutrition supplements fitness gyms fitness programming wellness programming
probably even the beauty industries will fold it up in there hard to say what
(11:01):
that includes but it's enormous right and And then the really hard pill to swallow is we look around,
and it's like, hmm, we're spending a lot of money on this.
It doesn't seem to be working, but it could work.
It could work. And I think the spirit behind this article, why I wanted to share it with you is that,
it's exciting to imagine that we could sort of rearrange the way we execute
(11:22):
the health consumer's experience in the health and wellness is multi-trillion
dollar industry so that they can get results and long-term results the results that stick.
So back to the article, it says over the years, the fitness industry has learned
from its collective ineffectiveness in successfully addressing the obesity epidemic,
(11:44):
recognizing that more needs to be done to help the whole person.
One thing hasn't changed. People need health guidance more than ever.
And personal training brands from all corners of the sector have taken notice
and are taking steps to embed wellness principles into their products and services.
So we are now this is what we're talking about.
(12:04):
It's like yes, you'll come here and exercise and you're gonna move the weights
and you're gonna do the things to get your athletic and fitness Goals met and
also what else is important to you? What else how do you want your life to shake
out from a health and wellness perspective a longevity perspective?
What does life look like dear client when you've achieved your health and wellness?
(12:25):
Outcomes, how do you feel? How do you look? How do you perform?
How do you live your life when this is all working and then what can we do?
What tiny tiny little steps can we take together to get you there exercise will
definitely be part of it but not the only thing and we can't put it into a silo
so Bill Davis is quoted in the article he's the CEO of ABC fitness and.
(12:50):
He says, we expect to see a new phase of growth in the fitness industry that
incorporates nutrition, recovery, and mental health as key parts of the average
member's fitness journey.
Whether dedicated recovery studios or adding cold plunge facilities to your
club, we're seeing the focus shift to overall well-being.
The studio the gym or the personal trainer is the gateway to more
(13:12):
holistic health opportunities for members i completely agree completely
agree i say this as somebody who i have a virtual
practice so i work with clients online they find me through my social media
marketing efforts but there's something really magical about having a brick
and mortar facility the gym the gym where we all go i'm probably i mean i don't
(13:34):
know what the statistics are i don't know what the statistics are on gym memberships.
But everybody I know has one, whether they go or not, whether they're getting
any fitness gains or not, that's neither here nor there, but everyone's got a gym membership.
So you're going to this place anyway, what if it had, yes, the weight equipment?
Yes, the cardio equipment? Yes, it's got classes. Oh, it's got hot yoga.
(13:54):
It's got a recovery room. It's got massage chairs. It's got the Theraguns.
It's got a stretching area. My gym has these meditation
rooms we just got a cryotherapy thing
like so now the gym becomes this destination where
you could go to the gym and say well today i'm just going to meditate and then
sit in a massage chair like that's all i'm going to do and that's part of my
(14:15):
wellness focus so i'm going to go to the gym every day not every day is going
to be a crush sesh maybe i'm just going to go to be with other people that was
another article i saw recently that i really was excited about um sort of touting
the benefits of group or squad fitness programming where you you get together with a group.
That's group fitness, man. CrossFit capitalized on that.
Group fitness has capitalized on that for decades.
(14:39):
But it's sort of like, we've got to get in with people again.
We need to take care of our body in different ways. It's pretty cool. I think...
I think this is exciting. So if you're a personal trainer, maybe you work at
a gym, or maybe you have a home studio, or maybe you do it virtually as well.
I hope that you are taking some time to fold in other wellness modalities.
(15:06):
You know, you could just start by saying to your clients, hey,
once a week, we're going to have a coaching conversation.
We're going to have an actual conversation, no workout, we're just going to
talk about goal setting, we're just going to set some goals, some weekly goals.
Once a week, we're going to set weekly granular goals that shore up to your greater health vision.
This will complement the workouts we're doing, but it's going to give you a
(15:31):
more holistic approach to, you know, your body, your body, your health,
your wellness, your life.
So I do love hearing this as a fitness industry grandma.
It's very exciting to me to know that the fitness industry, it's not going anywhere.
It's growing exponentially, multi-trillions of dollars.
Well, at least it's evolving.
(15:53):
That's great to see.
Health Coach Radio listeners, have I got a treat for you.
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(16:14):
coach comm forward slash HCR today
all right it's
time for Q&A the first question comes from Mike and Mike asks I'm curious how
to handle coaching while still doing a full-time job and being an active husband
and father okay so here's what we got I know that many of you will relate to
(16:36):
this because you've got your full-time 9 to 5 job Monday to Friday,
let's assume. And then from five to nine in the evenings, you're parenting and
doing family stuff and on the weekends.
So, you know, I think there's a lot of nuance here because like if your kids
are, you know, younger, older infants, what have you, you know,
you might be able to claw back precious hours, an hour a day.
(17:00):
I think you can find an hour a day. Now I know a lot of productivity gurus will
say, well, wake up at four in the morning and get it done before you start your day.
Maybe Mike, that's something that would work for you. Because I what I've heard,
what I've heard from people is that those early morning hours are highly productive,
you, you wake up, it's non negotiable.
This two hours before everybody else wakes up is my time to write something,
(17:24):
create something, answer client emails, whatever it might be.
So you'd be doing the early morning sort of working on the business kind of
thing, working on developing programs,
doing maybe some content marketing, writing a blog post, writing some social
posts and email mail to your list, the marketing efforts we have to do,
sort of uninterrupted deep work time.
Okay, so now I do want to point out that a health coaching practice needs a
(17:47):
bit of that. We have our deep work time where we have to go into our business.
I do that on Wednesdays. So on Wednesdays every week, I do not accept calls
in my calendar. You can't book a call with me on Wednesday.
So I don't have any interruptions, I guess you could say, in my day on Wednesdays.
I can actually chunk out time.
I also have a full-time job, by the way. I work full-time for Primal Health
(18:08):
Coach Institute, and I have a successful health coaching practice.
So it's a lot. I totally get it.
So Wednesdays are a day where I chunk out time to do big batches of content.
I batch it all, I create it all, then I just kind of sort of sprinkle it out for the next week or two.
Because I'm not very good at waking up early in the morning.
Myself, I don't like it. so I won't do it.
(18:30):
Now, alternately, I'm a little more productive and creative at night.
So it's sort of like after my workday has ended, all my client stuff is buttoned
up, and I'm kind of out of the productive part of my day, I can settle into
this sort of deep work phase, sort of in the evening before bed.
Let's address the elephant in the room, which is that's not super healthy,
(18:51):
because I'm probably staring at my MacBook or my phone, and it's dark.
Don't worry, I've got my blue blockers on, I know that staring at screens late
at night is not a healthy behavior.
What I will say though is that if you're trying to move into health coaching
because it's a passion of yours that you can't go another year of your life
without doing, it means something to you, and you're trying to tiptoe into it
(19:13):
out of your full-time job, that's going to take years by the way,
years, I'll talk about that in a second,
but you're going to have to work in the dregs of time that you have left.
So you might find yourself looking at a screen late at night or way too early
in the morning or whatever the case may be.
I want to normalize that this sort of working in the business part,
(19:35):
it will be little, the dribbles of time you have left over in amongst all of your other duties.
Okay. So I wanted to mention that, that you're going to have to carve out some
hours, call it four to seven.
I don't know. I pick those numbers completely randomly, But if it's one hour
a day for almost every day of the week to write something, to create something,
(19:56):
to put something together, to develop a system, to anchor to some technology,
to build something, to market yourself,
you need that time. Don't forget about that time.
Then there's the client-facing time. So you have to be on discovery calls,
you know, having consultations with prospective clients.
You have to be doing coaching calls with them, and those things must happen
(20:17):
during times of day that are convenient for the client.
So I often did this on my lunch break so
it depends on what kind of job you have when I my full-time job that I
had um I was pretty autonomous at my office I
could kind of take my lunch break whenever I wanted so sometimes I would take
my lunch break at 11 a.m sometimes it'd be a 1 p.m or noon somewhere in there
(20:40):
midday and I would have that as my coaching call time and I could squeeze two
coaching calls into my lunch hour if they're 25 minute calls with a client if
I did that five days a week,
which I didn't, but if I did, well, there's 10 clients you can carry squeezing
coaching calls into your lunch break.
Or maybe you have, maybe you can carve out a half an hour on the drive home
(21:00):
or right after work, or, you know, make an arrangement with your co-parent,
your partner, who's also raising the family with you and say,
you know, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I just want to carve out one hour,
90 minutes before dinner every night.
I'm going to come home and then I'm going to go into my office for 90 minutes
and just do client calls. And then I'll be out here for dinner and I'm with you.
(21:23):
But you know, partner, it's very important to me to grow this coaching business.
I think it can really be something exciting for me. And I know I can help a
lot of people. So I really would love if we could just make this arrangement.
Just, you know, I think our partners, our loved ones, they love us.
So they want the best for us.
And if you can approach these conversations from the perspective of an an arrangement
(21:43):
and just say, I only need a couple hours a week to do these coaching calls.
