The Real Reason Your Clients Hired You; When You Know Why, You Can Change Their Lives

There's always been an inherent connection between personal training and personal development.

I'm sure you'd know from experience, that along with prescribing exercises and counting reps, personal trainers offer their clients motivation and tools to potentially transform their lives completely, both physically and emotionally.

The emotional transformations our clients can experience are an understated part of the personal training industry. We often sell our services on the back of physical results and promote the benefits of being thinner or more muscular to attract the opposite sex, or to live longer and while that is a core component, it's what lies beneath those results that our clients are most concerned about.

Maybe our client has never had a boyfriend or girlfriend, maybe there's a new addition to the family and if they don't lose weight, they won't see their child's 18th birthday. Maybe their marriage is on the rocks and they feel if they don't get into shape they are going to lose their life partner.

These are the underlying factors why people join gyms and hire personal trainers.

Do you go to the dentist because it's a cool thing to do or you want to give away money? If you're like most people, you probably go there to get your teeth fixed so they don't fall out or to make them whiter to be more attractive. You might not tell your dentist, but they're generally the underlying motivators.

I think a lot of the time that we as fitness professionals forget about these things. We forget the core reason our clients made the initial phone call or walked into our gyms or what's more likely, you probably never asked.

Have you ever had a client just disappear off the radar? Maybe you weren't doing your job properly, or maybe your client just achieved their underlying goal and doesn't need you anymore.

I remember a client of mine in his mid thirties that loved rugby. His dream was to play again but a niggling knee injury and lack of fitness was holding him back and that's why he hired me.

We worked together twice a week for about 4 months and he was so driven and committed to achieving his goal that his progress was phenomenal.

Then one night he came in and told me that he'd played on the weekend with no problems and would no longer require my services. He was extremely grateful for our work, said that if he ever wanted to do more training he'd look me up and he did refer me several clients as well.

This made me wonder if this was a business success or a failure? I mean, he achieved his goals but I lost a client.

Of course it was a success. This is what we do, we help our clients achieve their goals; their underlying, life changing goals.

Maybe the pre-exercise questionnaire should look more like this:

• How long since you've worked out?
• How important is it for you to achieve your fitness goals?
• How long since you've been laid?
• Is death knocking on your door?

It may sound funny, but take a second to think about it...it would make sense to find out these things don't you think?

Make that connection with your clients and find out what their underlying motivators are to work out or eat right.

You will find that not only will your relationship greatly improve, you will be better prepared to supply your clients with the tools that they need and therefore build a more stable and consequently more profitable fitness business.

Do your clients confide in you? How do you get them to open up and share their true goals?

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Have a great day!

Ben

Additional Reading:
Is The Fear Of Failure Holding You Back?
When Personal Trainers Feel Rotten, This Is What They Do
I'm The World's Best Personal Trainer
Personal Training Is Hard Work