Here’s what podcast cohosts Jonathan Goodman, Carolina Belmares, and Ren Jones talked about this week on the Online Trainer Show: In Episode 53, How to Help Clients When Life Throws Them a Curve, producer Amber Reynolds introduces the concept of “toxic positivity”: When a client or friend tells us about something difficult they’re going through, “A lot of us try to cheerlead them out of feeling negative. We try to be so positive it becomes toxic.” Sometimes,
Amber says, life is just going to suck, and if we try to force someone to look on the bright side at moments like those, it’s not just unrealistic, it’s mentally unhealthy. It’s also a cheat, Ren says. If you take a shortcut past the sadness, you compromise the growth process. It’s the emotional equivalent of a crash diet. Sure, you can lose a bunch of weight in a short amount of time, but you don’t learn anything, and the weight just comes back anyway. The team lightens up quite a bit for Episode 54, How to Keep Your Online Clients Engaged.
And it’s weirdly appropriate that an episode about how to keep clients focused includes a discussion of an exercise the hosts find almost unbearably tedious. “Running is the detention of fitness,” Ren says. “It’s like punishment for something.” Now imagine that some of your clients feel that way about the exercises in your program. They want the results, but the process bores them. And as Jon says, you need your clients to stay engaged both in individual workouts and over time. As we explained in this article, an online coach has four tools to keep clients engaged: variety,
narrowing the client’s focus, creating a distraction from something the client doesn’t like, and tracking their progress. The key, Ren says, is to know your clients well enough to understand what will engage them. You’ll find every episode here: --> The Online Trainer Show
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