And I think that would be sufficient. If you could squeeze them in little sort
of dribbles of time you have maybe at your workday, depending on how you work.
I also want to acknowledge that not everybody has a desk job like I did.
You might be a firefighter. You might be in my work on a factory floor. I don't know.
(22:03):
So it's possible that when I say, oh, just do it on your lunch break,
that that's not feasible.
But you know, for example, if you're a firefighter, it would be really hard
for you to schedule coaching calls during your workday, because there could be a fire.
You wouldn't have to cancel it. So, you know, extrapolate accordingly.
But you don't need a ton of time because here's the deal. You're going to start
(22:27):
your coaching business. You're going to have one client.
And then you probably have one client. And then you probably have one.
And maybe you'll get a second one.
Then you'll have two clients. And maybe you'll have two clients.
And then maybe you'll get a third one. And this is taking a long time.
It's going to take a long time to build, quite frankly. This is what I wanted
to come back to. Because you have lots of time.
What's probably not going to happen, you're probably not going to open your
(22:50):
business and be immediately slammed with clients.
So this is an exciting thing to think about what happens when my client roster
is overwhelmingly large.
Well, at that point, you can make a move like you'll you'll see that coming from miles away.
You'll have your fourth, fifth, sixth client in your roster,
which I still think you can manage six to eight clients with a full time job and a family.
(23:13):
I really do because every client needs a 30 minute coaching call a week.
So if you have eight clients, that's four hours you got to find for coaching calls.
And then, you know, you also have to do, like I said earlier,
that other work on your business where you're managing client files and programming, all that stuff.
So for, you need to find four hours, call it to do coaching calls at another
four to seven hours to do all the behind the scenes business stuff.
(23:38):
Um, that's with an eight with a roster of eight clients and say each client
pays you a thousand bucks.
You know, that's, that's nice, right I mean it's not not enough money to
get you to quit your job but it's a
start and then you might say man if I took on
another client here I took on a
ninth or a tenth client I'd be really really hurt and I would be hard for me
(23:59):
to facilitate this well that's when you can start making moves I don't know
can you approach your employer and negotiate sort of like I'd like to take you
know I'd like to work a four-day work week or I'm doing this other thing.
It's really important to me.
Listen, I approached this with my employer and they were open to it, quite honestly.
(24:20):
They were like, as long as you stay here and keep doing what you're doing,
we know that you're looking to move out of this into your next phase.
Like they knew as long as I was still there and engaged with my work,
they were okay with me sort of having my side hustle.
I don't know that every employer is going to be cool with that.
So, like at some point too, and then I got to the point where,
(24:41):
and I'll just share an anecdote, where I couldn't maintain that full-time job
because it was just too cognitively demanding.
It was a whole ass full-time job.
And I'm trying to claw back some of that time to focus on my coaching business,
and it got to the point where I couldn't do it.
So I quit my job, but I couldn't, I didn't have enough clients to replace my
(25:02):
income. So I went and got a different job.
Like a really sort of, how can I put this? A job that was less demanding of
my time and cognitive energy.
So I went to, I went to work at a smoothie bar and a cafe.
I was sort of juggling these and both of these businesses, by the way,
they wanted like a nutrition coach on staff, just randomly.
(25:24):
They wanted somebody who could help them with their marketing and their menu
development so they could have healthy food.
And my background was marketing and I'm nutritionist, health coach.
So it was really cool. I got, you know, minimum wage for these two jobs.
And I was kind of juggling them.
And then I could sort of accept more clients.
And cobbling together my income like that got me close to my full time salary.
(25:47):
But now I was like out, I was out of marketing, I was out of it, I was in my new thing.
And I did that for a while. And by the way, that was really fun for me.
That was really fun for me.
I had never really done like a
food service or customer service type job before and sort of sitting at a cafe
or at a smoothie bar chit chatting with people and by the way if it wasn't busy
(26:09):
at the cafe or the smoothie bar guess what i was doing working on my business
i loved it you know you get a job at the vitamin store or,
there's tons of like part-time remote occasional health coaching jobs that you
could get when the time comes where your client roster has grown to the point
where you can't juggle it well with your full-time,
(26:32):
the demands of your full-time job, then maybe you can move away from your full-time job.
So I just want to, I want to, first of all, just validate that this takes a long time.
And I know when I say stuff like that, I'm just being realistic.
It takes a long time for your client roster to grow to the point where you have
to make a big decision on your career.
So you've got years, you got a few years, quite honestly, before you have to worry about that.
(26:55):
But then when you when it comes time, I literally use the phrase tiptoe out
of your professional career, because that's kind of what you'll do.
You'll you'll tiptoe out of it into something else that's maybe pays a little
less, but requires a little bit less of your mental energy, so that you can
build your health coaching business.
It's a really, it's a really common and cool strategy, you know.
(27:20):
I believe it's doable I believe any one of us
can and should start a health coaching practice and
you're probably going to have to start it while you still have your full-time
job I don't really want you all quitting your jobs to do this you have bills
to pay you have a family to take care of so let's be responsible about this
but yes you can still build it in the small moments of time that you carve out
(27:41):
just I think manage your expectations about how rapidly you're gonna grow.
All right, I got a couple programming questions. So this question is from Ileana.
I hope I'm pronouncing that right.
For a 12-week program, how often should you have coaching sessions once a week
or every other week? And how long should the sessions be?
(28:04):
And then a follow-up question was, what if the program was six months?
So I personally am a staunch advocate for the weekly coaching call.
Because a week is a nice interval of time where somebody, a client can go off
and sort of, let's say, run an experiment or try something or reach for a goal
(28:26):
and then report back. I love that cadence.
There's something really magical about, you know, you get on the phone with
your client on a Wednesday and you say, all right, Sally, tell me,
take me through how last week went.
How did you make out on your goal that we set last week? And she'll say,
well, this went well, this went well, this, I struggled here.
And you're going to pick up cues from what went well and where your client struggled.
(28:46):
And And typically, not often, but typically the struggle from last week is going
to become the objective for next week.
And then next week happens and you check back in again. And now we've got a
new couple of successes and we have a new struggle that's going to inform next week's action.
So we are marching the client down this continuum, or I guess up the staircase
(29:06):
to go back to my earlier metaphor, up the little staircase to the outcome goal
at the top week over week over week.
So generally speaking, I love a weekly check-in call. I want to add some texture
to this though, because I've tried other things.
My program, for example, my coaching program is six months long.
And when I was doing it one-on-one style, because I'm not doing one-on-one anymore,
(29:30):
which I'll talk about, I'll just gently talk about in a second.
When it was one-on-one, I would do weekly coaching sessions for the first 12 weeks.
And then for the subsequent 12 weeks, we went to every other week.
I would call that, I would call that bi-weekly, but I know there's a lot of
debate on what bi-weekly means.
(29:50):
Semi-monthly? Anyway, I moved from weekly to every other week.
And I just tried that honestly to, well, to claw back some of my time because
I had a really busy client roster.
And I thought, well, if these 20 people are only getting in my calendar every
other week, then that's, you know, that saves me, call it 10 hours of work a week.
But I actually personally didn't like the bi-weekly interval.
(30:13):
And my thinking behind doing that was, well, now they've been in this program
for three months. They get it. They've worked through some goals.
I want them to go off for longer periods of time now to really try putting this into their life.
Once again, we come back to the concept of self-efficacy. I want them to know
that they can do this on their own without having to check in with me all the time.
(30:34):
So that's the spirit behind why I did that. I'm sort of in the beginning phases
of graduating them to their own self-efficacy.
So I do like it for that reason, but I, as a coach, felt disconnected from my client's goals.
So I've come back to a weekly interval, and it's still my favorite.
And, you know, think about it from the consumer perspective.
(30:59):
Two things I want you guys to think about from the consumer perspective.
First of all, health consumers, they hire us because they're looking for some
measure of accountability.
You're going to hear that all the time. I need someone to hold me accountable.
Now what you and I know is that the client must be accountable to themselves
because you're a stranger.
I'm a stranger from the internet. You don't need to be accountable to me.
I'm nobody in your life. I'm your coach. I'm teaching you. I'm guiding you. I'm helping you.
(31:21):
But ultimately, this relationship is going to end and you're going to have to
go off on your own and know how to do this.
That's what gets me out of bed in the morning is delivering my clients to self-efficacy.
But they want the accountability. And I think the interval helps that.
Now, what I've noticed happens in a six-month coaching relationship is the client
self-selects their own coaching frequency based on what they need.
(31:47):
So what I mean by that is, maybe Sally skips a week, she's like,
Hey, Aaron, I don't have anything really to talk about this week,
everything's fine. Let's skip the call this week.
And we'll connect next week. So the client will almost elongate their own interval,
as their confidence grows.
There's a, there's a real, again, a continuum of confidence that grows week
(32:09):
over week, your client becomes more confident, more self efficacious,
so they don't actually need your help that much.
So you can leave the weekly coaching call available to
them and they may opt in or out of it as they get more and more confident
so one thing
I wanted to mention though just to close the loop on this is I don't do one-on-one
(32:29):
anymore I don't do one-on-one client calls anymore because I have too many clients
now my business grew to the point where one-on-one became unscalable and it
will become unscalable for you as well at some point that's just inevitable
as long as you don't quit as As long as you don't quit,
your business will grow to the point where you can't do one-on-one.
