What will it do for your clients ?
What will it do for you ? On more than one occasion I have suggested that a number of innovative personal trainers have been using NLP for some time. However the tendency was to keep very quiet about what it was they were using – seeing it as their secret weapon – if you like - in today’s competitive market. My take on it was slightly different – being aware of the huge potential benefits of NLP for clients/being aware of the difference NLP could make to people’s lives in terms of helping them make the changes they so desired, I asked myself how I could reach as many ‘clients’ as possible. The answer was very clear to make other fitness industry professionals aware of the huge potential benefits of NLP and to train other personal trainers in NLP skills they could use with clients.
In this way ultimately more people would benefit from this wonderful resource. Fitness Unlimited set up in business as a training company and the cat was well and truly out of the bag, or so to speak. By the time this article is published the company will have trained 15 Fitness Professionals as NLP Practitioners and another 50 or so will have started that journey
Using NLP as a complementary tool in the fitness arena is a concept whose time has come and yet I am still asked
What will it do for me ?
What will it do for my clients ?
During the past year I have written a series of articles explaining how NLP can be applied to the work that we do in the Fitness Industry. Broadly speaking these have focussed on how NLP enables Personal Trainers to work with their clients beliefs and values and not just their bodies. More recently Fitness Network has featured articles on how to use NLP with a client during an Induction, Habit Breaking and Sports Performance.
Perhaps the best way of illustrating this what NLP will do for your clients is to provide case studies which will demonstrate the range of issues and challenges that NLP can help to tackle. (See Below)
However there is a massive secondary gain to be had by attending one of our courses; while we aim to equip you to deal with whatever challenges your clients might have – first and foremost however it is important to remember that NLP is a tool for personal development. Therefore, in the process of learning how to look at your clients motivation, for example, you necessarily have to look at your own - sometimes student’s find that their own thinking could do with something of an overhaul.
Do you tell people about what’s wrong in your life, or about your future plans? What do you find yourself focussing on – what you don’t want, or what you do want?
I have had many conversations with disgruntled Fitness Instuctors who are fed up with having little control over their working lives and who tell me they want to do one to one work – but they have little idea how they can change. In short, despite the frustration, it is easier to complain about everything and stick with what they know….better the devil etc etc. In so doing dissatisfaction becomes habitual and a certain comfort is derived from being continually fed up ! Similarly, I frequently find myself coaching Personal Trainers who are not happy with their set up, but they have really no idea how they would prefer things to be. It’s important to remember that we lead by example – our client’s model themselves on us ; as Fitness Professionals then it is imperative that we can distinguish the difference between away from and towards motivation and that we live and breathe the latter.
Understanding whether your clients are motivated by moving away from their current situation or towards how they would like things to be is fundamental. They are more likely to succeed in reaching their fitness goals if they are clear about what they want -moving away from something you don’t want is seldom successful because we get what we focus on. Therefore, if we focus on what we don’t want, sadly we just tend to get more of it! NLP offers many techniques to help people shift their thinking from being focussed on what they don’t want to what they would ideally create for themselves. The first of these The Well Formed Outcome Model we teach on Day 1; using just this one tool will help a client begin to sense how they want to be – add to this Timeline work and techniques such as Fit, Healthy Future and a profound shift in their thinking can occur . This will enable them to move forwards toward what they desire rather than repeating old patterns that don’t serve them well.
During the past year my co-trainer, Julia Bishop, and I have, time and again, stood by and witnessed students benefit personally from such techniques. They gain new insights into themselves, and re-focus their lives accordingly.
An enormous amount of change has gone on !
Each and every individual is different of course but what our students have in common is a better idea of what they want , increased self belief and the increased confidence to follow their dreams. Whether those dreams have been of a new career, a new premises or a new country, our students are living their dreams while their clients are reaping the benefit of working with trainers who have not just more knowledge and more skills, but who have more of themselves. That I believe is the greatest measure of success.
Case Study
Female
Goal : Weight Loss
Histrory : yo-yo dieting, weight problem since early teens
This particular client had previously achieved substantial results on more than one occasion working with a personal trainer; however client would reach a certain point and then stop her program – this had become a pattern. She would then gain back the weight she had lost and gain more.
This pattern was identified during the initial consultation.
The client progressed well, losing a considerable amount of weight and achieving measurable gains in her fitness. This was achieved through a combination of healthy eating and regular, consistent exercise sessions.
After 4 months client reached a plateau; when she lost a few pounds by the following week she would have gained them. Following a successful weigh in she would miss sessions and her diet it was reported deteriorated. The client reported that this was how she had ‘let herself down before’.
The client’s trainer tried all of the standard techniques to overcome this phase; however these were all on a behavioural level , for example, change in programme, increase in intensity, and had no effect. The client was becoming increasingly frustrated, and her trainer was concerned that she would discontinue her attempts.
At this stage the trainer decided to use NLP with the client as it became apparent that suggesting various changes she could make at the behavioural level was not going to be enough.
The client was currently at the lightest she had ever been, and previously it was always at this point that she had sabotaged her programme. The trainer asked how she had seen herself when at the beginning she had visualised herself after losing weight.
The client revealed that she had only ever been able to imagine/see herself at around this current weight; she was not able to imagine/see herself as any lighter or smaller. She was adamant however that she wanted to lose more weight, and that this wasn’t where she wanted to be.
Essentially this client was unable to identify with being a smaller size because it was so unknown to her. It didn’t fit with her sense of self. She had never been that size and so didn’t actually believe that she could ever get there. This was the point that she had, in her view, previously failed at, so not only expected but in fact had conditioned herself to stop when she got here. She had a limiting belief that she was never going to be any lighter or slimmer than she was now. Her sabotage of the programme was designed to ensure that she could not move on, and in so doing maintain her belief.
Using NLP she achieved great results over a relatively short period of time. The particular techniques which enabled this success were Fit, Healthy Future ( an adaptation of a Suzi Smith’s Compelling Future timeline technique) ; a Submodality Belief Change technique and Robert Dilts linguistic Belief Chaning Technique. Using timeline work the client was able to revise her sense of self and create a new lighter, slimmer image of herself which she then began to feel comfortable with. The belief change work would help her unravel the sense that it wasn’t possible for her to change, and replace this belief with the sense that it was possible. Happily the outcome was successful, she lost more weight and is still exercising regularly.
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