I’ve had some time to reflect on my recent conversation with fellow trainer/coach Leigh Peele which was released as the 200th episode of the podcast.
It can be so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day of this business that while I catch certain successes, I tend to miss others. Sometimes I can sense a point of failure coming before it happens and sometimes it catches me by surprise. As the adage might go: “the joys of owning a business.”
It can be that outsider’s perspective too, that shines a light on things that I may have previously missed or discounted. When someone tells you you’re successful, maybe you just don’t really feel like it because all you see are the things that are going wrong.
By and large, what we’re doing at RevFit is a resounding success. We beat the industry norm, we beat the small business norm, we beat my expectations, that’s for sure.
And it stands to reason, human nature being what it is, that no matter how good it gets I’m always failing at something.
Maybe I put too much on my schedule where I shouldn’t, or maybe my wife, Marissa, asks me to do something for her and I forget, or I lost a client because they didn’t get the experience they had hoped for with us.
What I experience with this business is not unlike what my clients go through with their own self improvement.
Think of it like this: if I only used my gross revenue as an indication of success, how truly successful am I?
Within the scope of monetary success, I have to question: How happy are my clients? Shouldn’t that be an indicator of success? It stands to reason that I could make a lot of money just by bringing in more people to train but what are the long-term results and overall satisfaction levels of those clients?
Shouldn’t that satisfaction be what trumps everything else?
If a client only uses the scale as the indicator of success, what details are they missing?
And this is what I wanted to write you about.
It’s easy(ish) to diet for a goal.
It’s also easy to remove whole food groups, demonize certain macronutrients and double-down to force ourselves in a deficit just to get closer to that goal.
But what problem are you actually solving? Is this a “weight loss” problem or is this a “I want to be healthier” problem? They are not always synonymous.
As a business owner, I could be purely motivated by gross revenue (think “scale weight”.) Or, I could be motivated by customer experience, customer retention, and customer satisfaction, allowing those factors to determine our gross revenue (not the other way around.)
Those factors would lead me to ask you if you’re focusing on quality sleep, quality movement and quality food intake. You know: the things that undoubtedly get you to your goal but we tend to forget about because the allure of a diet trend makes us lose focus.
Much like I’ve admitted with my misgivings as a business owner, I want you to consider similar questions for yourself.
If you’re not seeing results as you want, I’d like you to look at other variables like how many hours you sleep, how many servings of fruits/vegetables you eat in a day, how much water you’re drinking, how consistent you are with caloric intake or your exercise plan, how happy you feel on a given day and how you might be monitoring the relative chaos in your life.
You see, all of those things above can affect your scale weight but if all you ever look at is the scale, how do you know the bigger picture of your success?
And, as I’ve done professionally, it’s easy to discount our success when I tend to nit-pick what we’re not doing right (or what I feel can be improved upon.)
Your circumstances are not unlike this business. The successes ebb and flow, the failures tend to be magnified as we find ways to figuratively self-flagellate.
And it might be helpful to treat your body somewhat like a business. Keep it profitable and move it forward. “Trim the fat”, if you will, to keep expenses minimal but necessary. Get outside opinion to see and hear things you may not have your eyes open to (this is where coaching tends to be beneficial.)
Most of all, realize that while you’re on this spectrum, there will be heavy doses of success and failure. All of which is normal, all of which is needed, all of it is valuable feedback.
There is no one success that catapults you to your goals. It is normally a series of minor successes that compound over time. Conversely, there is no one failure that completely erases your progress thus far (although having a tendency to catastrophize those failures can set off an unfortunate chain of less than ideal behaviors.)
It’s my kind encouragement to you to celebrate your successes and find ways to replicate them as frequently as possible; to fail consciously and to course-correct as swiftly as possible in efforts to minimize damage (emotionally and in defense of your goals.) Both sides of this coin have to be embraced.
Because to get to your goal, you’re going to experience a lot of success that may not always be noticeable and you’re going to experience a lot of failure that has to be accepted as part of the plan.
There is really no other way.
“We Make Great People Greater.”
(Below is our very own, Starr, taking over Top 5 in deadlift last week with 265×1.)