There's just not gonna be enough hours in the day.
(32:51):
So you will move to group coaching. And just very quickly, the way I manage
group coaching is I open a Zoom
room for an hour a day, and my clients are invited in to that meeting.
And they can just sit back and listen, or they can unmute themselves and share
what they want to work on.
We go around the horn, we goal set, same thing. Okay, Sally,
what's going to be your goal for this week? All right, Bob, over to you. Let's get a goal going.
(33:14):
Okay, Dave, what do you want to work on. We just go around the horn.
That's, that's eventually, I don't, if you're a brand new health coach,
don't start with that. Okay.
Don't start with the group models. Definitely start with one-on-one.
You have to get your coaching chops.
You have to figure out how to coach people. You have to figure out how to work
with individuals before you can extrapolate that to a group.
(33:36):
So just a small thing, but you know, even then I,
even though my coaching calls happen every single day
and my clients could ostensibly come into a call every day
if they want to I normalize and socialize the
idea with them that I need to see you about once a week but
you can come more if you want to or less but I need to see you about once a
week that's the interval where people get the greatest results and I fully believe
(33:59):
that this question is from Bruce and it's also in the same vein as the last
question which is what is the average length of time a typical client will use your services.
So I just mentioned that my program, for example, is six months long.
In the health coaching industry, I think 12 weeks, a 12 week program is kind
of the industry, call it median, the standard.
(34:22):
And 12 weeks is really 12 weeks is a really good amount of time,
because you know, in three months
time, you can make big moves on behavior change, on health improvement,
people will have some wins under their belt, whether it's some weight loss,
or some improved energy, or their mental clarity, or their performance in in
the gym or something, it's enough time that they'll notice something.
Because this is something that I'm really passionate about, which is that the
(34:45):
health change takes a long time. It doesn't, nothing really happens quickly, unfortunately.
So at least 12 weeks, in at least 12 weeks, you get some good results for people.
So I ran a 12 week program for a long time. And it was great.
It was awesome. In 12 weeks, we got such insane results.
And ultimately, all these clients would would, again, graduate to self-efficacy.
(35:07):
So they're going off and continuing to do it on their own without needing me.
And then it stopped working.
So, and this is just a sort of a personal anecdote, but I started noticing that
my clients, okay, every now and then I get a client who got to the end of 12
weeks and hadn't quite achieved the goals that...
We had um we had set at the start of the engagement and
(35:31):
it started happening more often and more often and frankly folks i
don't know what happened so i really don't know what happened i
don't know if this is like a covid thing like we we came through that time of
life and then it was sort of like it was all too much and it felt feels now
harder for us to be healthy or get sort of fired up and motivated i don't know
if it's some global loss of motivation that happened after that that crazy experience.
(35:57):
Or because I'm aging, so my clients are aging.
So if I think about, you know, 12 years ago, when I started my health coaching
business, I was in my mid 30s.
And so were my clients. Now we're in our late 40s, or 50s. And so my clients
are now different people.
They are, well, my clients are basically all women.
Now they're going through their menopause transition, they're probably at some
(36:19):
advanced stage in their career.
So they're grinding at work, their kids are growing up into adulthood.
So they're trying to navigate that a whole new type of parenting.
Maybe they have, you know, they have more spare time now. So they're traveling
more, they're having more, you know, social moments with food and drink,
because they have money and they have time.
So maybe because my clients and I have come into this next phase of life,
(36:43):
maybe that's why 12 weeks isn't feeling like enough. So I extended ended my program to six months.
Six months is a long time, but it also flies by. And so when I'm on the discovery
call with clients, prospective clients, and I get to the prescription part of the conversation,
I'll say, all right, so I work with my clients for six months in a very close,
(37:04):
personalized coaching relationship.
And the reason for that is because, not because it's going to take six months
for you to achieve your goals, but it's going to take you six months to practice
the art and science of behavior change.
Like just, it's really hard to change behaviors at this stage in life, you know?
So I want you to feel really supported while you go through this arduous process of behavior change.
(37:27):
And I'm going to support you through that for six months. And I think when I
frame it that way, I think I'm doing a pretty good job of describing the value.
Because I think if I said, if you just say six months and let it sort of hang
in the air, where your client might be thinking like, wow, is it gonna take
me that long to lose 20 pounds or whatever their thing is? And they might find that to be.
(37:53):
Like a daunting prescription. So framing it from the perspective of we work
together for six months so that you can achieve your weight loss goal and learn
the skills and abilities and resources,
and the personal accountability to do this for the rest of your life.
So you never have to go on a diet again.
It doesn't take six months to get healthy, but it definitely will take six months
(38:14):
to create a health paradigm in your life that you can stick with. How does that sound?
So when I bumped my program up to six months, I thought I might get some pushback,
like maybe it's too long or Now it's too expensive because obviously when the,
when the duration of the program changed, the price tag changed,
I've gotten no pushback.
People really like it, but people also really like the 12 week program.
So I guess my final word on this is I would say most health coaches will probably
(38:36):
run a 12 week program and it's a good amount of time. It's a whole season, whole quarter, right?
And there's like, as humans, we kind of, we kind of think seasonally and we
kind of think quarterly, right?
In some ways. so your your prospective client
can wrap their head around a 12-week length of time oh that's
(38:56):
one season by spring I'll be in my you know
smaller size pants or whatever I think 12 weeks is a great length of time I
think six months is awesome you know I've even talked to health coaches that
have two-year programs five-year programs like very long programs because they're
working on bigger maybe more longevity focused programs that have a lot more moving
(39:17):
parts, maybe there's other allied health professionals involved.
But I think generally speaking, 12 weeks is a great place to start.
All right my final question for today comes from jose and
this is just a jose was just asking me a personal question about
my own health coaching business which i i love sharing those because i reflect
(39:39):
back on the beginning of my health coaching business very very very fondly so
jose asks how did you start to coach your first client did they ask for a certification
so nobody's ever never asked me for a certification.
Well, not ever, but maybe 1% of the time I've had a person say,
(40:02):
just out of curiosity, what are your credentials?
And then I can say, well, I'm a board-certified health coach.
And I also have a holistic nutrition diploma and nobody cares.
Nobody cares because more importantly is I have a specific solution for the
health struggle that's keeping a certain type of person awake at night.
So I already mentioned I work with midlife, menopause transition women who are
(40:23):
struggling through some of the metabolic dysregulation that happens at that
stage of life. That's all I do.
Listen, if you want to try to run a 100 mile foot race fasted on a ketogenic diet, I don't got you.
I don't know how to do that. If you want to shred for the wedding,
you want to get a six-pack for your beach vacation, I don't do that.
(40:44):
I only do the one thing that I do.
And the only thing health consumers care about is do I
have a proven solution for their problem and i
do so it never comes up i think
you do need to so i do think that it's wise for
coaches to have training so there's always this
debate in the coaching industry like well coaching is unregulated you don't
(41:05):
have to be certified to go to business as a coach true but i do think you need
to be trained if you're not trained as a coach i just i don't know if you're
going to be any good at it i don't i don't do you have the confidence that you
can get great results for your clients in these really personalized bespoke
coaching relationships if you don't know how to coach.
So I think learning how to coach is crucial. And you just kind of have to go to school for that.
(41:29):
It's not easy to learn that through book learning. But I will make a plug for
one book that's very powerful. And I love this book.
And I think you can still get it on Audible, which is my preferred way of engaging with this book.
It's called Motivational Interviewing in Fitness and Nutrition.
I think that's what it's called. I'm just going off the top of my head.
But there's a lot of motivational interviewing books. This one's the In Fitness
(41:50):
and Nutrition one. one, it is such a great book to learn.
I always think the cadence of the motivational interview and the client led
coaching conversation.
But still, I think that going to school to learn how to coach is crucial.
So like when a client would ask me for my credential, the one I'm the most proud
(42:11):
of is my health coaching credential, because I know how to coach people.
Like, yeah, I have a nutrition credential too. But like, I don't think B vitamin
insufficiency is your problem here.
Not for my clients. I'm not the health coach that helps you with your vitamin insufficiencies.
And that's not my thing. I help midlife women through their menopause metabolic changes.
(42:32):
And I am an expert in that. And that's what I do. And people want to work with the expert.
So I don't really care what my credentials are. But how did I start?
So my first client, I've shared this anecdote before, so stop me if if you've heard it.
Her name was Tenille, which is a name that you would remember.
(42:53):
And Tenille found me through a Google search.
I know very boring origin story but the reason why i think that's crazy is because
i don't i didn't do any type of seo on my website i built my own website it's
just okay i've you know i've revised it many times since then that was 12 years
ago i i must have just kind of winged it on the seo,
(43:17):
you know you use a platform like wix or squarespace to build your website which
they're very easy and they have some little seo sort of plug and play things
like hey give us 25 keywords words that speak to what you do and they'll kind
of do something in the background. It's not good SEO.
Just so we're clear. I'm not an SEO expert, but if an SEO expert is listening
to this, SEO means search engine optimization.
