There should never be a week, a day, even an hour when you are not actively seeking and implementing improvements to your business, marketing, procedural, and operational systems. There can only be one reason for moments when you aren’t learning new things or improving your ability to train: laziness.
You could explain your excuses to me all day long, your list can run and run for miles with reasons, explanations, defenses and justifications as to why you haven’t made changes in your work, but laziness will always come out as truly the only reason for such behavior.
Now, before you click out of this post because you feel it is dripping with judgment and a lack of understanding, let me say that I completely understand this type of behavior. It is so blissfully easy to find something that works well enough and just stick with it over and over again.
It’s easy to get excited about just a little bit of success. Especially after lots of hard work that failed or didn’t perform as well as expected; when something does finally go right, we want to hold on to it and never let it change.
But this kind of attitude has never gotten anyone to the top.
You aren’t going to become hugely successful and be filled with self-satisfaction because you used methods that produced acceptable but mediocre results for an entire career. This type of compromise just cannot produce great trainers.
So that means, no matter what results we may be getting, no matter how hugely successful we do eventually get, we must constantly and actively be finding ways to change and improve.
And if you don’t, it’s because you’re lazy.
If you don’t like “lazy,” you can say content, satisfied, appeased— but these words are all just as bad as “lazy,” I assure you.
You are literally a professional in the industry of self–improvement— how could you ever justify a single day without any improvement? And I’m not talking about your own fitness milestones here, I’m strictly talking work and business.
You can never be content.
Isn’t that what our work is all about? Is that not what being a personal trainer or boot camp owner is based upon? Helping our clients to be constantly improving their bodies and lifestyles? So how can we operate our businesses with any other kind of attitude?
OK, I think you’ve got.
So let’s talk about some ways we can get this attitude and maintain it in order to encourage our perpetual improvement.
#1 – Constant Analysis
Every action you take throughout your professional day produces a plethora of reactions. Whether it is the way to answer a telephone call or the building lease you decide to sign, the actions you choose have noticeable impacts upon your business.
So pay attention and notice them.
Keep track of all the choices you make each day, evaluate your decision-making processes, see the affects your choices have made, and make adjustments to future choices based on this information.
Notice the effectiveness of your work, your procedures, your attitude and your efforts. Analyze these actions each time they are performed so that you can spot any flaws, issues, or problems with the way you are running your business. Once you find any concerns, fix them.
Constant vigilance is the only way to make sure you are always improving and staying on top of your game.
#2 – Never Compromise
The moment your analysis brings an issue, no matter how small, to your attention, and your response to this issue is to say, “eh, good enough,” you have spelt disaster for your business. It is noticing and fixing even the smallest issues that separates the good from the incredible. You cannot let your work be ‘good enough’ and you can never assume anything less than perfect will still produce high quality results.
Now, you cannot let obsessive perfectionism keep you form ever acting at all. Sometimes a product, a workout or a business plan must be produced or executed even before it is perfect simply because of logistical reasons. But the point here is that, after that release or after that first try, improvement should always be on the way.
Don’t let this hold you back, but at the same time, don’t ever let imperfection hold your work back from being its best.
#3 Define Purpose
A great way to measure your work’s effectiveness and to discover what and how much improvement it needs is evaluating how it has achieved its designated purposes. And the only way to know this is to designate your work’s purpose. This can be done in a very broad sense but can also get extremely specific.
Look at your business as a whole and decide the 10-15 main outcomes that allow your business to become and remain profitable. If you are a personal trainer, that means you should be helping clients get results, improving their happiness, finding new clients, signing new contracts, etc.
Get the idea?
Every personal training business or Fit Body Boot Camp exists to solve certain societal problems and to provide services clients are willing to pay for. But it must deliver on those obligations to be considered successful.
So, if I asked you, right now, what percentage of your clients saw significant results within the first 30-days of your service? How many clients cancel, on average, after 60-days of service? How many clients have been with you for over a year?
By finding the answers to these questions you can identify issues and implement improvement. But you won’t know which questions to ask until you define your purpose.
It seems obvious, even instinctual, yet by articulating what we know by instinct we can discover more nuanced and complicated ways to implement improvement.
These are just a few ways to constantly seek improvement, but once you get into the habit of preforming these tasks you will always be finding new ways to improve and new ways to find areas in need of improvement.
It is exactly this kind of attitude I strive to maintain each day. As I approach my work I am always thinking to myself: “How can I perform this task in a way that will bring more success, better outcomes, and faster results?”
I think you should do the same.
Committed to your success,
Bedros