💪S.S. 58 Where to find your next great idea

1. Where to find your next great idea – Jonathan Goodman

Adapted from Jonathan Goodman’s recent post on Instagram.

Ideas, Seth Godin once wrote, don’t come from watching television.

They come from reading, listening, observing, brainstorming. They also come from daydreaming, from letting your mind wander while you’re brushing your teeth or sweeping the garage.

Sometimes they come alone, but they often travel in groups. Willie Nelson once wrote three hit songs on a single road trip from Houston to Nashville. One of them was "Crazy," which Patsy Cline recorded the next week.

(Dolly Parton did even better. She wrote "Jolene" and "I Will Always Love You" on the same day in 1973. Both songs were number-one hits multiple times for multiple artists. Not a bad day’s work.)

An idea doesn’t have to be great to be successful. It just has to work better for your audience than the last thing they tried.

Almost every successful idea requires a leap of faith to pull off. There’s always someone who thinks your idea sucks.

Sometimes they’re right. The only way to prove them wrong is with hard work and dedication.

And maybe try watching a little less TV.

For more on fitness, business, travel, and meditations on life, please follow the PTDC founder Jonathan Goodman on Instagram @jonathan_goodman101

--> Jonathan Goodman on Instagram

2. The power of "good enough" – Jennifer Broxterman

Jennifer is a Registered Dietitian and founder of NutritionRx (NutritionRx.ca), where she offers a coaching course for fitness and health professionals.

When I started my coaching career, I calculated macros and wrote individualized meal plans for my nutrition clients.

I thought it was what they wanted. More important, I thought it was what they needed to reach their goals.

Eventually, though, I scrapped those complex plans in favor of something much simpler: happy faces.

I give my clients a seven-day meal planning worksheet. Each day, for each meal, the clients give themselves a green happy face if they met their goals for food quality and quantity. They give themselves a yellow "meh" face if they did okay. And if they totally blew it for that one meal, they get a red "off-track" face.

Simple as it is, it works much better for all of us.

Think of it like high school:

If you show up for class, listen to the teacher, complete your assignments on time, and study for tests, you’re probably going to graduate with a solid B+ average. That gets you into a decent college and sets you up for a successful career.

All without turning yourself into a perfectionist wreck by trying to get an A+ 100 percent of the time.

The simple habits and behaviors that make you a B+ student also apply to nutrition. The goal isn’t to be perfect. It’s to be consistently good enough.

By keeping things simple—radically simple, compared to what I used to do with my clients—you also make it sustainable.

Your clients can’t sustain perfection. The harder it is, the faster they’ll burn out. But they can be pretty good for as long as they want.

And as we all learned in high school, "good enough" can take you pretty far in life.

Go deeper: Nutrition coaching isn’t all happy faces and satisfied clients. (But you knew that.) In this comprehensive guide, Stronger U Nutrition founder Mike Doehla tells you what you need to get started:

--> How to Become an Online Nutrition Coach

3. How to mistake it till you make it

Here’s what podcast cohosts Jonathan Goodman, Carolina Belmares, and Ren Jones talked about this week on the Online Trainer Show:

In Episode 11, How to Choose the Right Online Training Business Model, Jon compares and contrasts the four most common business models: "one to a few," "one to many," high-ticket programs, and hybrid programs.

Each can work at different times for different coaches at different stages of their careers. But there’s only one way to figure out which is the right one right now, which gives us a perfect segue to the next item.

In Episode 12, Mistakes We've Made (and Learned From), Ren offers an analogy for the ages:

Imagine if you tried to hit a new PR on the bench press by reading about it for a year, but not actually training for it. How would that go?

It’s similar to the way a lot of fitness pros try to make the transition to online training. They’re so afraid of making mistakes that they neglect the most important factor in business success: making mistakes.

"When you’re making errors, you don’t see the progress because you’re so fixated on what may not be perfect," he says. "You always progress more when you’re out there messing it up."

And that’s just one minute of an episode packed with the kind of insights you only get when you screw up in embarrassing, absurd, and potentially confidence-crushing ways.

You’ll find every episode here:

--> The Online Trainer Show

P.S. Whenever you’re ready, here are 3 ways we can help you:

1. Grab a free copy of The Wealthy Fit Pro’s Guide to Online Training
It’s your blueprint to building a fitness or nutrition business online. -- > Click here

2. Join the Online Trainers Unite Group and connect with other online trainers
It’s our Facebook community where fitness and nutrition pros like you can share insights and advice about starting or running a successful coaching business online.
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3. Join the Online Trainer Academy
Our world-class certification course is everything you need to responsibly and profitably coach fitness or nutrition online.
-- > Click here

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