(43:38):
If a search engine optimization expert is listening to me telling you to just
plug some keywords into Wix, they're definitely hurting themselves from eye-rolling.
They're definitely eye-rolling. There's some eye injuries happening.
But I did that. And Tennille searched for, she wanted,
(44:00):
she specifically searched the keyword paleo, which I was aligning with the paleo
diet at the time, and frankly still do. No one is surprised.
Paleo, autoimmune, nutrition, coach, something like that.
That was like her string of keywords or just because I asked her like,
I'm just curious, how did you find me? Because I'd literally been in business
for like, I've been in business for six weeks.
(44:22):
I was busy behind the scenes, building my program and writing,
you know, creating my intake forms.
And I wasn't expecting anybody to come into my calendar until she did.
And also she was looking for somebody local. So my very first client was local
to me and we did all our sessions in person.
She helped me build my program because I knew the first couple of things I wanted people to do.
Like, you know, I kind of want you to eat more protein. I kind of want you to
(44:44):
eat less of this, more of that.
You know, I have a personal perspective on circadian rhythms and circadian meal
timing that I think is really crucial. So I got her sort of sorted out on that.
I mentioned when I was talking about how to kneel search for me,
that she was looking for somebody to help her with autoimmunity.
And so like on some level like I understand gut health and
I understand the autoimmune process and you know I
know you know I understand elimination diets and how they can be really beneficial
(45:06):
autoimmunity is not a personal interest of mine or a specialty or something
I have any experience with I never had an autoimmune condition like working
with Tennille though I could help her and I did help her because I can apply
an elimination diet to help to resolve her autoimmune symptoms.
But I didn't find a lot of joy in it. It wasn't going to be my area of expertise.
(45:28):
So after Tennille, she helped me build my program.
I pivoted. I said, okay, I don't think autoimmunity is what I want to work on.
So I deleted that keyword from my pretend SEO on my website.
I think I want to work more on like metabolic dysregulation,
insulin resistance, prediabetes, because that's my origin story.
So I put those keywords in instead and really geared my program I talked about
(45:49):
programming earlier I geared my program toward resolving mild sort of subclinical
insulin resistance and then I just started messaging that and that's when I
you know got onto social media and,
granted this was 12 years ago so there wasn't a lot going on it wasn't really
a hotbed of consumer activity back then social media was a lot of like food
(46:09):
pics you know but you know I write blog posts I would I was mostly blog posting
interesting at the time.
But I would just write. I would just embody my expertise.
So, I've decided, I've drawn the line in the sand. I'm the expert in mild to
moderate subclinical insulin resistance for women in midlife.
I spent the next while just writing and creating and thinking and being that person.
(46:33):
And pretty soon I was attracting that kind of client through,
mostly through content marketing efforts. So Facebook at the time.
And then tons of referrals. So my clients would have good results and they'd
refer people. Referrals were a big part of my early business.
And now it's all social media. That's where I get all my business. this.
(46:55):
So my first coaching client came to me from a Google search,
which was just a happy accident.
She helped me build the program.
She had great results. She also helped me crystallize what I did and did not want to do.
And it was, I just want to also just to kind of wrap up in reflecting back on
(47:18):
working with Tennille, my very first client. client, it felt like,
I felt like I had come home to my true calling.
You know, if you think back to the conversation we had here today,
which is I left my job in advertising and tiptoed out of it into working at
a cafe and a smoothie bar.
And, you know, in my spare time, building a website and building a program and
writing a blog, and then somebody finds me and I could help them.
(47:41):
It was everything. It was everything. That's why I'll remember Tennille's name
forever. Also because it's a unique name.
But it was everything. thing. It was an affirmation that I was absolutely right where I was meant to be.
It was not smooth sailing to build a business over the last 12 years to build
a health coaching practice.
It's very up and down, but anything, any personal or professional development
(48:03):
you're going to do is going to have peaks and valleys, right?
Just don't quit. Just don't quit. Refuse to quit. I knew as soon as I felt that
way after working with Sunil that I was never going to quit this.
So I really owe Tennille everything. So Tennille, if you're listening to this,
I can't thank you enough.
(48:25):
All right, my friends, always wonderful to spend this time with you.
And, you know, keep coaching, keep submitting those questions.
You can submit them at hello at primalhealthcoach.com.
And I'll see you next time.
This podcast was brought to you by Primal health coach institute to
learn more about how to become a successful health coach get in
(48:46):
touch with us by visiting primalhealthcoach.com forward
slash call or if you're already a successful health coach practitioner influencer
or thought leader with a thriving business and an interesting story we'd love
to hear from you connect with us at hello at primalhealthcoach.com and let us
know why we need to interview you for health coach radio thanks for listening.
Greetings, coaches and coaches-to-be. Nice to be here with you.
I'm Erin, and I've got a Q&A episode for you today, which I'm really excited
about because I got some great questions submitted, almost too many to tackle today.
So I'm going to just sort of cluster a few like questions together.
Today, we're going to talk about how to tiptoe into your health coaching practice
(00:20):
if you're still managing a full-time job and maybe still in the throes of raising your family.
So you have limited time, how do we do this?
I've got a couple of questions that came in about programming and when I say
programming, I'm referring to kind of the delivery of your client protocol,
if you will, or your signature methodology.
So I call that programming and I have a few programming questions here,
(00:41):
which is one of my favorite things to talk about actually.
And I got a couple more questions too that are just kind of fun.
Hi, I'm Erin Power. I'm a health coach, a health coaching educator and mentor
and your host of Health Coach Radio.
This podcast delves into the art, science, and business of health coaching.
Whether you're aspiring to land a coaching dream job or to embark on your own
(01:04):
entrepreneurial adventure, we cover it all.
Our mission is to help you grow your career, elevate your income,
change the lives of the clients who need your help, and leave a lasting mark
in this rapidly growing field.
It's time for health coaches to make an impact. It's time for Health Coach Radio.
I wanted to start with a really interesting article that i came across once
(01:27):
again this comes from athlete tech news and
this is a great um i get this email summary every day of articles that they've
sort of aggregated from the fitness and wellness industry and this one really
excited me the title of this article is wellness redefined the fitness industry's new focus now,
(01:48):
I come from the fitness industry. I've been in the fitness industry for 30 years,
which is so long. It's crazy.
In my health coaching practice, I actually just parenthetically don't factor fitness in.
I focus squarely on nutrition and lifestyle in my health coaching practice.
But the fitness thing for myself has been something that's always, always been in my life.
(02:09):
Maybe you're the same. Maybe you are a health coach that came from a fitness industry background.
Okay, so we're going to, we're going to talk about fitness. Now,
maybe you're not a a health coach who came from a fitness industry background, that's okay.
Because first of all, you don't ever have to fold fitness into your health coaching program.
I just want to normalize that. If you don't want to have exercise programming
and prescriptions in your coaching methodology, you don't have to.
(02:33):
I mean, the industry is enormous.
The resources for clients are immense, innumerable.
So you can send your clients away to get their fitness training from other coaches, other programs.
You don't have to have it in your program. But if you are a fitness-oriented
health coach, I really, really am excited to talk through this with you a little bit.
(02:55):
So this article sort of starts off by setting the stage of what personal training
kind of has been up until recently.
And if you're a personal trainer, this might hit home for you.
I personally was a personal trainer as well.
I've worked with personal trainers as a client forever.
I love personal training. It's awesome.
(03:17):
And there's, I've always felt that there was a gap in the personal training,
trainer client relationship.
So the article starts by saying, you know, trainers learn early on in their
career that setting exercise goals with clients is the easy part.
The hard part is that traditional exercise programming
(03:37):
only considers one dimension of wellness and that's
the physical aspect whereas optimal wellness
requires a more holistic approach so we know this
on some level right we already know you can't go
to the gym and undo your bad food decisions or your dodgy night's sleep that
you're having or the immense stress that you insist on putting yourself under
(03:58):
we know that exercise isn't a band-aid that can solve things it has it's it's
a factor that's folded into a greater wellness paradigm and.
So the personal trainer you know what I when I've had personal trainers I've
had wonderful experiences with them great results and I also kind of wanted more,
(04:19):
because I would I would come to the gym for my one-hour session call it three
times a week and we would exercise for one hour three times a week and then
that was kind of it there was no conversation about what else I was doing in
my life my trainer would talk to me about nutrition a little bit because because
my new trainers have always had a little bit of a background in like
macros and stuff, but I don't really need help with nutrition.
(04:40):
I wanted to understand maybe more about like, well, how is this movement style
going to help me with my greater fitness and wellness goals?
You know, what else can I be doing in my day-to-day life to support the efforts I just made in the gym?
Because that's not just food. It's not just diet and exercise.
And we know this because we're health coaches.
We completely understand this holistic realm. Well, interestingly,
(05:04):
at Primal Health Coach Institute, we created a fitness coach certification.
So it's called the Primal Fitness Coach Certification Course.
And we love it because, first of all, primal fitness is such a cool concept.
It's not necessarily about lifting weights in the gym, although that's a factor.
But it's also about how we stand, how we sit, how we move, how we tend to our
(05:27):
nervous system state. sort of, you know, that yin yang of intensity versus recovery.
It's an immensely robust course, and it's awesome.
Just the stuff you'll learn kind of the interesting more, I guess,
ancestral patterns of movement.
And when we created this course, we thought, you know, what the fitness industry needs is more coaching.
(05:52):
We need our fitness coaches to be having coaching conversations with their clients.
So imagine this. This was always my vision was like the client comes for maybe
two or three workouts a week because we do generally know that two to three
strength training sessions a week is sufficient for great fitness and beautiful
longevity and an awesomely healthy body composition with lean body mass.
(06:15):
You know, we know that. So maybe
you have two or three training sessions actually in the gym exercising.
And then maybe once a week, there's a coaching call, just like,
you know, just like health coaches do, just like I do with my clients.
They have coaching calls with me every week. So we can talk about what was going,
what happened last week, what's coming up next week, how do you feel about how
(06:35):
we're moving towards your goals, what's working, what's not working,
where can we make a small adjustment, let's set a small, a small goal for the
week. This is one of my favorite parts about health coaching.
I don't know about you, but for me, I love granular goal-setting.
In fact, when I train health coaches, I know all of my previous students are
laughing at hearing me say that because granular goal-setting is terminology
(06:58):
that I really drill into their skulls.
But the smaller and the more attainable and the more sort of precise and granular
the goal is, the more meaningful it is in the context of process Process versus outcome goals.
I hope that commentary means something to you if you're a health coach listening.
(07:19):
But a process goal is the tiny little steps we take to achieve the ultimate outcome.
So the top of the staircase is the outcome goal. We got to walk up this little
micro staircase bit by bit by bit. it.
So now I believe that fitness trainers, personal trainers, they have our programming.
In mind, they know what they're doing, they understand, I'm going to get I'm
(07:42):
going to get this client of mine to deadlift this much this week,
and the next week, we're going to add five pounds.
And then subsequently, we're going to add five pounds, the client won't necessarily
notice, but the personal trainer knows that they're, they're hitting that progressive
overload, they are making the progress goals in the strength realm and the client
doesn't really have to do anything.
They just have to show up. That's actually, by the way, one of the great benefits
(08:04):
of having a personal trainer is you just show up, you just walk into the gym
and say, all right, tell me what to do.
And people think they like that.
But what that doesn't foster is self-efficacy.
So, self-efficacy is the desired slash the necessary outcome that a health coaching
(08:28):
relationship must have.
And what basically self-efficacy means is the client feels confident.
They have the skills, abilities, knowledge, and resources to do it on their own.
And in some ways, the fitness industry...
Anchors to the lack of self-efficacy that a lot of people are left with,
(08:50):
you know, if you decide to cut ties with your personal trainer and just go off
on your own, they already know you're not going to figure it out.
Some people might, but most people aren't going to really do it on their own
anyway. They like the accountability. They like the programming that the coach did.
They're going to come back like I did, like I kept coming back, right?
And I know a lot about fitness and an exercise and I still am
(09:13):
better off if I have somebody to tell me what to do because maybe that
that's that sense of self-efficacy wasn't fostered so just
having the client show up and be and being told what to do
first of all clients really do think they want
that and on some level I believe them my clients have said that
to me too they said just tell me what to eat and I'll
say well I could do that but if I did you
(09:36):
wouldn't really learn anything and you wouldn't figure this out for yourself
and I have a hunch that you want to get on with your life right
graduate from my care and just go off and eat move
and live and feel healthy and great in your body so I'm not
going to tell you what to eat but I'm gonna teach you and guide you
as you learn how to eat to support your health goals right so I think the fitness
(09:56):
industry needs that too so anyway back to this article this is the gist of the
article again the title of the article is wellness redefined the fitness industry's
new focus and this is on on Athlete Tech News.
What's really fascinating in this article, just a small parenthetical,
is this paragraph. Listen to this.
(10:19):
"'The size of the wellness market worldwide "'stood at $5.61 trillion in 2022,',
"'according to Statista.
"'This figure was projected to grow at a compound annual growth
rate of 8.6 like hello
(10:40):
that's that's better than the stock market by orders of magnitude
reaching an estimated 8.47 trillion
by 2027 that's insane there's not
a bigger industry now i think the wellness market probably encapsulates things
like nutrition supplements fitness gyms fitness programming wellness programming
probably even the beauty industries will fold it up in there hard to say what
(11:01):
that includes but it's enormous right and And then the really hard pill to swallow is we look around,
and it's like, hmm, we're spending a lot of money on this.
It doesn't seem to be working, but it could work.
It could work. And I think the spirit behind this article, why I wanted to share it with you is that,
it's exciting to imagine that we could sort of rearrange the way we execute
(11:22):
the health consumer's experience in the health and wellness is multi-trillion
dollar industry so that they can get results and long-term results the results that stick.
So back to the article, it says over the years, the fitness industry has learned
from its collective ineffectiveness in successfully addressing the obesity epidemic,
(11:44):
recognizing that more needs to be done to help the whole person.
One thing hasn't changed. People need health guidance more than ever.
And personal training brands from all corners of the sector have taken notice
and are taking steps to embed wellness principles into their products and services.
So we are now this is what we're talking about.
(12:04):
It's like yes, you'll come here and exercise and you're gonna move the weights
and you're gonna do the things to get your athletic and fitness Goals met and
also what else is important to you? What else how do you want your life to shake
out from a health and wellness perspective a longevity perspective?
What does life look like dear client when you've achieved your health and wellness?
(12:25):
Outcomes, how do you feel? How do you look? How do you perform?
How do you live your life when this is all working and then what can we do?
What tiny tiny little steps can we take together to get you there exercise will
definitely be part of it but not the only thing and we can't put it into a silo
so Bill Davis is quoted in the article he's the CEO of ABC fitness and.
(12:50):
He says, we expect to see a new phase of growth in the fitness industry that
incorporates nutrition, recovery, and mental health as key parts of the average
member's fitness journey.
Whether dedicated recovery studios or adding cold plunge facilities to your
club, we're seeing the focus shift to overall well-being.
The studio the gym or the personal trainer is the gateway to more
(13:12):
holistic health opportunities for members i completely agree completely
agree i say this as somebody who i have a virtual
practice so i work with clients online they find me through my social media
marketing efforts but there's something really magical about having a brick
and mortar facility the gym the gym where we all go i'm probably i mean i don't
(13:34):
know what the statistics are i don't know what the statistics are on gym memberships.
But everybody I know has one, whether they go or not, whether they're getting
any fitness gains or not, that's neither here nor there, but everyone's got a gym membership.
So you're going to this place anyway, what if it had, yes, the weight equipment?
Yes, the cardio equipment? Yes, it's got classes. Oh, it's got hot yoga.
(13:54):
It's got a recovery room. It's got massage chairs. It's got the Theraguns.
It's got a stretching area. My gym has these meditation
rooms we just got a cryotherapy thing
like so now the gym becomes this destination where
you could go to the gym and say well today i'm just going to meditate and then
sit in a massage chair like that's all i'm going to do and that's part of my
(14:15):
wellness focus so i'm going to go to the gym every day not every day is going
to be a crush sesh maybe i'm just going to go to be with other people that was
another article i saw recently that i really was excited about um sort of touting
the benefits of group or squad fitness programming where you you get together with a group.
That's group fitness, man. CrossFit capitalized on that.
Group fitness has capitalized on that for decades.
(14:39):
But it's sort of like, we've got to get in with people again.
We need to take care of our body in different ways. It's pretty cool. I think...
I think this is exciting. So if you're a personal trainer, maybe you work at
a gym, or maybe you have a home studio, or maybe you do it virtually as well.
I hope that you are taking some time to fold in other wellness modalities.
(15:06):
You know, you could just start by saying to your clients, hey,
once a week, we're going to have a coaching conversation.
We're going to have an actual conversation, no workout, we're just going to
talk about goal setting, we're just going to set some goals, some weekly goals.
Once a week, we're going to set weekly granular goals that shore up to your greater health vision.
This will complement the workouts we're doing, but it's going to give you a
(15:31):
more holistic approach to, you know, your body, your body, your health,
your wellness, your life.
So I do love hearing this as a fitness industry grandma.
It's very exciting to me to know that the fitness industry, it's not going anywhere.
It's growing exponentially, multi-trillions of dollars.
Well, at least it's evolving.
(15:53):
That's great to see.
Health Coach Radio listeners, have I got a treat for you.
To get 72-hour free trial access to
Primal Health Coach Institute and a 50% off
coupon code to the How to Become a Health Coach
virtual summit featuring video interviews with over 30
industry experts visit primal health
(16:14):
coach comm forward slash HCR today
all right it's
time for Q&A the first question comes from Mike and Mike asks I'm curious how
to handle coaching while still doing a full-time job and being an active husband
and father okay so here's what we got I know that many of you will relate to
(16:36):
this because you've got your full-time 9 to 5 job Monday to Friday,
let's assume. And then from five to nine in the evenings, you're parenting and
doing family stuff and on the weekends.
So, you know, I think there's a lot of nuance here because like if your kids
are, you know, younger, older infants, what have you, you know,
you might be able to claw back precious hours, an hour a day.
(17:00):
I think you can find an hour a day. Now I know a lot of productivity gurus will
say, well, wake up at four in the morning and get it done before you start your day.
Maybe Mike, that's something that would work for you. Because I what I've heard,
what I've heard from people is that those early morning hours are highly productive,
you, you wake up, it's non negotiable.
This two hours before everybody else wakes up is my time to write something,
(17:24):
create something, answer client emails, whatever it might be.
So you'd be doing the early morning sort of working on the business kind of
thing, working on developing programs,
doing maybe some content marketing, writing a blog post, writing some social
posts and email mail to your list, the marketing efforts we have to do,
sort of uninterrupted deep work time.
Okay, so now I do want to point out that a health coaching practice needs a
(17:47):
bit of that. We have our deep work time where we have to go into our business.
I do that on Wednesdays. So on Wednesdays every week, I do not accept calls
in my calendar. You can't book a call with me on Wednesday.
So I don't have any interruptions, I guess you could say, in my day on Wednesdays.
I can actually chunk out time.
I also have a full-time job, by the way. I work full-time for Primal Health
(18:08):
Coach Institute, and I have a successful health coaching practice.
So it's a lot. I totally get it.
So Wednesdays are a day where I chunk out time to do big batches of content.
I batch it all, I create it all, then I just kind of sort of sprinkle it out for the next week or two.
Because I'm not very good at waking up early in the morning.
Myself, I don't like it. so I won't do it.
(18:30):
Now, alternately, I'm a little more productive and creative at night.
So it's sort of like after my workday has ended, all my client stuff is buttoned
up, and I'm kind of out of the productive part of my day, I can settle into
this sort of deep work phase, sort of in the evening before bed.
Let's address the elephant in the room, which is that's not super healthy,
(18:51):
because I'm probably staring at my MacBook or my phone, and it's dark.
Don't worry, I've got my blue blockers on, I know that staring at screens late
at night is not a healthy behavior.
What I will say though is that if you're trying to move into health coaching
because it's a passion of yours that you can't go another year of your life
without doing, it means something to you, and you're trying to tiptoe into it
(19:13):
out of your full-time job, that's going to take years by the way,
years, I'll talk about that in a second,
but you're going to have to work in the dregs of time that you have left.
So you might find yourself looking at a screen late at night or way too early
in the morning or whatever the case may be.
I want to normalize that this sort of working in the business part,
(19:35):
it will be little, the dribbles of time you have left over in amongst all of your other duties.
Okay. So I wanted to mention that, that you're going to have to carve out some
hours, call it four to seven.
I don't know. I pick those numbers completely randomly, But if it's one hour
a day for almost every day of the week to write something, to create something,
(19:56):
to put something together, to develop a system, to anchor to some technology,
to build something, to market yourself,
you need that time. Don't forget about that time.
Then there's the client-facing time. So you have to be on discovery calls,
you know, having consultations with prospective clients.
You have to be doing coaching calls with them, and those things must happen
(20:17):
during times of day that are convenient for the client.
So I often did this on my lunch break so
it depends on what kind of job you have when I my full-time job that I
had um I was pretty autonomous at my office I
could kind of take my lunch break whenever I wanted so sometimes I would take
my lunch break at 11 a.m sometimes it'd be a 1 p.m or noon somewhere in there
(20:40):
midday and I would have that as my coaching call time and I could squeeze two
coaching calls into my lunch hour if they're 25 minute calls with a client if
I did that five days a week,
which I didn't, but if I did, well, there's 10 clients you can carry squeezing
coaching calls into your lunch break.
Or maybe you have, maybe you can carve out a half an hour on the drive home
(21:00):
or right after work, or, you know, make an arrangement with your co-parent,
your partner, who's also raising the family with you and say,
you know, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I just want to carve out one hour,
90 minutes before dinner every night.
I'm going to come home and then I'm going to go into my office for 90 minutes
and just do client calls. And then I'll be out here for dinner and I'm with you.
(21:23):
But you know, partner, it's very important to me to grow this coaching business.
I think it can really be something exciting for me. And I know I can help a
lot of people. So I really would love if we could just make this arrangement.
Just, you know, I think our partners, our loved ones, they love us.
So they want the best for us.
And if you can approach these conversations from the perspective of an an arrangement
(21:43):
and just say, I only need a couple hours a week to do these coaching calls.
And I think that would be sufficient. If you could squeeze them in little sort
of dribbles of time you have maybe at your workday, depending on how you work.
I also want to acknowledge that not everybody has a desk job like I did.
You might be a firefighter. You might be in my work on a factory floor. I don't know.
(22:03):
So it's possible that when I say, oh, just do it on your lunch break,
that that's not feasible.
But you know, for example, if you're a firefighter, it would be really hard
for you to schedule coaching calls during your workday, because there could be a fire.
You wouldn't have to cancel it. So, you know, extrapolate accordingly.
But you don't need a ton of time because here's the deal. You're going to start
(22:27):
your coaching business. You're going to have one client.
And then you probably have one client. And then you probably have one.
And maybe you'll get a second one.
Then you'll have two clients. And maybe you'll have two clients.
And then maybe you'll get a third one. And this is taking a long time.
It's going to take a long time to build, quite frankly. This is what I wanted
to come back to. Because you have lots of time.
What's probably not going to happen, you're probably not going to open your
(22:50):
business and be immediately slammed with clients.
So this is an exciting thing to think about what happens when my client roster
is overwhelmingly large.
Well, at that point, you can make a move like you'll you'll see that coming from miles away.
You'll have your fourth, fifth, sixth client in your roster,
which I still think you can manage six to eight clients with a full time job and a family.
(23:13):
I really do because every client needs a 30 minute coaching call a week.
So if you have eight clients, that's four hours you got to find for coaching calls.
And then, you know, you also have to do, like I said earlier,
that other work on your business where you're managing client files and programming, all that stuff.
So for, you need to find four hours, call it to do coaching calls at another
four to seven hours to do all the behind the scenes business stuff.
(23:38):
Um, that's with an eight with a roster of eight clients and say each client
pays you a thousand bucks.
You know, that's, that's nice, right I mean it's not not enough money to
get you to quit your job but it's a
start and then you might say man if I took on
another client here I took on a
ninth or a tenth client I'd be really really hurt and I would be hard for me
(23:59):
to facilitate this well that's when you can start making moves I don't know
can you approach your employer and negotiate sort of like I'd like to take you
know I'd like to work a four-day work week or I'm doing this other thing.
It's really important to me.
Listen, I approached this with my employer and they were open to it, quite honestly.
(24:20):
They were like, as long as you stay here and keep doing what you're doing,
we know that you're looking to move out of this into your next phase.
Like they knew as long as I was still there and engaged with my work,
they were okay with me sort of having my side hustle.
I don't know that every employer is going to be cool with that.
So, like at some point too, and then I got to the point where,
(24:41):
and I'll just share an anecdote, where I couldn't maintain that full-time job
because it was just too cognitively demanding.
It was a whole ass full-time job.
And I'm trying to claw back some of that time to focus on my coaching business,
and it got to the point where I couldn't do it.
So I quit my job, but I couldn't, I didn't have enough clients to replace my
(25:02):
income. So I went and got a different job.
Like a really sort of, how can I put this? A job that was less demanding of
my time and cognitive energy.
So I went to, I went to work at a smoothie bar and a cafe.
I was sort of juggling these and both of these businesses, by the way,
they wanted like a nutrition coach on staff, just randomly.
(25:24):
They wanted somebody who could help them with their marketing and their menu
development so they could have healthy food.
And my background was marketing and I'm nutritionist, health coach.
So it was really cool. I got, you know, minimum wage for these two jobs.
And I was kind of juggling them.
And then I could sort of accept more clients.
And cobbling together my income like that got me close to my full time salary.
(25:47):
But now I was like out, I was out of marketing, I was out of it, I was in my new thing.
And I did that for a while. And by the way, that was really fun for me.
That was really fun for me.
I had never really done like a
food service or customer service type job before and sort of sitting at a cafe
or at a smoothie bar chit chatting with people and by the way if it wasn't busy
(26:09):
at the cafe or the smoothie bar guess what i was doing working on my business
i loved it you know you get a job at the vitamin store or,
there's tons of like part-time remote occasional health coaching jobs that you
could get when the time comes where your client roster has grown to the point
where you can't juggle it well with your full-time,
(26:32):
the demands of your full-time job, then maybe you can move away from your full-time job.
So I just want to, I want to, first of all, just validate that this takes a long time.
And I know when I say stuff like that, I'm just being realistic.
It takes a long time for your client roster to grow to the point where you have
to make a big decision on your career.
So you've got years, you got a few years, quite honestly, before you have to worry about that.
(26:55):
But then when you when it comes time, I literally use the phrase tiptoe out
of your professional career, because that's kind of what you'll do.
You'll you'll tiptoe out of it into something else that's maybe pays a little
less, but requires a little bit less of your mental energy, so that you can
build your health coaching business.
It's a really, it's a really common and cool strategy, you know.
(27:20):
I believe it's doable I believe any one of us
can and should start a health coaching practice and
you're probably going to have to start it while you still have your full-time
job I don't really want you all quitting your jobs to do this you have bills
to pay you have a family to take care of so let's be responsible about this
but yes you can still build it in the small moments of time that you carve out
(27:41):
just I think manage your expectations about how rapidly you're gonna grow.
All right, I got a couple programming questions. So this question is from Ileana.
I hope I'm pronouncing that right.
For a 12-week program, how often should you have coaching sessions once a week
or every other week? And how long should the sessions be?
(28:04):
And then a follow-up question was, what if the program was six months?
So I personally am a staunch advocate for the weekly coaching call.
Because a week is a nice interval of time where somebody, a client can go off
and sort of, let's say, run an experiment or try something or reach for a goal
(28:26):
and then report back. I love that cadence.
There's something really magical about, you know, you get on the phone with
your client on a Wednesday and you say, all right, Sally, tell me,
take me through how last week went.
How did you make out on your goal that we set last week? And she'll say,
well, this went well, this went well, this, I struggled here.
And you're going to pick up cues from what went well and where your client struggled.
(28:46):
And And typically, not often, but typically the struggle from last week is going
to become the objective for next week.
And then next week happens and you check back in again. And now we've got a
new couple of successes and we have a new struggle that's going to inform next week's action.
So we are marching the client down this continuum, or I guess up the staircase
(29:06):
to go back to my earlier metaphor, up the little staircase to the outcome goal
at the top week over week over week.
So generally speaking, I love a weekly check-in call. I want to add some texture
to this though, because I've tried other things.
My program, for example, my coaching program is six months long.
And when I was doing it one-on-one style, because I'm not doing one-on-one anymore,
(29:30):
which I'll talk about, I'll just gently talk about in a second.
When it was one-on-one, I would do weekly coaching sessions for the first 12 weeks.
And then for the subsequent 12 weeks, we went to every other week.
I would call that, I would call that bi-weekly, but I know there's a lot of
debate on what bi-weekly means.
(29:50):
Semi-monthly? Anyway, I moved from weekly to every other week.
And I just tried that honestly to, well, to claw back some of my time because
I had a really busy client roster.
And I thought, well, if these 20 people are only getting in my calendar every
other week, then that's, you know, that saves me, call it 10 hours of work a week.
But I actually personally didn't like the bi-weekly interval.
(30:13):
And my thinking behind doing that was, well, now they've been in this program
for three months. They get it. They've worked through some goals.
I want them to go off for longer periods of time now to really try putting this into their life.
Once again, we come back to the concept of self-efficacy. I want them to know
that they can do this on their own without having to check in with me all the time.
(30:34):
So that's the spirit behind why I did that. I'm sort of in the beginning phases
of graduating them to their own self-efficacy.
So I do like it for that reason, but I, as a coach, felt disconnected from my client's goals.
So I've come back to a weekly interval, and it's still my favorite.
And, you know, think about it from the consumer perspective.
(30:59):
Two things I want you guys to think about from the consumer perspective.
First of all, health consumers, they hire us because they're looking for some
measure of accountability.
You're going to hear that all the time. I need someone to hold me accountable.
Now what you and I know is that the client must be accountable to themselves
because you're a stranger.
I'm a stranger from the internet. You don't need to be accountable to me.
I'm nobody in your life. I'm your coach. I'm teaching you. I'm guiding you. I'm helping you.
(31:21):
But ultimately, this relationship is going to end and you're going to have to
go off on your own and know how to do this.
That's what gets me out of bed in the morning is delivering my clients to self-efficacy.
But they want the accountability. And I think the interval helps that.
Now, what I've noticed happens in a six-month coaching relationship is the client
self-selects their own coaching frequency based on what they need.
(31:47):
So what I mean by that is, maybe Sally skips a week, she's like,
Hey, Aaron, I don't have anything really to talk about this week,
everything's fine. Let's skip the call this week.
And we'll connect next week. So the client will almost elongate their own interval,
as their confidence grows.
There's a, there's a real, again, a continuum of confidence that grows week
(32:09):
over week, your client becomes more confident, more self efficacious,
so they don't actually need your help that much.
So you can leave the weekly coaching call available to
them and they may opt in or out of it as they get more and more confident
so one thing
I wanted to mention though just to close the loop on this is I don't do one-on-one
(32:29):
anymore I don't do one-on-one client calls anymore because I have too many clients
now my business grew to the point where one-on-one became unscalable and it
will become unscalable for you as well at some point that's just inevitable
as long as you don't quit as As long as you don't quit,
your business will grow to the point where you can't do one-on-one.
There's just not gonna be enough hours in the day.
(32:51):
So you will move to group coaching. And just very quickly, the way I manage
group coaching is I open a Zoom
room for an hour a day, and my clients are invited in to that meeting.
And they can just sit back and listen, or they can unmute themselves and share
what they want to work on.
We go around the horn, we goal set, same thing. Okay, Sally,
what's going to be your goal for this week? All right, Bob, over to you. Let's get a goal going.
(33:14):
Okay, Dave, what do you want to work on. We just go around the horn.
That's, that's eventually, I don't, if you're a brand new health coach,
don't start with that. Okay.
Don't start with the group models. Definitely start with one-on-one.
You have to get your coaching chops.
You have to figure out how to coach people. You have to figure out how to work
with individuals before you can extrapolate that to a group.
(33:36):
So just a small thing, but you know, even then I,
even though my coaching calls happen every single day
and my clients could ostensibly come into a call every day
if they want to I normalize and socialize the
idea with them that I need to see you about once a week but
you can come more if you want to or less but I need to see you about once a
week that's the interval where people get the greatest results and I fully believe
(33:59):
that this question is from Bruce and it's also in the same vein as the last
question which is what is the average length of time a typical client will use your services.
So I just mentioned that my program, for example, is six months long.
In the health coaching industry, I think 12 weeks, a 12 week program is kind
of the industry, call it median, the standard.
(34:22):
And 12 weeks is really 12 weeks is a really good amount of time,
because you know, in three months
time, you can make big moves on behavior change, on health improvement,
people will have some wins under their belt, whether it's some weight loss,
or some improved energy, or their mental clarity, or their performance in in
the gym or something, it's enough time that they'll notice something.
Because this is something that I'm really passionate about, which is that the
(34:45):
health change takes a long time. It doesn't, nothing really happens quickly, unfortunately.
So at least 12 weeks, in at least 12 weeks, you get some good results for people.
So I ran a 12 week program for a long time. And it was great.
It was awesome. In 12 weeks, we got such insane results.
And ultimately, all these clients would would, again, graduate to self-efficacy.
(35:07):
So they're going off and continuing to do it on their own without needing me.
And then it stopped working.
So, and this is just a sort of a personal anecdote, but I started noticing that
my clients, okay, every now and then I get a client who got to the end of 12
weeks and hadn't quite achieved the goals that...
We had um we had set at the start of the engagement and
(35:31):
it started happening more often and more often and frankly folks i
don't know what happened so i really don't know what happened i
don't know if this is like a covid thing like we we came through that time of
life and then it was sort of like it was all too much and it felt feels now
harder for us to be healthy or get sort of fired up and motivated i don't know
if it's some global loss of motivation that happened after that that crazy experience.
(35:57):
Or because I'm aging, so my clients are aging.
So if I think about, you know, 12 years ago, when I started my health coaching
business, I was in my mid 30s.
And so were my clients. Now we're in our late 40s, or 50s. And so my clients
are now different people.
They are, well, my clients are basically all women.
Now they're going through their menopause transition, they're probably at some
(36:19):
advanced stage in their career.
So they're grinding at work, their kids are growing up into adulthood.
So they're trying to navigate that a whole new type of parenting.
Maybe they have, you know, they have more spare time now. So they're traveling
more, they're having more, you know, social moments with food and drink,
because they have money and they have time.
So maybe because my clients and I have come into this next phase of life,
(36:43):
maybe that's why 12 weeks isn't feeling like enough. So I extended ended my program to six months.
Six months is a long time, but it also flies by. And so when I'm on the discovery
call with clients, prospective clients, and I get to the prescription part of the conversation,
I'll say, all right, so I work with my clients for six months in a very close,
(37:04):
personalized coaching relationship.
And the reason for that is because, not because it's going to take six months
for you to achieve your goals, but it's going to take you six months to practice
the art and science of behavior change.
Like just, it's really hard to change behaviors at this stage in life, you know?
So I want you to feel really supported while you go through this arduous process of behavior change.
(37:27):
And I'm going to support you through that for six months. And I think when I
frame it that way, I think I'm doing a pretty good job of describing the value.
Because I think if I said, if you just say six months and let it sort of hang
in the air, where your client might be thinking like, wow, is it gonna take
me that long to lose 20 pounds or whatever their thing is? And they might find that to be.
(37:53):
Like a daunting prescription. So framing it from the perspective of we work
together for six months so that you can achieve your weight loss goal and learn
the skills and abilities and resources,
and the personal accountability to do this for the rest of your life.
So you never have to go on a diet again.
It doesn't take six months to get healthy, but it definitely will take six months
(38:14):
to create a health paradigm in your life that you can stick with. How does that sound?
So when I bumped my program up to six months, I thought I might get some pushback,
like maybe it's too long or Now it's too expensive because obviously when the,
when the duration of the program changed, the price tag changed,
I've gotten no pushback.
People really like it, but people also really like the 12 week program.
So I guess my final word on this is I would say most health coaches will probably
(38:36):
run a 12 week program and it's a good amount of time. It's a whole season, whole quarter, right?
And there's like, as humans, we kind of, we kind of think seasonally and we
kind of think quarterly, right?
In some ways. so your your prospective client
can wrap their head around a 12-week length of time oh that's
(38:56):
one season by spring I'll be in my you know
smaller size pants or whatever I think 12 weeks is a great length of time I
think six months is awesome you know I've even talked to health coaches that
have two-year programs five-year programs like very long programs because they're
working on bigger maybe more longevity focused programs that have a lot more moving
(39:17):
parts, maybe there's other allied health professionals involved.
But I think generally speaking, 12 weeks is a great place to start.
All right my final question for today comes from jose and
this is just a jose was just asking me a personal question about
my own health coaching business which i i love sharing those because i reflect
(39:39):
back on the beginning of my health coaching business very very very fondly so
jose asks how did you start to coach your first client did they ask for a certification
so nobody's ever never asked me for a certification.
Well, not ever, but maybe 1% of the time I've had a person say,
(40:02):
just out of curiosity, what are your credentials?
And then I can say, well, I'm a board-certified health coach.
And I also have a holistic nutrition diploma and nobody cares.
Nobody cares because more importantly is I have a specific solution for the
health struggle that's keeping a certain type of person awake at night.
So I already mentioned I work with midlife, menopause transition women who are
(40:23):
struggling through some of the metabolic dysregulation that happens at that
stage of life. That's all I do.
Listen, if you want to try to run a 100 mile foot race fasted on a ketogenic diet, I don't got you.
I don't know how to do that. If you want to shred for the wedding,
you want to get a six-pack for your beach vacation, I don't do that.
(40:44):
I only do the one thing that I do.
And the only thing health consumers care about is do I
have a proven solution for their problem and i
do so it never comes up i think
you do need to so i do think that it's wise for
coaches to have training so there's always this
debate in the coaching industry like well coaching is unregulated you don't
(41:05):
have to be certified to go to business as a coach true but i do think you need
to be trained if you're not trained as a coach i just i don't know if you're
going to be any good at it i don't i don't do you have the confidence that you
can get great results for your clients in these really personalized bespoke
coaching relationships if you don't know how to coach.
So I think learning how to coach is crucial. And you just kind of have to go to school for that.
(41:29):
It's not easy to learn that through book learning. But I will make a plug for
one book that's very powerful. And I love this book.
And I think you can still get it on Audible, which is my preferred way of engaging with this book.
It's called Motivational Interviewing in Fitness and Nutrition.
I think that's what it's called. I'm just going off the top of my head.
But there's a lot of motivational interviewing books. This one's the In Fitness
(41:50):
and Nutrition one. one, it is such a great book to learn.
I always think the cadence of the motivational interview and the client led
coaching conversation.
But still, I think that going to school to learn how to coach is crucial.
So like when a client would ask me for my credential, the one I'm the most proud
(42:11):
of is my health coaching credential, because I know how to coach people.
Like, yeah, I have a nutrition credential too. But like, I don't think B vitamin
insufficiency is your problem here.
Not for my clients. I'm not the health coach that helps you with your vitamin insufficiencies.
And that's not my thing. I help midlife women through their menopause metabolic changes.
(42:32):
And I am an expert in that. And that's what I do. And people want to work with the expert.
So I don't really care what my credentials are. But how did I start?
So my first client, I've shared this anecdote before, so stop me if if you've heard it.
Her name was Tenille, which is a name that you would remember.
(42:53):
And Tenille found me through a Google search.
I know very boring origin story but the reason why i think that's crazy is because
i don't i didn't do any type of seo on my website i built my own website it's
just okay i've you know i've revised it many times since then that was 12 years
ago i i must have just kind of winged it on the seo,
(43:17):
you know you use a platform like wix or squarespace to build your website which
they're very easy and they have some little seo sort of plug and play things
like hey give us 25 keywords words that speak to what you do and they'll kind
of do something in the background. It's not good SEO.
Just so we're clear. I'm not an SEO expert, but if an SEO expert is listening
to this, SEO means search engine optimization.
(43:38):
If a search engine optimization expert is listening to me telling you to just
plug some keywords into Wix, they're definitely hurting themselves from eye-rolling.
They're definitely eye-rolling. There's some eye injuries happening.
But I did that. And Tennille searched for, she wanted,
(44:00):
she specifically searched the keyword paleo, which I was aligning with the paleo
diet at the time, and frankly still do. No one is surprised.
Paleo, autoimmune, nutrition, coach, something like that.
That was like her string of keywords or just because I asked her like,
I'm just curious, how did you find me? Because I'd literally been in business
for like, I've been in business for six weeks.
(44:22):
I was busy behind the scenes, building my program and writing,
you know, creating my intake forms.
And I wasn't expecting anybody to come into my calendar until she did.
And also she was looking for somebody local. So my very first client was local
to me and we did all our sessions in person.
She helped me build my program because I knew the first couple of things I wanted people to do.
Like, you know, I kind of want you to eat more protein. I kind of want you to
(44:44):
eat less of this, more of that.
You know, I have a personal perspective on circadian rhythms and circadian meal
timing that I think is really crucial. So I got her sort of sorted out on that.
I mentioned when I was talking about how to kneel search for me,
that she was looking for somebody to help her with autoimmunity.
And so like on some level like I understand gut health and
I understand the autoimmune process and you know I
know you know I understand elimination diets and how they can be really beneficial
(45:06):
autoimmunity is not a personal interest of mine or a specialty or something
I have any experience with I never had an autoimmune condition like working
with Tennille though I could help her and I did help her because I can apply
an elimination diet to help to resolve her autoimmune symptoms.
But I didn't find a lot of joy in it. It wasn't going to be my area of expertise.
(45:28):
So after Tennille, she helped me build my program.
I pivoted. I said, okay, I don't think autoimmunity is what I want to work on.
So I deleted that keyword from my pretend SEO on my website.
I think I want to work more on like metabolic dysregulation,
insulin resistance, prediabetes, because that's my origin story.
So I put those keywords in instead and really geared my program I talked about
(45:49):
programming earlier I geared my program toward resolving mild sort of subclinical
insulin resistance and then I just started messaging that and that's when I
you know got onto social media and,
granted this was 12 years ago so there wasn't a lot going on it wasn't really
a hotbed of consumer activity back then social media was a lot of like food
(46:09):
pics you know but you know I write blog posts I would I was mostly blog posting
interesting at the time.
But I would just write. I would just embody my expertise.
So, I've decided, I've drawn the line in the sand. I'm the expert in mild to
moderate subclinical insulin resistance for women in midlife.
I spent the next while just writing and creating and thinking and being that person.
(46:33):
And pretty soon I was attracting that kind of client through,
mostly through content marketing efforts. So Facebook at the time.
And then tons of referrals. So my clients would have good results and they'd
refer people. Referrals were a big part of my early business.
And now it's all social media. That's where I get all my business. this.
(46:55):
So my first coaching client came to me from a Google search,
which was just a happy accident.
She helped me build the program.
She had great results. She also helped me crystallize what I did and did not want to do.
And it was, I just want to also just to kind of wrap up in reflecting back on
(47:18):
working with Tennille, my very first client. client, it felt like,
I felt like I had come home to my true calling.
You know, if you think back to the conversation we had here today,
which is I left my job in advertising and tiptoed out of it into working at
a cafe and a smoothie bar.
And, you know, in my spare time, building a website and building a program and
writing a blog, and then somebody finds me and I could help them.
(47:41):
It was everything. It was everything. That's why I'll remember Tennille's name
forever. Also because it's a unique name.
But it was everything. thing. It was an affirmation that I was absolutely right where I was meant to be.
It was not smooth sailing to build a business over the last 12 years to build
a health coaching practice.
It's very up and down, but anything, any personal or professional development
(48:03):
you're going to do is going to have peaks and valleys, right?
Just don't quit. Just don't quit. Refuse to quit. I knew as soon as I felt that
way after working with Sunil that I was never going to quit this.
So I really owe Tennille everything. So Tennille, if you're listening to this,
I can't thank you enough.
(48:25):
All right, my friends, always wonderful to spend this time with you.
And, you know, keep coaching, keep submitting those questions.
You can submit them at hello at primalhealthcoach.com.
And I'll see you next time.
This podcast was brought to you by Primal health coach institute to
learn more about how to become a successful health coach get in
(48:46):
touch with us by visiting primalhealthcoach.com forward
slash call or if you're already a successful health coach practitioner influencer
or thought leader with a thriving business and an interesting story we'd love
to hear from you connect with us at hello at primalhealthcoach.com and let us
know why we need to interview you for health coach radio thanks for listening.
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